Feeling, Meaning, and Art
Susanne K. Langer
For many essays by Langer, see Anthony Flood's website
from which the two articles below are reposted
see also "Whitehead's Influence on Susanne Langer's
Conception of Living Form" by Donald Dryden
Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985) is important to process philosophy because she, more than any other philosopher, shows what a process philosophy of art might look like. Langer was one of the most influential American philosophers of art and mind in the twentieth century. She gained international recognition with Philosophy in a New Key (1942), followed by her major aesthetic treatise Feeling and Form (1953). Her final and most ambitious project was the three-volume Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967–1982), an exploration of mind, emotion, biology, and symbolization that she worked on for two decades.
While influenced by Whitehead Langer was by no means a "Whiteheadian." She was a philosopher in her own right and is known for her work in philosophies of art, mind, and semiotics. There are occasional references to Whitehead in her writing, but the parallels with Whitehead are more structural or conceptual. They lie in her emphasis on the primacy of feeling, the idea that feelings exist as potentials prior to the actualization, the processive nature of experience, and the power of a symbolic presentation of forms of feeling in art. Influenced by Langer, and in the spirit of Whitehead, we might say that art if what feelings sound like: actual feelings and potential feelings.
This page features two essays by Langer: "The Principles of Creation in Art" and "The Primary Illusions and The Great Orders of Art." For a careful introduction to her work and its relevance, see the essay in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Susanne Langer. Here is an excerpt.
While influenced by Whitehead Langer was by no means a "Whiteheadian." She was a philosopher in her own right and is known for her work in philosophies of art, mind, and semiotics. There are occasional references to Whitehead in her writing, but the parallels with Whitehead are more structural or conceptual. They lie in her emphasis on the primacy of feeling, the idea that feelings exist as potentials prior to the actualization, the processive nature of experience, and the power of a symbolic presentation of forms of feeling in art. Influenced by Langer, and in the spirit of Whitehead, we might say that art if what feelings sound like: actual feelings and potential feelings.
This page features two essays by Langer: "The Principles of Creation in Art" and "The Primary Illusions and The Great Orders of Art." For a careful introduction to her work and its relevance, see the essay in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Susanne Langer. Here is an excerpt.
Feeling, in Langer’s philosophy, encompasses the qualitative, sensory, and emotional aspects of human experience. It is not limited to mere emotional states but includes the entire range of sensory and emotional qualities that humans perceive and experience. Langer argues that feeling is not separate from rationality but, rather, an integral part of human intelligence and creativity.
In contrast to the logical positivists with whom she is sometimes associated, Langer argues for an expanded field of meaning. In contrast to the early Wittgenstein, who argues for a very limited field of meaning bounded by strict usage of language, Langer argues that symbolisms other than language are capable of expressing thoughts that language cannot.
Langer’s theory of feeling is closely tied to her theory of art, where she argues that artworks express forms of feeling. Artists use various elements, such as colours, shapes, sounds, and rhythms, to formulate feeling in their work, with each artwork being an art symbol. According to Langer, the artist’s task is to formulate the quality or gestalt of a particular feeling in their chosen medium.
In her broader philosophy of mind, Langer suggests that feeling is a fundamental aspect of human consciousness. She contends that feeling is not limited to individual emotions but is the basis for all forms of human thought, perception, and expression. In this sense, feeling serves as the foundation for higher-level cognitive processes, including symbolic thought and language.
As the extended citation suggests, Langer understood human beings as symbol-making creatures whose deepest meanings arise not from language alone but from the “forms of feeling” expressed in art. Her work parallels Whitehead’s conviction that feeling is the foundation of experience. Langer's point is that, by virtue of artistic creativity, potentials for feeling ingress art in ways that disclose meaning non-discursively. As she puts it in "The Primary Illusions and The Great Orders of Art" below:
"All art is the creation of forms expressive of human feeling, from the primitive sense of vitality that goes with breathing and moving one’s limbs, or even suddenly resting, to the poignant emotions of love and grief and ecstasy. The essential unity of the arts is vouched for by this large and single purpose, and really requires no other explanation."
The artist does not express feeling as tears and laughter express emotions, but rather by creating a 'symbol' that communicates the potential for feeling, often in non-discursive and non-verbal ways. The artists shows the potential for feeling. As she says of music in the opening paragraph of "The Principles of Creation in Art."
"In the study of music as a form of expression1 I came to the conclusion that music 'expresses' feeling as words express ideas, rather than as tears and laughter express emotions; that it is a symbol whereby we understand the characteristic forms of sentience, because the symbolic structure of sound articulates with great precision the structure of feeling in its passage; and that it is not necessarily a symptom showing that the performer has a certain feeling, or that the composer had it when he invented the expressive form."
Langer proposes that each art form creates its own “virtual world” of felt relationships—temporal, spatial, kinetic, emotional—by which we come to understand aspects of life that ordinary language cannot convey. Music, for instance, articulates the morphology of feeling in sonic form; dance expresses the rhythms and tensions of embodied existence; visual art discloses the spatial logic of lived experience. Through these symbolic forms, Langer believes, we glimpse the deep structures of human and cosmic process. Her philosophy thus offers not only a theory of art but a way of understanding mind as a continuous flow of feeling, patterning, and imaginative transformation.
Any systematic development of a process philosophy of art begins, and perhaps also ends, with a consideration of Langer's insights.
"All art is the creation of forms expressive of human feeling, from the primitive sense of vitality that goes with breathing and moving one’s limbs, or even suddenly resting, to the poignant emotions of love and grief and ecstasy. The essential unity of the arts is vouched for by this large and single purpose, and really requires no other explanation."
The artist does not express feeling as tears and laughter express emotions, but rather by creating a 'symbol' that communicates the potential for feeling, often in non-discursive and non-verbal ways. The artists shows the potential for feeling. As she says of music in the opening paragraph of "The Principles of Creation in Art."
"In the study of music as a form of expression1 I came to the conclusion that music 'expresses' feeling as words express ideas, rather than as tears and laughter express emotions; that it is a symbol whereby we understand the characteristic forms of sentience, because the symbolic structure of sound articulates with great precision the structure of feeling in its passage; and that it is not necessarily a symptom showing that the performer has a certain feeling, or that the composer had it when he invented the expressive form."
Langer proposes that each art form creates its own “virtual world” of felt relationships—temporal, spatial, kinetic, emotional—by which we come to understand aspects of life that ordinary language cannot convey. Music, for instance, articulates the morphology of feeling in sonic form; dance expresses the rhythms and tensions of embodied existence; visual art discloses the spatial logic of lived experience. Through these symbolic forms, Langer believes, we glimpse the deep structures of human and cosmic process. Her philosophy thus offers not only a theory of art but a way of understanding mind as a continuous flow of feeling, patterning, and imaginative transformation.
Any systematic development of a process philosophy of art begins, and perhaps also ends, with a consideration of Langer's insights.
The Principles of Creation in Art
Susanne K. Langer
From The Hudson Review, Vol. II, No. 4, Winter 1950, 515-534. This was followed a few months later by “The Primary Illusions and the Great Orders of Art.” Posted in AnthonyFlood.com on June 26, 2008; reposted in Open Horizons Dec. 12, 2025
In the study of music as a form of expression1 I came to the conclusion that music “expresses” feeling as words express ideas, rather than as tears and laughter express emotions; that it is a symbol whereby we understand the characteristic forms of sentience, because the symbolic structure of sound articulates with great precision the structure of feeling in its passage; and that it is not necessarily a symptom showing that the performer has a certain feeling, or that the composer had it when he invented the expressive form.
The problem of symbolism and significance involved in such a thesis is, of course, still open to debate, but I do not wish to re-iterate my views on it here. Let us accept, for the moment, the notion that any logical form, even other than what is known as “discursive” form, may symbolize factors in experience wherein the same pattern can be detected, and that music presents to us the life of feeling because music and sentience have a similar structure, a common pattern. The purpose of this essay is to set forth some ideas about art in general, which follow from that assumption.
A theory of music is one thing, a general theory of art is quite another. It is plausible enough to call musical form a direct presentation of feeling, but what of the forms created in painting and sculpture, which throughout the ages have been copied from animate or inanimate nature, and thus appeared to present objects rather than feelings? Furthermore, if we do extend the theory of “non-discursive symbolization” to cover plastic art as well as music where does that leave us in regard to literature, whlch uses the discursive medium of language as its prime, if not sole, material? Shall we, like Schopenhauer, interpose a realm of Platonic Ideas to overcome the particularity of depicted objects, and make music an exception to the scheme because it sets forth its vital import directly?
The best approach to all these problems is, I believe, a consistent pursuit of the central idea of non-discursive symbolic form; and a general solution results if we consider any and every art as the making of the symbol. This is the principle of generalization, which I propose to apply undistrac-tedly to the consecutive questions that arise in the course of any complex problem. Most people can recall the distress they suffered in school when faced with mathematical questions, until they learned the most important lesson of elementary mathematics--to trust the general principle, and always seek a transformation of apparently recalcitrant instances that will make them amenable to its use—in other words, make them “examples” of a known and negotiable form. The principle here proposed is really very powerful to distinguish and yet relate the several arts, and show them all equally creative, equally important and original, equally intellectual, emotional, and moral, yet each independent, and ultimately self-sufficient.
A work of art is essentially an appearance, a “form” in the broadest sense of that very broad word. I do not say a sensuous form, as most aestheticians would, because in some arts, e.g. literature, the sensuous element is variable and sometimes even negligible. But every art-work is a perceptual form, addressed to some phase of direct perception: sight, hearing, or their combination, or to that less-known organ of direct intuitions, imagination, whereby we perceive separate events, each under its own Gestalt, in the fluid welter of experience. It is only by virtue of form that a work can have emotive import, because its form is what makes it a possible symbol; so the artist’s first aim is, necessarily, to make a form apparent, and indeed to make the impression of form paramount.
In practical life we are only vaguely aware of perceptual forms while we are dealing with real objects. Sensory impressions are mixed up, abbreviated, half-noted, as we pass with the least possible effort from them to our beliefs and interests in the object, or objects, which they signify. It really is only when their pragmatic functions fail—that is, when the expectations we normally base on them go unfulfilled—that we note sense-data as sheer appearances instead of properties of things; and then we call them “illusions.”
Every work of art has an air of being somehow an illusion. This is most obvious, of course, in works that simulate the form of real objects or events, like pictures or stage actions, which show us an image of familiar experience even while we know that the scene exists only for our contemplation and not for practical purposes. The fictitious nature of such images is so striking that it has led many people to regard art as essentially “make-believe,” escape from distasteful reality into a better world of dream, a playful self -deception.
Yet this theory soon reaches its limits; for, although every work of art is essentially an appearance, not every appearance is deceptive. A vase does not make us believe in anything but a vase. A building does not pretend to be a tree or a rocking-horse. Nevertheless, in so far as the vase or the building is a work of art, it stands before us as an image, because it addresses itself so forcibly to our vision that this appeal makes all its practical properties and relations irrelevant; and in receiving it as a completely visual thing we abstract its appearance from its material existence. It does not need to fool us. It only has to dissociate itself from the actual world (the world of our actions), and present a coherent and entirely perceptual form to become, for the beholder, an image.
The word “image” is almost inseparably wedded to the sense of sight because our stock example of it is the looking-glass world that gives us a visible copy of the things opposite the mirror without a tactual or other sensory replica of them. But some of the alternative words that have been used to denote the virtual character of so-called “aesthetic objects” escape this association. Carl Gustav Jung, for instance, speaks of it as “semblance.” His exemplary case of illusion is not the reflected image, but the dream; and in a dream there are sounds, smells, feelings, happenings, intentions, dangers—all sorts of things invisible—as well as sights, and all are equally unreal by the measures of public fact. Dreams do not consist entirely of images, but everything in them is imaginary. The music heard in a dream comes from a virtual piano under the hands of an apparent musician; the whole experience is a semblance of events. It may be as vivid as any reality, yet it is what Schiller called “Schein.”
Schiller was the first thinker who saw what really makes “Schein,” or semblance, important for art: the fact that it liberates perception—and with it, the power of conception—from all practical purposes, and lets the mind dwell on the sheer appearance of things. The function of artistic illusion is not “make-believe,” as many philosophers and psychologists assume, but the very opposite, disengagement from belief—the contemplation of sensory qualities without their usual meanings of “Here’s that chair,” “That’s my telephone,” “These figures ought to add up to the bank’s statement,” etc. The knowledge that what is before us has no practical significance in the world is what enables us to give attention to its appearance as such.
Everything has an aspect of appearance as well as of causal importance. Even so non-sensuous a thing as a fact or a possibility appears this way to one person and that way to another. That is its “semblance,” whereby it may “resemble” other things, and—where the semblance is used to mislead judgment about its causal properties—is said to “dissemble” its nature. Where we know that an “object” consists entirely in its semblance, that apart from its appearance it has no cohesion and unity—like a rainbow, or a shadow—we call it a merely virtual object, or an illusion. In this literal sense a picture is an illusion; we see a face, a flower, a vista of sea or land, etc., and know that if we stretched out our hand to it we would touch a surface smeared with paint.
The object seen is given only to the sense of sight. That is the chief purpose of “imitation,” or “objective” painting. To present things to sight which are known to be illusion is a ready (though by no means necessary) way to abstract visible forms from their usual context.
Normally, of course, semblance is not misleading; a thing is what it seems. But even where there is no deception, it may happen that an object—a vase, for instance, or a building—arrests one sense so exclusively that it seems to be given to that sense alone, and all its other properties become irrelevant. It is quite honestly there, but is important only for (say) its visual character. Then we are prone to accept it as a vision; there is such a concentration on appearance that one has a sense of seeing sheer appearance—that is, a sense of illusion.
Herein lies the “unreality” of art that tinges even perfectly real objects like pots, textiles, and temples. Whether we deal with actual illusions or with such quasi-illusions made by artistic emphasis, what is presented is, in either case, just what Schiller called “Schein”; and a pure semblance, or “Schein,” among the husky substantial realities of the natural world, is a strange guest. Strangeness, separateness, other-ness—call it what you will—is its obvious lot.
The semblance of a thing, thus thrown into relief, is its direct aesthetic quality. According to several eminent critics, this is what the artist tries to reveal for its own sake. But the emphasis on quality, or essence, is really only a stage in artistic conception. It is the making of a rarefied element that serves, in its turn, for the making of something else—the imaginal art—work itself. And this form is the non-discursive but articulate symbol of feeling.
Here is I believe the clear statement of what Clive Bell dealt with rather confusedly in a passage that identifies “significant form” (not, however, significant of anything) with “aesthetic quality.” The setting forth of pure quality, or semblance, creates a new dimension apart from the familiar world. That is its office. In this dimension, all artistic forms are conceived and presented. Since their substance is illusion or “Schein” they are, from the standpoint of practical reality, mere forms; they exist only for the sense or the imagination that perceives them—like the fata morgana, or the elaborate, improbable structure of events in our dreams. The function of “semblance” is to give forms a new embodiment in purely qualitative, unreal instances, setting them free from their normal embodiment in real things so they may be recognized in their own right, and freely conceived and composed in the interest of the artist’s ultimate aim—significance, or logical expression.
All forms in art, then, are abstracted forms; their content is only a semblance, a pure appearance, whose function is to make them, too, apparent—more freely and wholly apparent than they could be if they were exemplified in a context of real circumstances and anxious interest. It is in this elementary sense that all art is abstract. Its very substance, quality without practical significance, is an abstraction from material existence; and exemplification in this illusory or quasi-illusory medium makes the forms of things (not only shapes, but logical forms, e.g., proportions among the degrees of importance in events, or among different speeds in motions) present themselves in abstracto. This fundamental abstractness belongs just as forcibly to the most illustrative murals and most realistic plays, provided they are good after their kind, as to the deliberate abstractions that are schematic representations or entirely non-representative designs.
But abstract form as such is not an artistic ideal. To carry abstraction as far as possible, and achieve pure form in only the barest conceptual medium is a logician’s business, not a painter’s or poet’s. In art, forms are abstracted only to be made clearly apparent, and are freed from their common uses only to be put to new uses: to act as symbols, to become expressive of human feeling.
An artistic symbol is a much more intricate thing than what we usually think of as a “form,” because it involves all the relationships of its elements to one another, all similarities and differences of quality, not only geometric or other familiar relations. That is why qualities enter directly into the form itself, not as its contents, but as constitutive elements in it. Our scientific convention of abstracting mathematical forms, which do not involve quality, and fitting them to experience, always makes qualitative factors “content”; and as scientific conventions rule our academic thinking, it has usually been taken for granted that in understanding art, too, one should think of form as opposed to qualitative “content.” But on this uncritical assumption the whole conception of form and content comes to grief, and analysis ends in the confused assertion that art is “formed content,” form and content are one. The solution of that paradox is, that a work of art is a structure whose interrelated elements are often qualities, or properties of qualities such as their degrees of intensity; that qualities enter into the form and in this way are as much one with it as the relations which they, and they only, have; and that to speak of them as “content,” from which the form could be abstracted logically, is nonsense. The form is built up out of relations peculiar to them; they are formal elements in the structure, not contents.
Yet forms are either empty abstractions, or they do have a content; and artistic forms have a very special one, namely their import. They are logically expressive, or significant, forms. They are symbols for the articulation of feeling, and convey the elusive and yet familiar pattern of sentience. And as essentially symbolic forms they lie in a different dimension from physical objects as such. They belong to the same category as language, though their logical form is a different one, and as myth and dream, though their function is not the same.
Herein lies the “strangeness” or “otherness” that characterizes an artistic object. The form is immediately given to perception, and yet it reaches beyond itself; it is semblance, but seems to be charged with reality. Like speech, that is physically nothing but little buzzing sounds, it is filled with its meaning, and its meaning is a reality. In a “presentational” symbol the symbolic import permeates the whole structure, because every articulation of that structure is an articulation of the idea it conveys; the meaning (or, if that word is to be reserved for the assigned signification characteristic of words, let us say “the import”) is the content of the symbolic form, given with it, as it were, to perception.
A work of art differs from all other beautiful things in that it is “a glass and a transparency”—not, in any relevant way, a thing at all, but a symbol. Every good philosopher or critic of art realizes, of course, that feeling is somehow expressed in art; but as long as a work of art is viewed primarily as an “arrangement” of sensuous elements for the sake of some inexplicable aesthetic satisfaction, the problem of expressiveness is really an alien issue.
What art expresses is not actual feeling, but ideas of feeling; as language does not express actual things and events but ideas of them. Art is expressive through and through—every line, every sound, every gesture; and therefore it is a hundred per cent symbolic. It is not sensuously pleasing and also symbolic; the sensuous quality is in the service of its vital import. A work of art is far more symbolic than a word, which can be learned and even employed without any knowledge of its meaning; for a “presentational” symbol presents its import directly to any beholder who is sensitive at all to articulated forms in the given medium.
A purely perceptual form, however, must be clearly given and understood before it can convey any import, especially where there is no conventional reference whereby the import is assigned to it as its unequivocal meaning, but the congruence of the symbolic form and the form of some vital experience must be directly perceived by the force of “Gestalt” alone. Hence the paramount importance of abstracting the form, banning all irrelevancies that might obscure its logic, and especially divesting it of all its usual meanings so it may be open to new ones. The first thing is to estrange it from actuality, to give it “otherness,” “self-sufficiency”; this is done by creating a realm of illusion, in which it functions as “Schein,” mere semblance, free from worldly offices. The second thing is to make it plastic, so it may be manipulated in the interests of expression instead of practical signification. This is achieved by the same means—uncoupling it from practical life, abstracting it as a free perceptual figment. Only such freed forms can be plastic, subject to deliberate torsion, modification, and composition for the sake of expressiveness. And finally, it must become “transparent”—which it does when insight into the reality to be expressed, the Gestalt of living experience, guides its author in creating it.
“Expression” in the logical sense—presentation of an idea through a formal symbol—is the ruling power and purpose of art. And the symbol is, from first to last, something created. The illusion, which constitutes the work of art, is not a mere arrangement of given materials in an aesthetically pleasing pattern; it is what results from the arrangement, and is literally something the artist makes. It comes with his work and passes away in its destruction.
To produce and sustain the essential illusion, set it off clearly from the surrounding world of actuality, and articulate its form to the point where it coincides unmistakably with forms of feeling and living, is the artist’s task. To such ends he uses whatever materials lend themselves to technical treatment—tones, colors, plastic substances, words, gestures, or any other physical means. If we look, first of all, to the plastic arts, we find from the very beginning the making of a semblance, more general and thorough-going than any counterfeiting of objects: the appearance of purely visual space, divorced from the space of actuality, which is largely tactual or even conceptual (geometrically constructed). This is a more fundamental aim than imitation; picturing things is only one way of creating spatial forms for the eye alone, but the semblance of space thus created is involved in any plastic work whatever, from textile patterns to portraits and battle-scenes. The patterns, indeed, have an interest of their own, because their motivation is primarily artistic, whereas representative forms hide their true credentials under the cloak of another office.
In all folk art, savage or civilized, there is a heritage of purely decorative forms, two-dimensional, clear in outline, either in two tones, or painted with simple, solid colors that fill the outlined shapes. The immediate effect of such devices is to simplify perceptual space by reducing it to only two dimensions. This simplification is the primary education of artistic vision; it achieves the abstraction of visual space from the confused actual realm by making the plane surface paramount. The aim of decoration is to deploy definite forms and colors in such a way that the eye is “satisfied,” i.e., that it accepts the established two-dimensional space as sufficient and has no tendency to go beyond it. The flowing lines, complementary areas clearly divided, and contrasting, pure colors that are typical of decorative art all serve this main purpose.
Decoration is, above all, an invitation to pure seeing.2 It is, therefore, a natural preparation for drawing and painting, which—despite all common factors—are something different. For graphic ornamentation aims merely to simplify, and thus abstract, the visual character of space, by projecting vision fully and freely in two dimensions; but genuine pictorial art seeks to fill the illusory realm with expressive forms, symbols of vital feeling, and often finds itself pushed far beyond the elementary stages of space creation.
Yet even in the motifs of pure decoration—zigzags and S-curves, parallels and spirals and loops—we find the basic principles of expressiveness, forms that seem to “have life” not because they represent anything living, but because they symbolize directly the sense of life, which underlies all our feelings. In a little book on design3 I find the following statement, made by the artist-author with perfectly literal intent and evidently no consciousness whatever of using metaphor: “Borders must move forward, and grow as they move.”
Now, what does it mean to say a border moves? The border is a mark on a contrasting ground, perfectly stationary. When we draw it, the pencil moves, the line or series of forms actually grows in one direction. But suppose it is not even made in this fashion; suppose it is made all at once, by block-printing. And perhaps we do not see it made at all. Still the border “runs” along the edge of the tablecloth or around the margins of a page. If it is supported by short tangential lines the apparent movement is very much enhanced.
There are, of course, classical explanations of this phenomenon in terms of eye-movements: the eye, it is said, is “carried” along a line as it is in following a moving object, such as a mouse running across the floor, and the association of our eye-movement with moving objects prompts us to impute movement to the line. It is not unlikely that eye-movements do play some part in the illusion, but they do not account for it, for if they were always thus associated we could never appreciate as stationary anything too big to be seen at the focal center, i.e., without moving the eyes. Everything else should appear to shift or mill around. Quite to the contrary, however, we are just as likely to think of actual motion in terms of a fixed form. The mouse running across the floor seems to cover a path that remains there, an imaginary line.
The real connection between lines and motion is, I believe, that an uninterrupted line serves us as a symbol of motion, and conveys the idea of it exactly as any symbol conveys its message. In the direct, intuitive appreciation of what may be termed “natural symbols,”4 the import is received like something inherent in the symbol; therefore the running mouse seems to cover a path lying on the floor, and the still, painted line seems to run. The reason is that both exemplify the abstract principle of direction, by virtue of which they are logically congruent enough to be symbols for one another; and in the ordinary, intelligent use of vision, we let them stand proxy for each other all the time, though we do not know it. This is not a function that is first discursively conceived and then assigned a possible symbol, but is non-discursively exhibited and then perceived long before it is acknowledged in a scientific device (as it is in the language of physics, where vectors are conventionally indicated by arrows). Motion, therefore, is logically related to linear form, and where a line is unbroken, and supporting forms tend to give it direction, the mere perception of it is charged with the idea of motion, which shines through our impression of the actual sense-datum and fuses with it in apperception. The result is a very elementary artistic illusion (not delusion, for, unlike delusion, it survives analysis), which we call “living form.”
This term takes us back to Best-Maugard’s supposedly simple statement (it is addressed to children!) : “Borders should move forward, and grow as they move.” What does “grow” mean in this context? The border does not grow bigger in design. No, but it seems to grow longer, for in its seeming motion it does not vacate the places where it was before; like the imaginary path of the mouse, it covers the ground, but continues in one direction; and an ornamental border design appears to do this by a law of its own.
Artistically, all motion is growth; not growth of things or creatures, but of lines and spaces. The spiral—one of the simple motifs—is a “dynamic” or progressing line, but what really seems to grow is a space, the two-dimensional area it defines. This intimate relation between movement and growth is what makes design—the grammar of visual semblance—“living form,” in a perfectly intelligible sense. It is also the surest refutation of any theory that reduces the experience of movement in design to motions connoted by stimulation of tiny muscular actions in the eye. The term “living form” is justified by a logical connection that exists between a half-illusory datum—the “growing” line or space—and the concept of life, whereby the former is a natural symbol of the latter; for “living form” directly exhibits what is the essence of life—incessant change, or process, articulating a permanent form.
The path of a physical motion is an ideal line. In a line that “has movement,” there is ideal motion. In the phenomenon we call “life,” both continuous change and permanent form really exist; but the form is made and maintained by a complicated disposition of mutual influences among the physical units (atoms, molecules, then cells, then organs) whereby changes tend always to occur in certain pre-eminent ways. Instead of a simple law of transformation such as one finds in inorganic change, living things exist by a cumulative process; they assimilate elements of their surroundings to themselves, and these elements fall under the law of change that is the organic form or “life.” This assimilation of factors not originally belonging to the organism, whereby they enter into its life, is the principle of growth. A growing thing need not actually become bigger; since the metabolic action does not stop when a non-living substance has been assimilated and become alive, but is a continuous process of oxidation, separate elements also resign from the organic pattern; they break down again into inorganic structures, i.e., they die. When growth is more vigorous than decay the living form grows larger; when they are balanced it is self-perpetuating; when decay occurs faster than growth the organism is decadent. At a certain point the metabolic process stops all at once, and the life is finished.
Permanence of form, then, is the constant aim of living matter; not the final goal (for it is what finally fails), but the thing that is perpetually being achieved, and that is always, at every moment, an achievement, because it depends entirely on the activity of “living.” But “living” itself is a process, a continuous chance; if it stands still the form disintegrates—for the permanence is a pattern of changes.
Nothing, therefore, is as fundamental in the fabric of our feeling as the sense of permanence and change and their intimate unity. What w call “motion” in art is not necessarily change of place, but is change made perceivable, i.e., imaginable, in any way whatever. Anything that symbolizes change so we seem to behold it is what artists, with more intuition than convention, call a “dynamic” element. It may be a “dynamic accent” in music, physically nothing but loudness, or a word charged above others with emotion, or a color that is “exciting” where it stands, i.e., physically stimulating.
A form that exemplifies permanence, such as a fixed line or a delimited space (the most permanent anchors of vision), yet symbolizes motion, carries with it the concept of growth, because growth is the normal operation of those two principles conjoined in mutual dependence. Therefore Best-Maugard’s metaphorical statement: “Borders should move forward, and grow as they move,” is perfectly rational if we consider that, and why, they seem to do these things. But why “should” they be drawn to seem like that? Because this illusion, this seeming, is the real symbol of feeling. The elementary pattern of feeling expressed in such world-accepted forms symbolizing “growth” is the sense of life, the most primitive “fulfillment”; and it is not mirrored in the physical lines, but in the created thing, the “motions” they have. The dynamic pattern, which is actually an illusion, is what “copies” the form of vital feeling. It is in order to be expressive that borders should move and grow.
Very early in the evolution of design we meet the great principle of graphic expression: the possibility of picturing things. A simple circle decorated with surrounding secondary forms, half-circles, zigzags, or what-not, immediately yields a flower-shape—fantastic, schematic, but exactly the sort of flower pattern one finds in Persian shawls and French hour-books and on Mexican pots. The astounding thing is that these shapes are so unmistakably flowers. The same convincing representational function gives us birds, beasts, men, moon and stars. The principle of representation serves to organize forms and makes much greater elaboration possible without confusing the eye. The forceful implication in the essentially decorative character of primitive art and folk-art, and in the fact that naturalism grows with sophistication, seems to me to be that graphic representation does not spring from copying of direct visual impressions which are then “composed” into design but, on the contrary, arises from ornamental forms that are seen to have representative powers. It is formulation, shaping, defining of the impressions themselves, and is not copying at all, but symbolizing from the outset. In short, form is first, and pictorial meaning is read into it.5
The higher principle of organization, however, becomes dominant as the artist’s imagination produces more involved, asymmetrical, and subtle forms, created not only by obvious means like outlines and pure colors, but also by illusions of receding space and the orientation of units of design toward each other. The interpretation of such units as forms of objects is an inestimable aid in the creation of new spatial relationships, in distributing centers of interest and composing them into a visual unity. For centuries art evolved mainly on representational guidelines; and, as in decorative design we speak of zigzags and circles as “motifs,” so now we apply “motif” to what is pictured in the forms.
But no matter how many possibilities are opened to the artistic imagination by the power of representing things, imitation is never the main device in organization. The primary interest is always design, and the very measure of an artist is his instinct for transforming his actual perceptions into wholly plastic elements as he works with them. As we pass from the study of naive design to a more ambitious literature of aesthetics, dealing with the highest art-forms we meet almost at once the same fundamental principle—the primacy of form. Adolf Hildebrand, for instance, in the first paragraphs of his brief but significant book, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, distinguishes between natural perception and artistic, or, as he calls it, “architectonic” perception, which “enables us to realize a unity of form lacking in objects themselves as they appear in Nature.” What he calls the “architectonic process” is the transformation of natural appearances into pictorial ones, or design in a broad sense; and this process is as old as art itself.
“Reviewing the artistic production of earlier times,” he says, “we find that the architectonic structure of a work of art stands out everywhere as the paramount factor, whereas mere imitation is a thing which has only gradually developed. Its is, in fact, instinctive with us to combine the piece-work of perception into an ideal whole.”
The great difference between the common form of perception and the “architectonic” or artistic is that the former is a product of all our senses working together, and aided, furthermore, by memory and inference, whereas the latter must be achieved solely by one organ, the eye. If we want to make a semblance that shall address itself to sight alone we must, therefore, have visual substitutes for everything that other kinds of experience usually supply. The “architectonic process,” then, is the construction and ordering of forms in space in such a way that they define and organize the space. But a perceptually defined space is a shape: so the complete shaping of a given visual field is a work of pictorial art. Design, therefore, is the essence of drawing and painting, and as simple decorative forms are its lowest terms, composition in color and depth is its highest evolution. For the true aim of plastic art, as Hildebrand conceives it, is to make space visible, and its unity and continuity sensible.
Here we seem, however, to encounter a philosophical difficulty; for space, as we know it in the practical world, has no shape. Even in science it has none, though it has “form.” There are spatial relations, but there is no concrete totality of space. Space itself is amorphous in our active lives and purely abstract in scientific thought. It is a substrate of all our experience, but it is never an entity. How, then, can it be “organized,” “shaped,” or “articulated”? We meet all these terms in the most serious literature of aesthetics.
The answer is, I think, that the space in which we live and act is not what is treated in art at all. The harmoniously organized space in a picture is not experiential space, known by sight and touch, by free motion and restraint, far and near sounds, voices lost or re-echoed. It is an entirely visual affair; for touch and hearing and muscular action it does not exist. For them there is a flat canvas, relatively small, or a cool blank wall, where for the eye there is deep space full of shapes. This purely visual space is an illusion, for our sensory experiences do not agree on it in their report. Pictorial space is not only organized by means of color (including black and white and the gamut of grays between them), it is created; without the organizing shapes it is simply not there. Like the space “behind” the surface of a mirror, it is what the physicists call “virtual space”:—and an intangible image.
This virtual space is the primary illusion of all plastic art. Every element of design, every use of color and semblance of shape, serves to produce and support and develop the picture-space that exists for vision alone. Being only visual, this space has no continuity with the space in which we live; it is limited by the frame, or by surrounding blanks, or incongruous other things that cut it off. Yet its limits cannot even be said to divide it from practical space; for a boundary that divides things always connects them as well, and between the picture space and any other space there is no connection. The created virtual space is entirely self-contained and independent.
This is the fundamental reason why everything that is relevant and artistically valid in a picture must be visual, and everything visual serves “architec-tonic” purposes. In the virtual space of a picture there are only images, and if these are to symbolize objects of our actual world we must have imaginal equivalents for the things that are normally known by touch, movement or inference. That is why a direct copy of what we see is not enough. The copy of things seen would need the same supplementation from non-visual sources that the original perception demanded. The visual substitutes for the non-visible ingredients in space experience make the great difference between photographic rendering and creative rendering; the latter is necessarily a departure from direct imitation, because it is a construction of spatial entities out of color alone (perhaps only varying shades of one color), by all sorts of devices, in order to present at once, with complete authority, the primary illusion of a perfectly visible and perfectly intelligible total space.
Virtual space—the primary illusion of pictorial art—is a creation, not a recreation. There are no natural objects in it, but only semblances, which characterize it and make it an articulate total shape, free frm all practical functions, and therefore capable of functioning as a symbol. There are no degrees of illusoriness or expressiveness among different art-genders, but only degrees of achievement among individual works. From the first line of decorative drawing to the works of Raphael, Leonardo, or Rivera, the same principle of pictorial art is wholly exemplified: the creation of virtual space, and its organization by forms (be they lines, or volumes, or intersecting planes, or shadows and lights) that reflect the patterns of sentience and emotion. The picture-space, whether conceived in two dimensions or in three, dissociates itself from the actual space in which the canvas or other physical bearer of it exists; its function as a symbol makes the objects in a picture as unlike normal physical objects as a spoken word is unlike the sounds of footsteps, rustlings, clatter and other noises that usually accompany and sometimes drown it. The faint little sound of a speaking voice arrests the ear in midst of the medley of mechanical sounds and is something altogether different, because its significance is of a different order; similarly the space in a picture engages our vision completely because it is significant in itself and not as part of the surrounding room. Just establish one line in virtual space, and at once we are in the realm of symbolic forms.
The mental shift is as definite as that which we make from hearing a sound of tapping, squeaking, or buzzing to hearing speech, when suddenly in midst of the little noises surrounding us we make out a single word. The whole character of our hearing is transformed. The medley of physical sound disappears, the car receives language, perhaps indistinct by reason of interfering noises, but struggling through them like a living thing. Exactly the same sort of reorientation is effected for sight by the creation of any purely visual space. The image, be it a representation or a mere design, stands before us in its expressiveness: significant form.
The primary illusion of any art-genre is the basic creation wherein all its elements exist; and they, in turn, produce and support it. It does not exist by itself; “primary” does not mean first-established, but always established where any elements are given at all. There are numberless ways of making space visible, i.e., virtually presenting it.
What are the “elements” of a work of art?
Elements are factors in the semblance; and as such they are virtual themselves, direct components of the total form. In this they differ from materials, which are actual. Paints are materials, and so are the colors they have in the tube or on the palette; but the colors in a picture are elements, determined by their environment. They are warm or cold, rich or frugal, they advance or recede, enhance or soften or dominate other colors; they create tensions and distribute weight in a picture. Colors in a paintbox don’t do such things. They are materials, and lie side by side in their actual, undialectical materialism.
Choice of materials may, to be sure, affect the range of available elements. One can not always do the same things with diverse materials. The translucency of glass allows the making and use of special color elements that paint on a wooden ground could never create; therefore glass painting and wood painting set the artist different problems and suggest different ideas to be brought to expression. It is sometimes said that glass and wood have “different feelings.” They permit, and even command, quite distinct forms, and perhaps equally distinct ranges of vital import.
All the discernible elements in a picture (that is, the factors analysis may reveal) are secondary illusions. They support the primary illusion, which is invariant, while the forms that articulate it may vary indefinitely. The primary illusion is a substrate of the realm of virtual forms; it is involved in their occurrence.
The whole problem of the unity and diversity of the arts hinges, I believe, on this concept of illusion, or created form. The deepest distinction among them is that of having different primary illusions; this distinction obtains, for instance, between the visual arts and music, or between music and literature. Between painting, sculpture and architecture the distinction is less radical, for it rests only on a difference among modes of virtual space. With a really potent principle of analysis one need not defend the unity of art by belittling or denying the fact that there are several major art-forms, and insisting that between music and sculpture there is no “real” difference. The method here used is to push all differences as far as they will go. There is a definite point where, suddenly, no important distinctions can be made any more. Everything we can say of anyone art, on that level, holds for all. There is the unity. Knowing this, I shall set forth in a subsequent essay what gives the muses their individuality, and let their family solidarity take care of itself.
(The Hudson Review will publish a second related essay by Mrs. Langer, “The Primary Illusions and the Great Orders of Art,” in an early issue.)
1 See Philosophy in a New Key, ch. 8.
2 Cf. Albert Barnes: “The appeal of . . . decorative beauty is probably to be explained by its satisfaction of our general need of perceiving freely and agreeably.” (The Art in Painting, p. 29).
3 Adolfo Best-Maugard, A Method for Creative Design.
4 See Philosophy in a New Key, ch. 4.
5 Leonardo, in his Treatise on Painting, advises students to look at chance forms like cracks in plaster and knots in boards and try to make figures out of them, i.e., to read shapes of people and things into them. This, he says, is, very good for the painter’s imagination. It sounds silly: but was Leonardo silly? Or did he also feel that visual “reality” is made out of basic organizing forms, as truly as scientific “reality” is made out of the forms of rational discourse?
In the study of music as a form of expression1 I came to the conclusion that music “expresses” feeling as words express ideas, rather than as tears and laughter express emotions; that it is a symbol whereby we understand the characteristic forms of sentience, because the symbolic structure of sound articulates with great precision the structure of feeling in its passage; and that it is not necessarily a symptom showing that the performer has a certain feeling, or that the composer had it when he invented the expressive form.
The problem of symbolism and significance involved in such a thesis is, of course, still open to debate, but I do not wish to re-iterate my views on it here. Let us accept, for the moment, the notion that any logical form, even other than what is known as “discursive” form, may symbolize factors in experience wherein the same pattern can be detected, and that music presents to us the life of feeling because music and sentience have a similar structure, a common pattern. The purpose of this essay is to set forth some ideas about art in general, which follow from that assumption.
A theory of music is one thing, a general theory of art is quite another. It is plausible enough to call musical form a direct presentation of feeling, but what of the forms created in painting and sculpture, which throughout the ages have been copied from animate or inanimate nature, and thus appeared to present objects rather than feelings? Furthermore, if we do extend the theory of “non-discursive symbolization” to cover plastic art as well as music where does that leave us in regard to literature, whlch uses the discursive medium of language as its prime, if not sole, material? Shall we, like Schopenhauer, interpose a realm of Platonic Ideas to overcome the particularity of depicted objects, and make music an exception to the scheme because it sets forth its vital import directly?
The best approach to all these problems is, I believe, a consistent pursuit of the central idea of non-discursive symbolic form; and a general solution results if we consider any and every art as the making of the symbol. This is the principle of generalization, which I propose to apply undistrac-tedly to the consecutive questions that arise in the course of any complex problem. Most people can recall the distress they suffered in school when faced with mathematical questions, until they learned the most important lesson of elementary mathematics--to trust the general principle, and always seek a transformation of apparently recalcitrant instances that will make them amenable to its use—in other words, make them “examples” of a known and negotiable form. The principle here proposed is really very powerful to distinguish and yet relate the several arts, and show them all equally creative, equally important and original, equally intellectual, emotional, and moral, yet each independent, and ultimately self-sufficient.
A work of art is essentially an appearance, a “form” in the broadest sense of that very broad word. I do not say a sensuous form, as most aestheticians would, because in some arts, e.g. literature, the sensuous element is variable and sometimes even negligible. But every art-work is a perceptual form, addressed to some phase of direct perception: sight, hearing, or their combination, or to that less-known organ of direct intuitions, imagination, whereby we perceive separate events, each under its own Gestalt, in the fluid welter of experience. It is only by virtue of form that a work can have emotive import, because its form is what makes it a possible symbol; so the artist’s first aim is, necessarily, to make a form apparent, and indeed to make the impression of form paramount.
In practical life we are only vaguely aware of perceptual forms while we are dealing with real objects. Sensory impressions are mixed up, abbreviated, half-noted, as we pass with the least possible effort from them to our beliefs and interests in the object, or objects, which they signify. It really is only when their pragmatic functions fail—that is, when the expectations we normally base on them go unfulfilled—that we note sense-data as sheer appearances instead of properties of things; and then we call them “illusions.”
Every work of art has an air of being somehow an illusion. This is most obvious, of course, in works that simulate the form of real objects or events, like pictures or stage actions, which show us an image of familiar experience even while we know that the scene exists only for our contemplation and not for practical purposes. The fictitious nature of such images is so striking that it has led many people to regard art as essentially “make-believe,” escape from distasteful reality into a better world of dream, a playful self -deception.
Yet this theory soon reaches its limits; for, although every work of art is essentially an appearance, not every appearance is deceptive. A vase does not make us believe in anything but a vase. A building does not pretend to be a tree or a rocking-horse. Nevertheless, in so far as the vase or the building is a work of art, it stands before us as an image, because it addresses itself so forcibly to our vision that this appeal makes all its practical properties and relations irrelevant; and in receiving it as a completely visual thing we abstract its appearance from its material existence. It does not need to fool us. It only has to dissociate itself from the actual world (the world of our actions), and present a coherent and entirely perceptual form to become, for the beholder, an image.
The word “image” is almost inseparably wedded to the sense of sight because our stock example of it is the looking-glass world that gives us a visible copy of the things opposite the mirror without a tactual or other sensory replica of them. But some of the alternative words that have been used to denote the virtual character of so-called “aesthetic objects” escape this association. Carl Gustav Jung, for instance, speaks of it as “semblance.” His exemplary case of illusion is not the reflected image, but the dream; and in a dream there are sounds, smells, feelings, happenings, intentions, dangers—all sorts of things invisible—as well as sights, and all are equally unreal by the measures of public fact. Dreams do not consist entirely of images, but everything in them is imaginary. The music heard in a dream comes from a virtual piano under the hands of an apparent musician; the whole experience is a semblance of events. It may be as vivid as any reality, yet it is what Schiller called “Schein.”
Schiller was the first thinker who saw what really makes “Schein,” or semblance, important for art: the fact that it liberates perception—and with it, the power of conception—from all practical purposes, and lets the mind dwell on the sheer appearance of things. The function of artistic illusion is not “make-believe,” as many philosophers and psychologists assume, but the very opposite, disengagement from belief—the contemplation of sensory qualities without their usual meanings of “Here’s that chair,” “That’s my telephone,” “These figures ought to add up to the bank’s statement,” etc. The knowledge that what is before us has no practical significance in the world is what enables us to give attention to its appearance as such.
Everything has an aspect of appearance as well as of causal importance. Even so non-sensuous a thing as a fact or a possibility appears this way to one person and that way to another. That is its “semblance,” whereby it may “resemble” other things, and—where the semblance is used to mislead judgment about its causal properties—is said to “dissemble” its nature. Where we know that an “object” consists entirely in its semblance, that apart from its appearance it has no cohesion and unity—like a rainbow, or a shadow—we call it a merely virtual object, or an illusion. In this literal sense a picture is an illusion; we see a face, a flower, a vista of sea or land, etc., and know that if we stretched out our hand to it we would touch a surface smeared with paint.
The object seen is given only to the sense of sight. That is the chief purpose of “imitation,” or “objective” painting. To present things to sight which are known to be illusion is a ready (though by no means necessary) way to abstract visible forms from their usual context.
Normally, of course, semblance is not misleading; a thing is what it seems. But even where there is no deception, it may happen that an object—a vase, for instance, or a building—arrests one sense so exclusively that it seems to be given to that sense alone, and all its other properties become irrelevant. It is quite honestly there, but is important only for (say) its visual character. Then we are prone to accept it as a vision; there is such a concentration on appearance that one has a sense of seeing sheer appearance—that is, a sense of illusion.
Herein lies the “unreality” of art that tinges even perfectly real objects like pots, textiles, and temples. Whether we deal with actual illusions or with such quasi-illusions made by artistic emphasis, what is presented is, in either case, just what Schiller called “Schein”; and a pure semblance, or “Schein,” among the husky substantial realities of the natural world, is a strange guest. Strangeness, separateness, other-ness—call it what you will—is its obvious lot.
The semblance of a thing, thus thrown into relief, is its direct aesthetic quality. According to several eminent critics, this is what the artist tries to reveal for its own sake. But the emphasis on quality, or essence, is really only a stage in artistic conception. It is the making of a rarefied element that serves, in its turn, for the making of something else—the imaginal art—work itself. And this form is the non-discursive but articulate symbol of feeling.
Here is I believe the clear statement of what Clive Bell dealt with rather confusedly in a passage that identifies “significant form” (not, however, significant of anything) with “aesthetic quality.” The setting forth of pure quality, or semblance, creates a new dimension apart from the familiar world. That is its office. In this dimension, all artistic forms are conceived and presented. Since their substance is illusion or “Schein” they are, from the standpoint of practical reality, mere forms; they exist only for the sense or the imagination that perceives them—like the fata morgana, or the elaborate, improbable structure of events in our dreams. The function of “semblance” is to give forms a new embodiment in purely qualitative, unreal instances, setting them free from their normal embodiment in real things so they may be recognized in their own right, and freely conceived and composed in the interest of the artist’s ultimate aim—significance, or logical expression.
All forms in art, then, are abstracted forms; their content is only a semblance, a pure appearance, whose function is to make them, too, apparent—more freely and wholly apparent than they could be if they were exemplified in a context of real circumstances and anxious interest. It is in this elementary sense that all art is abstract. Its very substance, quality without practical significance, is an abstraction from material existence; and exemplification in this illusory or quasi-illusory medium makes the forms of things (not only shapes, but logical forms, e.g., proportions among the degrees of importance in events, or among different speeds in motions) present themselves in abstracto. This fundamental abstractness belongs just as forcibly to the most illustrative murals and most realistic plays, provided they are good after their kind, as to the deliberate abstractions that are schematic representations or entirely non-representative designs.
But abstract form as such is not an artistic ideal. To carry abstraction as far as possible, and achieve pure form in only the barest conceptual medium is a logician’s business, not a painter’s or poet’s. In art, forms are abstracted only to be made clearly apparent, and are freed from their common uses only to be put to new uses: to act as symbols, to become expressive of human feeling.
An artistic symbol is a much more intricate thing than what we usually think of as a “form,” because it involves all the relationships of its elements to one another, all similarities and differences of quality, not only geometric or other familiar relations. That is why qualities enter directly into the form itself, not as its contents, but as constitutive elements in it. Our scientific convention of abstracting mathematical forms, which do not involve quality, and fitting them to experience, always makes qualitative factors “content”; and as scientific conventions rule our academic thinking, it has usually been taken for granted that in understanding art, too, one should think of form as opposed to qualitative “content.” But on this uncritical assumption the whole conception of form and content comes to grief, and analysis ends in the confused assertion that art is “formed content,” form and content are one. The solution of that paradox is, that a work of art is a structure whose interrelated elements are often qualities, or properties of qualities such as their degrees of intensity; that qualities enter into the form and in this way are as much one with it as the relations which they, and they only, have; and that to speak of them as “content,” from which the form could be abstracted logically, is nonsense. The form is built up out of relations peculiar to them; they are formal elements in the structure, not contents.
Yet forms are either empty abstractions, or they do have a content; and artistic forms have a very special one, namely their import. They are logically expressive, or significant, forms. They are symbols for the articulation of feeling, and convey the elusive and yet familiar pattern of sentience. And as essentially symbolic forms they lie in a different dimension from physical objects as such. They belong to the same category as language, though their logical form is a different one, and as myth and dream, though their function is not the same.
Herein lies the “strangeness” or “otherness” that characterizes an artistic object. The form is immediately given to perception, and yet it reaches beyond itself; it is semblance, but seems to be charged with reality. Like speech, that is physically nothing but little buzzing sounds, it is filled with its meaning, and its meaning is a reality. In a “presentational” symbol the symbolic import permeates the whole structure, because every articulation of that structure is an articulation of the idea it conveys; the meaning (or, if that word is to be reserved for the assigned signification characteristic of words, let us say “the import”) is the content of the symbolic form, given with it, as it were, to perception.
A work of art differs from all other beautiful things in that it is “a glass and a transparency”—not, in any relevant way, a thing at all, but a symbol. Every good philosopher or critic of art realizes, of course, that feeling is somehow expressed in art; but as long as a work of art is viewed primarily as an “arrangement” of sensuous elements for the sake of some inexplicable aesthetic satisfaction, the problem of expressiveness is really an alien issue.
What art expresses is not actual feeling, but ideas of feeling; as language does not express actual things and events but ideas of them. Art is expressive through and through—every line, every sound, every gesture; and therefore it is a hundred per cent symbolic. It is not sensuously pleasing and also symbolic; the sensuous quality is in the service of its vital import. A work of art is far more symbolic than a word, which can be learned and even employed without any knowledge of its meaning; for a “presentational” symbol presents its import directly to any beholder who is sensitive at all to articulated forms in the given medium.
A purely perceptual form, however, must be clearly given and understood before it can convey any import, especially where there is no conventional reference whereby the import is assigned to it as its unequivocal meaning, but the congruence of the symbolic form and the form of some vital experience must be directly perceived by the force of “Gestalt” alone. Hence the paramount importance of abstracting the form, banning all irrelevancies that might obscure its logic, and especially divesting it of all its usual meanings so it may be open to new ones. The first thing is to estrange it from actuality, to give it “otherness,” “self-sufficiency”; this is done by creating a realm of illusion, in which it functions as “Schein,” mere semblance, free from worldly offices. The second thing is to make it plastic, so it may be manipulated in the interests of expression instead of practical signification. This is achieved by the same means—uncoupling it from practical life, abstracting it as a free perceptual figment. Only such freed forms can be plastic, subject to deliberate torsion, modification, and composition for the sake of expressiveness. And finally, it must become “transparent”—which it does when insight into the reality to be expressed, the Gestalt of living experience, guides its author in creating it.
“Expression” in the logical sense—presentation of an idea through a formal symbol—is the ruling power and purpose of art. And the symbol is, from first to last, something created. The illusion, which constitutes the work of art, is not a mere arrangement of given materials in an aesthetically pleasing pattern; it is what results from the arrangement, and is literally something the artist makes. It comes with his work and passes away in its destruction.
To produce and sustain the essential illusion, set it off clearly from the surrounding world of actuality, and articulate its form to the point where it coincides unmistakably with forms of feeling and living, is the artist’s task. To such ends he uses whatever materials lend themselves to technical treatment—tones, colors, plastic substances, words, gestures, or any other physical means. If we look, first of all, to the plastic arts, we find from the very beginning the making of a semblance, more general and thorough-going than any counterfeiting of objects: the appearance of purely visual space, divorced from the space of actuality, which is largely tactual or even conceptual (geometrically constructed). This is a more fundamental aim than imitation; picturing things is only one way of creating spatial forms for the eye alone, but the semblance of space thus created is involved in any plastic work whatever, from textile patterns to portraits and battle-scenes. The patterns, indeed, have an interest of their own, because their motivation is primarily artistic, whereas representative forms hide their true credentials under the cloak of another office.
In all folk art, savage or civilized, there is a heritage of purely decorative forms, two-dimensional, clear in outline, either in two tones, or painted with simple, solid colors that fill the outlined shapes. The immediate effect of such devices is to simplify perceptual space by reducing it to only two dimensions. This simplification is the primary education of artistic vision; it achieves the abstraction of visual space from the confused actual realm by making the plane surface paramount. The aim of decoration is to deploy definite forms and colors in such a way that the eye is “satisfied,” i.e., that it accepts the established two-dimensional space as sufficient and has no tendency to go beyond it. The flowing lines, complementary areas clearly divided, and contrasting, pure colors that are typical of decorative art all serve this main purpose.
Decoration is, above all, an invitation to pure seeing.2 It is, therefore, a natural preparation for drawing and painting, which—despite all common factors—are something different. For graphic ornamentation aims merely to simplify, and thus abstract, the visual character of space, by projecting vision fully and freely in two dimensions; but genuine pictorial art seeks to fill the illusory realm with expressive forms, symbols of vital feeling, and often finds itself pushed far beyond the elementary stages of space creation.
Yet even in the motifs of pure decoration—zigzags and S-curves, parallels and spirals and loops—we find the basic principles of expressiveness, forms that seem to “have life” not because they represent anything living, but because they symbolize directly the sense of life, which underlies all our feelings. In a little book on design3 I find the following statement, made by the artist-author with perfectly literal intent and evidently no consciousness whatever of using metaphor: “Borders must move forward, and grow as they move.”
Now, what does it mean to say a border moves? The border is a mark on a contrasting ground, perfectly stationary. When we draw it, the pencil moves, the line or series of forms actually grows in one direction. But suppose it is not even made in this fashion; suppose it is made all at once, by block-printing. And perhaps we do not see it made at all. Still the border “runs” along the edge of the tablecloth or around the margins of a page. If it is supported by short tangential lines the apparent movement is very much enhanced.
There are, of course, classical explanations of this phenomenon in terms of eye-movements: the eye, it is said, is “carried” along a line as it is in following a moving object, such as a mouse running across the floor, and the association of our eye-movement with moving objects prompts us to impute movement to the line. It is not unlikely that eye-movements do play some part in the illusion, but they do not account for it, for if they were always thus associated we could never appreciate as stationary anything too big to be seen at the focal center, i.e., without moving the eyes. Everything else should appear to shift or mill around. Quite to the contrary, however, we are just as likely to think of actual motion in terms of a fixed form. The mouse running across the floor seems to cover a path that remains there, an imaginary line.
The real connection between lines and motion is, I believe, that an uninterrupted line serves us as a symbol of motion, and conveys the idea of it exactly as any symbol conveys its message. In the direct, intuitive appreciation of what may be termed “natural symbols,”4 the import is received like something inherent in the symbol; therefore the running mouse seems to cover a path lying on the floor, and the still, painted line seems to run. The reason is that both exemplify the abstract principle of direction, by virtue of which they are logically congruent enough to be symbols for one another; and in the ordinary, intelligent use of vision, we let them stand proxy for each other all the time, though we do not know it. This is not a function that is first discursively conceived and then assigned a possible symbol, but is non-discursively exhibited and then perceived long before it is acknowledged in a scientific device (as it is in the language of physics, where vectors are conventionally indicated by arrows). Motion, therefore, is logically related to linear form, and where a line is unbroken, and supporting forms tend to give it direction, the mere perception of it is charged with the idea of motion, which shines through our impression of the actual sense-datum and fuses with it in apperception. The result is a very elementary artistic illusion (not delusion, for, unlike delusion, it survives analysis), which we call “living form.”
This term takes us back to Best-Maugard’s supposedly simple statement (it is addressed to children!) : “Borders should move forward, and grow as they move.” What does “grow” mean in this context? The border does not grow bigger in design. No, but it seems to grow longer, for in its seeming motion it does not vacate the places where it was before; like the imaginary path of the mouse, it covers the ground, but continues in one direction; and an ornamental border design appears to do this by a law of its own.
Artistically, all motion is growth; not growth of things or creatures, but of lines and spaces. The spiral—one of the simple motifs—is a “dynamic” or progressing line, but what really seems to grow is a space, the two-dimensional area it defines. This intimate relation between movement and growth is what makes design—the grammar of visual semblance—“living form,” in a perfectly intelligible sense. It is also the surest refutation of any theory that reduces the experience of movement in design to motions connoted by stimulation of tiny muscular actions in the eye. The term “living form” is justified by a logical connection that exists between a half-illusory datum—the “growing” line or space—and the concept of life, whereby the former is a natural symbol of the latter; for “living form” directly exhibits what is the essence of life—incessant change, or process, articulating a permanent form.
The path of a physical motion is an ideal line. In a line that “has movement,” there is ideal motion. In the phenomenon we call “life,” both continuous change and permanent form really exist; but the form is made and maintained by a complicated disposition of mutual influences among the physical units (atoms, molecules, then cells, then organs) whereby changes tend always to occur in certain pre-eminent ways. Instead of a simple law of transformation such as one finds in inorganic change, living things exist by a cumulative process; they assimilate elements of their surroundings to themselves, and these elements fall under the law of change that is the organic form or “life.” This assimilation of factors not originally belonging to the organism, whereby they enter into its life, is the principle of growth. A growing thing need not actually become bigger; since the metabolic action does not stop when a non-living substance has been assimilated and become alive, but is a continuous process of oxidation, separate elements also resign from the organic pattern; they break down again into inorganic structures, i.e., they die. When growth is more vigorous than decay the living form grows larger; when they are balanced it is self-perpetuating; when decay occurs faster than growth the organism is decadent. At a certain point the metabolic process stops all at once, and the life is finished.
Permanence of form, then, is the constant aim of living matter; not the final goal (for it is what finally fails), but the thing that is perpetually being achieved, and that is always, at every moment, an achievement, because it depends entirely on the activity of “living.” But “living” itself is a process, a continuous chance; if it stands still the form disintegrates—for the permanence is a pattern of changes.
Nothing, therefore, is as fundamental in the fabric of our feeling as the sense of permanence and change and their intimate unity. What w call “motion” in art is not necessarily change of place, but is change made perceivable, i.e., imaginable, in any way whatever. Anything that symbolizes change so we seem to behold it is what artists, with more intuition than convention, call a “dynamic” element. It may be a “dynamic accent” in music, physically nothing but loudness, or a word charged above others with emotion, or a color that is “exciting” where it stands, i.e., physically stimulating.
A form that exemplifies permanence, such as a fixed line or a delimited space (the most permanent anchors of vision), yet symbolizes motion, carries with it the concept of growth, because growth is the normal operation of those two principles conjoined in mutual dependence. Therefore Best-Maugard’s metaphorical statement: “Borders should move forward, and grow as they move,” is perfectly rational if we consider that, and why, they seem to do these things. But why “should” they be drawn to seem like that? Because this illusion, this seeming, is the real symbol of feeling. The elementary pattern of feeling expressed in such world-accepted forms symbolizing “growth” is the sense of life, the most primitive “fulfillment”; and it is not mirrored in the physical lines, but in the created thing, the “motions” they have. The dynamic pattern, which is actually an illusion, is what “copies” the form of vital feeling. It is in order to be expressive that borders should move and grow.
Very early in the evolution of design we meet the great principle of graphic expression: the possibility of picturing things. A simple circle decorated with surrounding secondary forms, half-circles, zigzags, or what-not, immediately yields a flower-shape—fantastic, schematic, but exactly the sort of flower pattern one finds in Persian shawls and French hour-books and on Mexican pots. The astounding thing is that these shapes are so unmistakably flowers. The same convincing representational function gives us birds, beasts, men, moon and stars. The principle of representation serves to organize forms and makes much greater elaboration possible without confusing the eye. The forceful implication in the essentially decorative character of primitive art and folk-art, and in the fact that naturalism grows with sophistication, seems to me to be that graphic representation does not spring from copying of direct visual impressions which are then “composed” into design but, on the contrary, arises from ornamental forms that are seen to have representative powers. It is formulation, shaping, defining of the impressions themselves, and is not copying at all, but symbolizing from the outset. In short, form is first, and pictorial meaning is read into it.5
The higher principle of organization, however, becomes dominant as the artist’s imagination produces more involved, asymmetrical, and subtle forms, created not only by obvious means like outlines and pure colors, but also by illusions of receding space and the orientation of units of design toward each other. The interpretation of such units as forms of objects is an inestimable aid in the creation of new spatial relationships, in distributing centers of interest and composing them into a visual unity. For centuries art evolved mainly on representational guidelines; and, as in decorative design we speak of zigzags and circles as “motifs,” so now we apply “motif” to what is pictured in the forms.
But no matter how many possibilities are opened to the artistic imagination by the power of representing things, imitation is never the main device in organization. The primary interest is always design, and the very measure of an artist is his instinct for transforming his actual perceptions into wholly plastic elements as he works with them. As we pass from the study of naive design to a more ambitious literature of aesthetics, dealing with the highest art-forms we meet almost at once the same fundamental principle—the primacy of form. Adolf Hildebrand, for instance, in the first paragraphs of his brief but significant book, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, distinguishes between natural perception and artistic, or, as he calls it, “architectonic” perception, which “enables us to realize a unity of form lacking in objects themselves as they appear in Nature.” What he calls the “architectonic process” is the transformation of natural appearances into pictorial ones, or design in a broad sense; and this process is as old as art itself.
“Reviewing the artistic production of earlier times,” he says, “we find that the architectonic structure of a work of art stands out everywhere as the paramount factor, whereas mere imitation is a thing which has only gradually developed. Its is, in fact, instinctive with us to combine the piece-work of perception into an ideal whole.”
The great difference between the common form of perception and the “architectonic” or artistic is that the former is a product of all our senses working together, and aided, furthermore, by memory and inference, whereas the latter must be achieved solely by one organ, the eye. If we want to make a semblance that shall address itself to sight alone we must, therefore, have visual substitutes for everything that other kinds of experience usually supply. The “architectonic process,” then, is the construction and ordering of forms in space in such a way that they define and organize the space. But a perceptually defined space is a shape: so the complete shaping of a given visual field is a work of pictorial art. Design, therefore, is the essence of drawing and painting, and as simple decorative forms are its lowest terms, composition in color and depth is its highest evolution. For the true aim of plastic art, as Hildebrand conceives it, is to make space visible, and its unity and continuity sensible.
Here we seem, however, to encounter a philosophical difficulty; for space, as we know it in the practical world, has no shape. Even in science it has none, though it has “form.” There are spatial relations, but there is no concrete totality of space. Space itself is amorphous in our active lives and purely abstract in scientific thought. It is a substrate of all our experience, but it is never an entity. How, then, can it be “organized,” “shaped,” or “articulated”? We meet all these terms in the most serious literature of aesthetics.
The answer is, I think, that the space in which we live and act is not what is treated in art at all. The harmoniously organized space in a picture is not experiential space, known by sight and touch, by free motion and restraint, far and near sounds, voices lost or re-echoed. It is an entirely visual affair; for touch and hearing and muscular action it does not exist. For them there is a flat canvas, relatively small, or a cool blank wall, where for the eye there is deep space full of shapes. This purely visual space is an illusion, for our sensory experiences do not agree on it in their report. Pictorial space is not only organized by means of color (including black and white and the gamut of grays between them), it is created; without the organizing shapes it is simply not there. Like the space “behind” the surface of a mirror, it is what the physicists call “virtual space”:—and an intangible image.
This virtual space is the primary illusion of all plastic art. Every element of design, every use of color and semblance of shape, serves to produce and support and develop the picture-space that exists for vision alone. Being only visual, this space has no continuity with the space in which we live; it is limited by the frame, or by surrounding blanks, or incongruous other things that cut it off. Yet its limits cannot even be said to divide it from practical space; for a boundary that divides things always connects them as well, and between the picture space and any other space there is no connection. The created virtual space is entirely self-contained and independent.
This is the fundamental reason why everything that is relevant and artistically valid in a picture must be visual, and everything visual serves “architec-tonic” purposes. In the virtual space of a picture there are only images, and if these are to symbolize objects of our actual world we must have imaginal equivalents for the things that are normally known by touch, movement or inference. That is why a direct copy of what we see is not enough. The copy of things seen would need the same supplementation from non-visual sources that the original perception demanded. The visual substitutes for the non-visible ingredients in space experience make the great difference between photographic rendering and creative rendering; the latter is necessarily a departure from direct imitation, because it is a construction of spatial entities out of color alone (perhaps only varying shades of one color), by all sorts of devices, in order to present at once, with complete authority, the primary illusion of a perfectly visible and perfectly intelligible total space.
Virtual space—the primary illusion of pictorial art—is a creation, not a recreation. There are no natural objects in it, but only semblances, which characterize it and make it an articulate total shape, free frm all practical functions, and therefore capable of functioning as a symbol. There are no degrees of illusoriness or expressiveness among different art-genders, but only degrees of achievement among individual works. From the first line of decorative drawing to the works of Raphael, Leonardo, or Rivera, the same principle of pictorial art is wholly exemplified: the creation of virtual space, and its organization by forms (be they lines, or volumes, or intersecting planes, or shadows and lights) that reflect the patterns of sentience and emotion. The picture-space, whether conceived in two dimensions or in three, dissociates itself from the actual space in which the canvas or other physical bearer of it exists; its function as a symbol makes the objects in a picture as unlike normal physical objects as a spoken word is unlike the sounds of footsteps, rustlings, clatter and other noises that usually accompany and sometimes drown it. The faint little sound of a speaking voice arrests the ear in midst of the medley of mechanical sounds and is something altogether different, because its significance is of a different order; similarly the space in a picture engages our vision completely because it is significant in itself and not as part of the surrounding room. Just establish one line in virtual space, and at once we are in the realm of symbolic forms.
The mental shift is as definite as that which we make from hearing a sound of tapping, squeaking, or buzzing to hearing speech, when suddenly in midst of the little noises surrounding us we make out a single word. The whole character of our hearing is transformed. The medley of physical sound disappears, the car receives language, perhaps indistinct by reason of interfering noises, but struggling through them like a living thing. Exactly the same sort of reorientation is effected for sight by the creation of any purely visual space. The image, be it a representation or a mere design, stands before us in its expressiveness: significant form.
The primary illusion of any art-genre is the basic creation wherein all its elements exist; and they, in turn, produce and support it. It does not exist by itself; “primary” does not mean first-established, but always established where any elements are given at all. There are numberless ways of making space visible, i.e., virtually presenting it.
What are the “elements” of a work of art?
Elements are factors in the semblance; and as such they are virtual themselves, direct components of the total form. In this they differ from materials, which are actual. Paints are materials, and so are the colors they have in the tube or on the palette; but the colors in a picture are elements, determined by their environment. They are warm or cold, rich or frugal, they advance or recede, enhance or soften or dominate other colors; they create tensions and distribute weight in a picture. Colors in a paintbox don’t do such things. They are materials, and lie side by side in their actual, undialectical materialism.
Choice of materials may, to be sure, affect the range of available elements. One can not always do the same things with diverse materials. The translucency of glass allows the making and use of special color elements that paint on a wooden ground could never create; therefore glass painting and wood painting set the artist different problems and suggest different ideas to be brought to expression. It is sometimes said that glass and wood have “different feelings.” They permit, and even command, quite distinct forms, and perhaps equally distinct ranges of vital import.
All the discernible elements in a picture (that is, the factors analysis may reveal) are secondary illusions. They support the primary illusion, which is invariant, while the forms that articulate it may vary indefinitely. The primary illusion is a substrate of the realm of virtual forms; it is involved in their occurrence.
The whole problem of the unity and diversity of the arts hinges, I believe, on this concept of illusion, or created form. The deepest distinction among them is that of having different primary illusions; this distinction obtains, for instance, between the visual arts and music, or between music and literature. Between painting, sculpture and architecture the distinction is less radical, for it rests only on a difference among modes of virtual space. With a really potent principle of analysis one need not defend the unity of art by belittling or denying the fact that there are several major art-forms, and insisting that between music and sculpture there is no “real” difference. The method here used is to push all differences as far as they will go. There is a definite point where, suddenly, no important distinctions can be made any more. Everything we can say of anyone art, on that level, holds for all. There is the unity. Knowing this, I shall set forth in a subsequent essay what gives the muses their individuality, and let their family solidarity take care of itself.
(The Hudson Review will publish a second related essay by Mrs. Langer, “The Primary Illusions and the Great Orders of Art,” in an early issue.)
1 See Philosophy in a New Key, ch. 8.
2 Cf. Albert Barnes: “The appeal of . . . decorative beauty is probably to be explained by its satisfaction of our general need of perceiving freely and agreeably.” (The Art in Painting, p. 29).
3 Adolfo Best-Maugard, A Method for Creative Design.
4 See Philosophy in a New Key, ch. 4.
5 Leonardo, in his Treatise on Painting, advises students to look at chance forms like cracks in plaster and knots in boards and try to make figures out of them, i.e., to read shapes of people and things into them. This, he says, is, very good for the painter’s imagination. It sounds silly: but was Leonardo silly? Or did he also feel that visual “reality” is made out of basic organizing forms, as truly as scientific “reality” is made out of the forms of rational discourse?
The Primary Illusions and the Great Orders of Art
Susanne K. Langer
From The Hudson Review, Vol. III, No. 2, Summer 1950, 219-233. This should be read with her earlier “The Principles of Creation in Art.” Posted in AnthonyFlood.com on June 26, 2008; reposted in Open Horizons on Dec. 3, 2025
All art is the creation of forms expressive of human feeling, from the primitive sense of vitality that goes with breathing and moving one’s limbs, or even suddenly resting, to the poignant emotions of love and grief and ecstasy. The essential unity of the arts is vouched for by this large and single purpose, and really requires no other explanation.
What is difficult to understand is the selective character of artistic talent. Few creative artists are equally gifted in even two realms of art. Leonardo, for all his versatility, was above all a painter; his poetry, from any other pen than the great painter’s, would hardly have stood the test of five hundred years. Wagner would certainly not have impressed his generation as poet or dramatist without his musical fame. William Blake, equally great as poet and painter, always comes to mind in this connection just because he is a notable exception to the rule. Talent is normally restricted to one artistic domain. No matter how positively we proclaim the identity of all arts, in practice we do not turn to Picasso for musical education, nor expect to learn painting from Kreisler, nor study ballet under T. S. Eliot. And that is not because the techniques are too specialized for one man to master; painting is technically as different from sculpture as it is from piano playing; but it is near to sculpture and far from piano playing, because the primary illusion it creates is virtual space, and what music creates is something else. Music is of a different order of imagination, and even if it were made with hammer and chisel on a stone that emitted sounds, it would be music, not sculpture.
The function of plastic art—”to make space visible, and its continuity sensible,” as Hildebrand stated it—has been generally overlooked, because a much less important but more obvious function commanded people’s first interest: imitation of things that are visible in actuality (which space is not). Music, too, is theoretically misunderstood because an obvious approach to it presents itself at once, and blocks our view of what a musician really creates. The wrong premises here are not as naive as the copy-theory of visual art, but they lead, I think, to an equally unenlightening analysis. They are, in brief, that the elements of music are tones, whose essential characters are pitch, duration, loudness, and timbre (tone-color depending on overtones); that these tones are combined by the composer to yield patterns of sound, characterized as melody, harmony, and rhythm. Complex patterns, exempli-fying all these characters, are works of music, which act upon our sensibilities, and stimulate our emotions. To “understand” a piece of music is to recognize its factors, which are, of course, more subtle than this bare outline indicates, but belong in the general categories here named.
What, then, is created in music? Apparently nothing; tones are produced, but tones are actual phenomena, and their somatic effects are actual, like the effects of contact with warm or cold objects, the smell of perfume, etc. According to this view, musical composition should be a science rather than an art. That theory has, indeed, been seriously entertained.
Yet music is the most enthralling, i.e. illusionistic, phenomenon in the world. What we hear in listening to sounds “musically” is not their specific pitch and loudness, duration and timbre. Often we are not even specifically aware of melody, harmony, or rhythmic figure, yet the music is perfectly meaningful. What we hear is what Hanslick has properly described as “tönend bewegte Formen”—“sounding forms in motion.” We hear movement and rest, swift movement or slow, stop, attack, direction, parallel and contrary motion, melody rising or soaring or sinking, harmonies crowding or resolving or clashing; moving forms in continuous flux.
But in all this progressive motion there is actually nothing that moves. Here a word may be in order to forestall a popular fallacy: namely, that the motion is actual because strings or air-columns and the air around them move. But such motion is not what we perceive. Vibration is minute, very fast, and without direction—or rather, it s direction is back and forth, in an infinitesimal space. The motion of tonal forms, however, is large and directed toward some point of relative rest. In a simple passage like the following:
the three eighth notes progress up to the tonic C. But in actuality there is no thing that moves up. The C is their point of rest; yet physically there is faster motion during the time we hear the C than there was while we heard the three tones going up to it. The motion of sounding forms, like the forms themselves—everything, in fact, but the sounding—is sheer appearance, illusion. The forms are virtual, their motion is virtual, and the whole composition is a semblance.
Music is a semblance of Time in its passage. What it creates is an order of virtual time, defined and organized by the illusion of motion. Music makes time audible, and its continuity sensible. It does this by virtue of its basic abstraction, sounding forms in motion, or kinetic tonal forms.
Just as the space of experience is not the space of geometry, so experienced time is not the time we establish by clocks. Our actual subjective time-perception is even more composite, pragmatic, and incomplete than our space-perception. Clock time is a highly simplified abstraction from experienced time; scientific time is a refinement of clock time. Both share one basic formal property that results from the intellectual economy they serve—they are both conceived as having but one dimension. Modern scientific time, in fact, is one dimension of a greater relational construction.
All this is very far from time as we know it in direct experience, where it has many characteristics. Experiential time is essentially passage, or the feeling of transience. That is, I believe, what Bergson meant by “duration,” as opposed to scientific time which he regarded as “spatialized” and thereby falsified, because space seemed to him less real than time. Why space should be less real is hard to understand, but his doctrine has a true intent none the less: for “spatialized” time is time conceived through a metaphor from space experience, and the time-concept thus attained is “clock time” in the broadest sense, culminating in the useful but artificial construction we call “scientific time.” It is not based on the feeling of passage, but on the comparison of physical states and the observation of differences between them. States are ranged in an order of before and after; the contrasts they present are the measure of change. What lies between two states is not observed, but left vague, because its exact conception is unnecessary to the formalization of a measurable time. Just because actual passage is not conceived, “clock time” is homogeneous and simple and may be treated as one-dimensional.
Experiential time, on the other hand, is not simple at all. Besides the property we commonly call “length,” and treat as its one dimension, it has another that I can only denote, metaphorically, as volume. Subjectively, a unit of time may be great or small as well as long or short. The slang phrase “a big time” is psychologically more accurate than “a pleasant time” or “a quickly-passed time.” It is this voluminousness of the direct experience of passage that makes it, as Bergson says, indivisible. But even its volume is not simple; for it is filled with its own characteristic forms, as space is filled with material forms; and each order is really conceivable only because it is divided by the things in it, whereby it may be noted and measured. The forms that fill time are tensions—physical emotional or intellectual. Time exists for us because we experience tensions and their resolutions. Their peculiar building-up, and their ways of breaking or diminishing or merging into longer and greater tensions, make for a vast variety of temporal forms. If we could undergo only single, successive organic strains, perhaps subjective time would be one-dimensional, like the scientific time ticked off by clocks. But life is always a dense fabric of concurrent tensions, and as each of them is a measure of time, the measurements themselves do not coincide. This causes our time-experience to fall apart into incommensurate elements which cannot all be perceived together as clear forms. If one is taken as parameter others become “irrational,” out of focus, ineffable. Some tensions therefore, always sink into the background; some drive and some drag, but for perception they give quality rather than form to the passage of time, which unfolds in the pattern of the dominant and distinct strain whereby we are measuring it.
Subjective time is perceived in actual life only in a haphazard and confused way. For practical purposes we largely ignore it and let the formal measurements of the clock predominate, because they are designed pragmatically in the universal framework of astronomical events, so that we can all agree on them. Like actual space, which we measure in geometric abstraction or else accept vaguely as a mixture of views, things, and places, so actual time is either a scientific datum or a confused experience of physical and mental strains—of waiting, expectation, fulfillment, surprise. It has no unified perceptual form, no clear continuity.
The creation of a self-contained temporal order, continuous, all-inclusive, and entirely given in direct experience, is the business of music. The elements of music therefore are sensuous images of the tensions and resolutions which constitute passage for us; and those sensuous images, creating the semblance of passage, are tonal forms in virtual motion. By these the illusion of time is achieved and its experiential character set forth—its complexity, density, and volume, its interwoven elements and indivisible flow.
If, now, we turn to the standard analysis of music and are confronted again by the inventory of its constituents—tones having definite degrees of duration and pitch, by virtue of which they may be composed into rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic patterns, enhanced by variations of loudness and timbre—we see that this study begins with musical materials, not musical elements. But it lacks an adequate principle for admitting or excluding materials. The sounds of a snaredrum, which have neither definite pitch nor controllable duration, cannot really be classed as “tones” at all. Rhythm, supposedly their main contribution, is achieved by leaving exact intervals between them, i.e. by silences. Is silence to be a constituent? Moreover, there is music that loses much of its character when it is separated from words; but words, though they are sounds, make “musical” patterns only in a derivative sense, for they are not tones. Is such music a hybrid art?
Materials are actual, and their properties are fixed. Elements, on the other hand, are virtual, for they are constituents of the total semblance. The question of what is or is not a musical element is easily answered with reference to the primary illusion: anything is a musical element that enters into the illusion—that serves to create, support, and organize the virtual image of time. The materials of which musical elements are made may be tones or atonal sounds, silence, speech, even dramatic actions motivating changes of theme. There is no legislating as to what shall be material for music. Once the primary illusion has been experienced, there are many materials, and probably many primitive sources of the art it begets. The musical mind finds music everywhere—in speech, in nature, in the rhythms of work; and so it uses everything resonant, from the human voice to the bowstring and the hollow drum, to make the passage of time audible and its forms expressive.
There are certain kindred arts, that create the same primary illusion in different modes. The subject is too extensive to be introduced here, except to remark that—plausibly enough—sculpture and architecture stand in this relation to painting, and drama to literature. Music, also, is generally supposed to have a sister art, namely the dance. They have grown up together; and after many centuries in which music rose to the highest artistic levels and ballet sank to mere entertainment or ballroom exercise, our so-called “modern dance” is again a serious creative venture, and is generally regarded as a musical art. Some aestheticians, and even more significantly—some excellent dancers and choreographers, and a few musicians, maintain that exactly the same forms may be exhibited in tone as in bodily motion, so that the difference between music and dance is only a superficial one of appeal to hearing or to vision, as the case may be, like the difference between spoken and written language. The French music critic who calls himself Jean D’Udine says in his provocative little book, L’art et le geste: “All music is dance—all melody just a series of attitudes, poses.” Jacques-Dalcroze, who was a musician and not a dancer by training, regarded dance as a direct translation of music into bodily responses, so that any music could be “danced,” i.e., rendered precisely as a balletic pattern. Fokine undertakes to translate Beethoven’s symphonies into choreographic terms. And Sakharov writes in his Reflections on Music and the Dance: “I do not dance to music, I dance music.” The person who taught him to do this, he claims, was Isadora Duncan; she was the first serious artist who proposed to dance music itself, to interpret it, just as a virtuoso with his instrument interprets what the composer has written.
Isadora’s relation to music, however, is just what throws a serious doubt on the musical character of dance. An artist is usually incompetent judge of work in his entire realm, i.e., anywhere within the scope of the primary illusion of his art, even where that illusion appears in a special mode not his own. But dancers are not usually connoisseurs of music, and there are but few musicians who appreciate dancing at all. Isadora’s musical taste was simply mystifying. From the musician’s standpoint it was neither good nor bad, but unpredictable. She admired very good pieces and very bad ones; her favorite composers were Beethoven and Ethelbert Nevin. What she did with their works was always beautiful, but musical critics generally protested that she did not understand the music and flouted the composer’s intent.
The explanation is, I think, that her judgment was not musical, but balletic; and that very great and very poor music, alike, may have balletic value. Isadora’s feeling was so entirely for dance that she could find nothing else in music, and therefore believed that what she danced was the music itself, its very essence. This belief did not interfere with her art, but it did mislead and affront musical people, whose conceptions of Beethoven certainly were not reflected, let alone deepened, by her performance. Musicians generally resent the modern ballet just because they believe it to be a musical art, and then find that it adds nothing to music, but on the contrary distorts and abuses it.
The illusion created in dance—any kind of dance, from square dance or social dance to the Russian ballet—is neither that of music, i.e. virtual time, nor the virtual space of plastic art. Dance is a separate art, with its own primary illusion.
What, then, is dance? Those dancers who do not regard it as a representation of music generally define it as a spatial art, and conceive it either as a pattern of motions with moments of statuesque arrest, or else as a succession of poses, like tableaux vivants, connected by motions. This is the “classic” point of view, comparable to the conception of painting as arrangement of colors, and of music as the combination of consonant or dissonant tones. For in the dance, motion is actual, not illusory, and a pattern of motions taken simply as such is aesthetic rather than significant. There is another school, however, sometimes frowned upon as “impure” in its aim, that treats all balletic motion as pantomime, i.e., formalized imitation of acts. The histrionic content here is of course thematic, and if it monopolizes or even distracts the beholder’s interest it debases the dance. Imitation, however important to a particular piece, is never an essential factor in an art. Yet the dramatic theory has its virtues, for it presents balletic motion as gesture. This immediately sets dance apart from mobile sculpture, from the rhythmic movements of machines, the sinuous grace of a hunting cat, or the weaving of gnats in the air. Gesture is in some ways a broader term than motion, and in other ways narrower: broader, because a pose, a look, a moment of rigor may be a gesture without being a motion; narrower, because not all motions are gestures. Gesture is expressive behavior. In actual life it is often unconscious, symptomatic of emotions and impulses; an attitude of weariness, for instance, is a sustained unconscious gesture. But gesture may be deliberate, too, and practical (pointing, beckoning, warning, etc.), or even symbolic, supplementing language (as when one says: “A fish as big as that”). The deaf-mute alphabet is a completely discursive system of gesture; another, less articulate but more self-evident, is the sign language evolved by Indian and white scouts, in which the principle of symbolization is pantomime, stretched to great lengths of meta-phorical use.
Gesticulation, however, is not art; it is expression, subjective self-expression or objective logical expression as the case may be, but as long as it is essentially either emotive or practical it is not art. If gestures could convey nothing but literal ideas—“I throw a ball,” “the swan dies,” “this is the way we wash the clothes”—they would not lend themselves to artistic uses. But they are more than involuntary or semantic acts: they are forms of behavior. As forms they may be abstracted, and treated freely to create rhythms, indivisible lines of action, the appearance of challenge and response, the illusion of powers in conflict, in balance, or in union. And here we have the ruling principle—the primary illusion of balletic art: all dance creates a realm of virtual Power, an illusory field of forces involved only with each other, weaving a fabric of freely rhythmic, continuous and coherent gesture.
The forces presented in dance may be physical, psychical, mythic or magical, but they are always felt, not computed or inferred. They are not the actual forces that move the dancers, bodily energies limited by gravity and friction, but lures and excitements, prescribed paths, engulfing rhythms, personal wills—all orgiastic, mystical, or musical causes, virtual powers that evoke virtual activities. In watching a ballet one is not aware of people running around, but of the dance driving this way, drawn that way, gathering here, spreading there. In a pas-de-deux the two partners seem to magnetize each other. The relation between them is more than a spatial one; it is a relation of forces.
The most elementary means of abstracting motion from the work it actually performs is rhythm. This is a psychological factor, not an intrinsic property of mechanical motions, where there is uniformity, but no accent. We organize uniformities mentally into arsis and thesis, to and fro, tick and tock. Rhythmization transforms walking into marching, prancing into dancing; for it establishes a conceptual control over motion and gives it a clearly sensible form. As soon as we feel the rhythm of a march, it dominates our walking; we “fall into step.” Ballroom dancing is one of the simplest abstractions of motion from the purpose of locomotion, which becomes subordinate. Through rhythm, and the gestive form of the step, the partners are oriented toward each other, and this virtual relation links them even without any physical contact. Artistically such performance has very limited possibilities, yet it creates its own little realm of virtual power, and is genuine dance.
In higher phases of balletic art, real activities are often simulated, and enter into the pattern of gestures as pantomime, or dance-motifs. But in so doing they are always transmuted into mere appearances: in representing flight from a pursuer, the dancers do not actually run as they would at an alarm of fire, but retreat in a rippling toe-dance or even pirouetting, or withdraw with a mere leaning gesture—anything, in fact, except turning around and running. If the dance is successful, they seem to be driven by a menacing force and to be carried by emotion.
If we regard dance as the envisagement of a realm of Powers and the presentation of their interplay, we can readily understand why dance holds a supreme position in primitive culture, why it is universally linked with religion, and why it usually reaches its highest development before music is more than a rhythmic accompaniment to it, and before painting has risen above traditional designs on pottery and textiles or on the human body. Elaborate ritual dances are found where poetry does not yet seem to exist. The reason is that imaginary Powers—mana, taboo, magic, godhead and doom—are the realities of primitive life, but not the prosaic realities: they constitute a closed and sanctified realm, the spirit-world.1 The center of this world—the altar—is the natural focus of the dance, which symbolizes and celebrates such Powers. The altar is the virtual force that organizes the whole field, and around it or its equivalent—the idol, the priest, the totem—the dance develops. Pantomime usually supplies the motifs, as physical objects furnish motifs for painting and sculpture. The magic circle governed by the god is the ideal choric stage, and ritual a constant source of purely expressive actions, thematic elements that weave themselves naturally into dance.
The proposition that artistic symbols are non-discursive forms, presenting the morphology of sentience which discursive forms cannot express, meets its test case, of course, in the literary arts. Certainly literature is composed of discursive symbols; and just as certainly it contains more than a logically adequate statement of propositions. This is most evident in poetry. Many books have been written on the problem of poetic quality, and different thinkers have attributed it variously to word-music, to imagery, to suggested associations, and to value-judgments implied by the poet’s selection of things to dwell upon. Dream symbolism especially has been held responsible for poetic appeal.
Word-music is a factor in poetic composition, but it is not what makes poetry. The same is true of imagery, word-pathos, “criticism of life,” and dynamic” phantasy. Sound and sense, implication and suggestion, derivations and metaphorical meanings, grammar, accent, dialect, strong and weak word-forms—all are materials out of which the elements of poetry may be made. But those elements are as non-discursive as the painter’s perceptual objects, the musician’s sonorous moving forms, the dancer’s virtual forces. They are created, i.e., are illusions achieved by abstracting semblances from the actual world, and then composing these sheer appearances into new forms that mirror the logic of feeling.
The nature of literary creations is most readily illustrated in a simple experience with words that probably everyone has encountered: that a perfectly familiar fact seems perfectly terrible when stated a certain way. I do not mean in a certain tone of voice, but with a particular turn of phrase. Surely everybody has at some time been told: “It sounds so awful when you put it like that!” Or: “When you say it that way, it seems silly.” Or: “He made it sound simply wonderful.” One does not protest that the fact is so awful because of the presentation, but only that it seems, or “sounds,” that way. But one might say quite truly: “When you put it like that, it’s an awful thought!” The thought is awful, although the proposition remains just what it was. And here, I believe, is the principle of all literature, which is most evident in lyric poetry. Poetry asserts propositions only as thoughts. The same proposition may be thought in countless ways, and each way has its own emotional value. The proposition, which might be expressed in logical symbols, is related to the thought as a physical object is related to a visual form that portrays it. The thought is what the poet’s way of stating the proposition creates; the thought is a poetic element.
Our actual thoughts chase each other in haphazard fashion, so that their complete form rarely develops. We think and act without taking stock of the way events and phantasies, beliefs and proposals and expectations really present themselves; yet such experiences constitute our personal history. Like all actuality, that history is only half perceived, and half intellectually constructed. For practical purposes we do not need to remember an unbroken past, but only to reconstruct salient moments, that mark successive stations in the progression of events known as our “life.”
Literary art, by contrast, creates a completely “lived” piece of experience. The piece may be very small, like the brief thought that constitutes a lyric such as:
A slight disorder in the dress
Giveth to youth a wantonness--
But it is a thought really seen in its passage, followed through from its whimsical rise to the final pronouncement of taste that closes it. The idea is fully entertained, without being foiled by the incursion of other, perhaps more important thoughts; and it seems to be entertained actively, at the moment, though it was written more than 300 years ago. The reason is that it is the semblance of a thought; that is why we read it as something essentially timeless. The present tense, which is characteristic of lyric poetry, is really a “historical present,” for it makes no reference to the actual situation of the poet, but to an envisaged piece of life. In that context, events and acts seemingly take place as they do in actuality—but only seemingly; the experience of them is virtual, and the form of the illusory occurrences is as much simplified, organized, and composed as a picture. But such illusory events are not discursive propositions. The propositional material has been transformed into experiential elements in a created semblance of life.
This total semblance is, I think, what critics often refer to as the poet’s “vision.” I can find no other justification for that word. In the framework of the present theory, however, it is perfectly justified. A poem is essentially and entirely a creation; the words beget virtual elements, that exhibit forms of sensibility and emotion and thus carry a meaning beyond the discursive statements involved in their construction. But the meaning is not something to be read “between the lines”; it is in the lines, in every word and every punctuation mark as well as in the literal content of every sentence. The whole fabric is a work of art.
The first task that confronts an artist is always to establish the primary illusion, i.e., to close the total form and set it apart from actuality. That is the purpose of poetic structure—of meter, rhyme, divisions, repeated or imitated lines, and pure sound-effects like hey-nonny-no and daffy-down-dilly. How much of this artifice is needed depends on what other elements there are that will assure the “psychical distance” of the work. A heavy discursive content usually requires a strict poetic form, as for instance the sonnet; there is such a thing as a true sonnet idea, which calls for every device of fabrication, from word-music to interlacing rhymes, to keep the thought in the realm of imagination. If, on the other hand, great imagery and a certain unrealism of subject matter already perform this function, the poetic structure may be very free, as in the Psalms of David. In poetry as elsewhere, the means of creating virtual elements are various, and almost every one—sound allusion, imagery, archaism, dynamic sym-bolism, ambiguity, etc.—has its possible alternatives.
The most prevalent single device, probably the first to beget literature at all, is narrative. The image of experience is most readily obtained as we obtain it in actual life, namely as memory. Marcel Proust finds this to be, indeed, his only key to authentic composition, for memory leaves much out but intensifies what it retains, and usually completes its reconstructions of life by the principle of association rather than real causal connectedness. The process of intensification seems to him the essence of all poetic experience, and certainly there is much to be said for his analysis. Memory is formative, and produces perspectives of deeply felt events. In literature the unfolding of a story does the same thing. Even a simple narrative is such an organizing force that we usually speak of it as the “plot,” i.e., the ground plan, of the work in which it is utilized. Where the principle of narration enters into poetic structure all other devices have to adjust themselves: the choice of imagery is no longer free, as in the pure lyric, but is determined by the need of heightening some events and perhaps preparing others, and of slowing or hurrying the course of action. The descriptions of witch-fires and water snakes and “slimy things” in the Ancient Mariner make the story move with terrifying slowness while the ship is in doldrums. The same effect may ruin a work, where the story ought to move and is delayed by long descriptions introduced for their own sake, as in many romantic poems and novels. The verbal problem, on the other hand, becomes much simpler where narration holds the total structure together; the intensive poetic cadence that is the magic of the lyric is no longer needed, so a much simpler form, e.g., the colloquial language and regular meter of the ballad, may take its place. The prime virtue of story is that it constructs a much bigger span of experience than a presentation of entirely subjective events can effect. It creates in free and full scope the primary illusion of literature, which is a virtual Past.
As the lyric and the ode use the present tense to convey thoughts that are really timeless, so the ballad is normally in the past tense, because it achieves the illusion of history. The perfect tense is, in fact, characteristic of literature as a whole; the use of the present is a special device, for the semblance of experience made with words is always complete, like memory. But it is a powerful device, the historical present, and does not by any means always achieve “timelessness”; it may intensify a past event, as strong feeling intensifies memories to the point of making them almost eidetic, so people sometimes say: “It’s just as though it were now!”
The ballad is built on one straightforward story, and has therefore a fundamentally linear structure, reflected in its simple and fast-moving meter. There are broader planes that give one a sense of contemporaneousness of events, and consequently of history as a fabric rather than a sequence of actions. Such a design is the romance, which uses a new technique, namely a detailed account of how things are done instead of the mere statement of their occurrence. Here description serves for something more than to delight the imagination by dwelling on events; this being dwelled on gives the events new form—like the creation of visual forms suddenly in three dimensions instead of two. That, far more than the introduction of occasional contemporaneous happenings, gives the romance the appearance of a fabric instead of a thread of history. The descriptive principle, in fact, is so effectual that the persons in the story may be quite schematically rendered, human types rather than individuals, actors in a very colorful scene, like figures in a tapestry.
As the resources of narrative are developed, the office of pure diction, i.e., poetic statement, becomes less vital; the romance retains its literary virtue even in prose, as in the Spanish “novella.” Finally the full-fledged novel, the chief fictional work of our age, presents an entirely different appearance, for its most important creations are “characters,” individual human agents. These are so obviously its pivotal elements that popular judgment, and often even the professional critics, treat only the personalities in a novel as the author’s creations, and literary criticism is led into a new danger, namely that of regarding the novelist as essentially a psychologist, a reporter on typical human reactions. Any novel that presents a lifelike personality is likely to be hailed as great literature. The peripheral characters, the places, the impersonal events, all these are passed over. But in fact they are all cut out of the same cloth as the central personages. Not only the brothers Karamazov, but the dim figures of the Elder the lame little girl, the inn-keeper and the officers of the law are literary creations; if they are undeveloped it is not because Dostoevsky did not know their prototypes intimately enough to give them more articulate form, but because he because he really created, not copied, them—created their outlines as he needed them, without detail but with perfect truth. Furthermore, the inn, the garden, the days and nights are all creations—elements in a virtual Past which bears the stamp of vivid memory, yet is not anyone’s actual recollection.
The analysis of forms I have just presented leads from the simplest—the use of words to abstract the appearance and feeling of propositions as they figure in our thinking—to the very elaborate composition of virtual events filling a whole human consciousness, even an extended, imaginary “social consciousness.” Historically, however, the very complex was first; for all literary devices—rhythmic cadence, story, imagery, realism and supernaturalism and mythical symbolism, dramatic characters, lyric utterance, dialogue—all may be found in the epic, which is the cradle of literature.
All—yes; but not all at once. The epic is the matrix, for in its great structure there is a constant variety of forms due to the alternating use of techniques each of which produces its own perspective. The purer literary genders have been derived, I believe, by specialization, through the discovery that any principle may become central, and may, in fact, stand proxy for any other, given the circumstances. It is this possibility of alternating the techniques of creation that keeps the several forms (lyric, ballad, novel, biography, etc.) so closely related; but it also begets their multiplicity, which is presumably not exhausted yet.
Nothing has been said, so far, about that ancient and eminent art form, the drama; and in the compass of this essay little can be said, save that I believe the drama is not strictly literature at all. It has a different origin, and uses words only as utterances. It is a kindred art, for it produces the same primary illusion as literature, namely the semblance of experienced events, but in a different mode: instead of creating a virtual Past it creates a virtual Present. It is related to literature as sculpture and architecture are related to the graphic arts. But this categorical statement must remain an “aside”; our subject is already too great for the allotted pages.
In the scaffolding of this theory of art, which was derived by generalization from the more limited study of significant forms in music, the first result is a very radical setting apart of the major arts. Yet oddly enough, as soon as they are duly distinguished, their basic identity comes to light, because their respective principles, whereby each is an autonomous realm, are analogous, so their abstract formulations coincide, and make one set of propositions expressing the broad and universal principles of Art. But, to borrow Rudyard Kipling’s phrase, “That is another story.”
1 The dichotomy of primitive life into sacred and profane was noted and developed by Cassirer in Die Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, vol. 2. See also Language and Myth and An Essay on Man.
All art is the creation of forms expressive of human feeling, from the primitive sense of vitality that goes with breathing and moving one’s limbs, or even suddenly resting, to the poignant emotions of love and grief and ecstasy. The essential unity of the arts is vouched for by this large and single purpose, and really requires no other explanation.
What is difficult to understand is the selective character of artistic talent. Few creative artists are equally gifted in even two realms of art. Leonardo, for all his versatility, was above all a painter; his poetry, from any other pen than the great painter’s, would hardly have stood the test of five hundred years. Wagner would certainly not have impressed his generation as poet or dramatist without his musical fame. William Blake, equally great as poet and painter, always comes to mind in this connection just because he is a notable exception to the rule. Talent is normally restricted to one artistic domain. No matter how positively we proclaim the identity of all arts, in practice we do not turn to Picasso for musical education, nor expect to learn painting from Kreisler, nor study ballet under T. S. Eliot. And that is not because the techniques are too specialized for one man to master; painting is technically as different from sculpture as it is from piano playing; but it is near to sculpture and far from piano playing, because the primary illusion it creates is virtual space, and what music creates is something else. Music is of a different order of imagination, and even if it were made with hammer and chisel on a stone that emitted sounds, it would be music, not sculpture.
The function of plastic art—”to make space visible, and its continuity sensible,” as Hildebrand stated it—has been generally overlooked, because a much less important but more obvious function commanded people’s first interest: imitation of things that are visible in actuality (which space is not). Music, too, is theoretically misunderstood because an obvious approach to it presents itself at once, and blocks our view of what a musician really creates. The wrong premises here are not as naive as the copy-theory of visual art, but they lead, I think, to an equally unenlightening analysis. They are, in brief, that the elements of music are tones, whose essential characters are pitch, duration, loudness, and timbre (tone-color depending on overtones); that these tones are combined by the composer to yield patterns of sound, characterized as melody, harmony, and rhythm. Complex patterns, exempli-fying all these characters, are works of music, which act upon our sensibilities, and stimulate our emotions. To “understand” a piece of music is to recognize its factors, which are, of course, more subtle than this bare outline indicates, but belong in the general categories here named.
What, then, is created in music? Apparently nothing; tones are produced, but tones are actual phenomena, and their somatic effects are actual, like the effects of contact with warm or cold objects, the smell of perfume, etc. According to this view, musical composition should be a science rather than an art. That theory has, indeed, been seriously entertained.
Yet music is the most enthralling, i.e. illusionistic, phenomenon in the world. What we hear in listening to sounds “musically” is not their specific pitch and loudness, duration and timbre. Often we are not even specifically aware of melody, harmony, or rhythmic figure, yet the music is perfectly meaningful. What we hear is what Hanslick has properly described as “tönend bewegte Formen”—“sounding forms in motion.” We hear movement and rest, swift movement or slow, stop, attack, direction, parallel and contrary motion, melody rising or soaring or sinking, harmonies crowding or resolving or clashing; moving forms in continuous flux.
But in all this progressive motion there is actually nothing that moves. Here a word may be in order to forestall a popular fallacy: namely, that the motion is actual because strings or air-columns and the air around them move. But such motion is not what we perceive. Vibration is minute, very fast, and without direction—or rather, it s direction is back and forth, in an infinitesimal space. The motion of tonal forms, however, is large and directed toward some point of relative rest. In a simple passage like the following:
the three eighth notes progress up to the tonic C. But in actuality there is no thing that moves up. The C is their point of rest; yet physically there is faster motion during the time we hear the C than there was while we heard the three tones going up to it. The motion of sounding forms, like the forms themselves—everything, in fact, but the sounding—is sheer appearance, illusion. The forms are virtual, their motion is virtual, and the whole composition is a semblance.
Music is a semblance of Time in its passage. What it creates is an order of virtual time, defined and organized by the illusion of motion. Music makes time audible, and its continuity sensible. It does this by virtue of its basic abstraction, sounding forms in motion, or kinetic tonal forms.
Just as the space of experience is not the space of geometry, so experienced time is not the time we establish by clocks. Our actual subjective time-perception is even more composite, pragmatic, and incomplete than our space-perception. Clock time is a highly simplified abstraction from experienced time; scientific time is a refinement of clock time. Both share one basic formal property that results from the intellectual economy they serve—they are both conceived as having but one dimension. Modern scientific time, in fact, is one dimension of a greater relational construction.
All this is very far from time as we know it in direct experience, where it has many characteristics. Experiential time is essentially passage, or the feeling of transience. That is, I believe, what Bergson meant by “duration,” as opposed to scientific time which he regarded as “spatialized” and thereby falsified, because space seemed to him less real than time. Why space should be less real is hard to understand, but his doctrine has a true intent none the less: for “spatialized” time is time conceived through a metaphor from space experience, and the time-concept thus attained is “clock time” in the broadest sense, culminating in the useful but artificial construction we call “scientific time.” It is not based on the feeling of passage, but on the comparison of physical states and the observation of differences between them. States are ranged in an order of before and after; the contrasts they present are the measure of change. What lies between two states is not observed, but left vague, because its exact conception is unnecessary to the formalization of a measurable time. Just because actual passage is not conceived, “clock time” is homogeneous and simple and may be treated as one-dimensional.
Experiential time, on the other hand, is not simple at all. Besides the property we commonly call “length,” and treat as its one dimension, it has another that I can only denote, metaphorically, as volume. Subjectively, a unit of time may be great or small as well as long or short. The slang phrase “a big time” is psychologically more accurate than “a pleasant time” or “a quickly-passed time.” It is this voluminousness of the direct experience of passage that makes it, as Bergson says, indivisible. But even its volume is not simple; for it is filled with its own characteristic forms, as space is filled with material forms; and each order is really conceivable only because it is divided by the things in it, whereby it may be noted and measured. The forms that fill time are tensions—physical emotional or intellectual. Time exists for us because we experience tensions and their resolutions. Their peculiar building-up, and their ways of breaking or diminishing or merging into longer and greater tensions, make for a vast variety of temporal forms. If we could undergo only single, successive organic strains, perhaps subjective time would be one-dimensional, like the scientific time ticked off by clocks. But life is always a dense fabric of concurrent tensions, and as each of them is a measure of time, the measurements themselves do not coincide. This causes our time-experience to fall apart into incommensurate elements which cannot all be perceived together as clear forms. If one is taken as parameter others become “irrational,” out of focus, ineffable. Some tensions therefore, always sink into the background; some drive and some drag, but for perception they give quality rather than form to the passage of time, which unfolds in the pattern of the dominant and distinct strain whereby we are measuring it.
Subjective time is perceived in actual life only in a haphazard and confused way. For practical purposes we largely ignore it and let the formal measurements of the clock predominate, because they are designed pragmatically in the universal framework of astronomical events, so that we can all agree on them. Like actual space, which we measure in geometric abstraction or else accept vaguely as a mixture of views, things, and places, so actual time is either a scientific datum or a confused experience of physical and mental strains—of waiting, expectation, fulfillment, surprise. It has no unified perceptual form, no clear continuity.
The creation of a self-contained temporal order, continuous, all-inclusive, and entirely given in direct experience, is the business of music. The elements of music therefore are sensuous images of the tensions and resolutions which constitute passage for us; and those sensuous images, creating the semblance of passage, are tonal forms in virtual motion. By these the illusion of time is achieved and its experiential character set forth—its complexity, density, and volume, its interwoven elements and indivisible flow.
If, now, we turn to the standard analysis of music and are confronted again by the inventory of its constituents—tones having definite degrees of duration and pitch, by virtue of which they may be composed into rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic patterns, enhanced by variations of loudness and timbre—we see that this study begins with musical materials, not musical elements. But it lacks an adequate principle for admitting or excluding materials. The sounds of a snaredrum, which have neither definite pitch nor controllable duration, cannot really be classed as “tones” at all. Rhythm, supposedly their main contribution, is achieved by leaving exact intervals between them, i.e. by silences. Is silence to be a constituent? Moreover, there is music that loses much of its character when it is separated from words; but words, though they are sounds, make “musical” patterns only in a derivative sense, for they are not tones. Is such music a hybrid art?
Materials are actual, and their properties are fixed. Elements, on the other hand, are virtual, for they are constituents of the total semblance. The question of what is or is not a musical element is easily answered with reference to the primary illusion: anything is a musical element that enters into the illusion—that serves to create, support, and organize the virtual image of time. The materials of which musical elements are made may be tones or atonal sounds, silence, speech, even dramatic actions motivating changes of theme. There is no legislating as to what shall be material for music. Once the primary illusion has been experienced, there are many materials, and probably many primitive sources of the art it begets. The musical mind finds music everywhere—in speech, in nature, in the rhythms of work; and so it uses everything resonant, from the human voice to the bowstring and the hollow drum, to make the passage of time audible and its forms expressive.
There are certain kindred arts, that create the same primary illusion in different modes. The subject is too extensive to be introduced here, except to remark that—plausibly enough—sculpture and architecture stand in this relation to painting, and drama to literature. Music, also, is generally supposed to have a sister art, namely the dance. They have grown up together; and after many centuries in which music rose to the highest artistic levels and ballet sank to mere entertainment or ballroom exercise, our so-called “modern dance” is again a serious creative venture, and is generally regarded as a musical art. Some aestheticians, and even more significantly—some excellent dancers and choreographers, and a few musicians, maintain that exactly the same forms may be exhibited in tone as in bodily motion, so that the difference between music and dance is only a superficial one of appeal to hearing or to vision, as the case may be, like the difference between spoken and written language. The French music critic who calls himself Jean D’Udine says in his provocative little book, L’art et le geste: “All music is dance—all melody just a series of attitudes, poses.” Jacques-Dalcroze, who was a musician and not a dancer by training, regarded dance as a direct translation of music into bodily responses, so that any music could be “danced,” i.e., rendered precisely as a balletic pattern. Fokine undertakes to translate Beethoven’s symphonies into choreographic terms. And Sakharov writes in his Reflections on Music and the Dance: “I do not dance to music, I dance music.” The person who taught him to do this, he claims, was Isadora Duncan; she was the first serious artist who proposed to dance music itself, to interpret it, just as a virtuoso with his instrument interprets what the composer has written.
Isadora’s relation to music, however, is just what throws a serious doubt on the musical character of dance. An artist is usually incompetent judge of work in his entire realm, i.e., anywhere within the scope of the primary illusion of his art, even where that illusion appears in a special mode not his own. But dancers are not usually connoisseurs of music, and there are but few musicians who appreciate dancing at all. Isadora’s musical taste was simply mystifying. From the musician’s standpoint it was neither good nor bad, but unpredictable. She admired very good pieces and very bad ones; her favorite composers were Beethoven and Ethelbert Nevin. What she did with their works was always beautiful, but musical critics generally protested that she did not understand the music and flouted the composer’s intent.
The explanation is, I think, that her judgment was not musical, but balletic; and that very great and very poor music, alike, may have balletic value. Isadora’s feeling was so entirely for dance that she could find nothing else in music, and therefore believed that what she danced was the music itself, its very essence. This belief did not interfere with her art, but it did mislead and affront musical people, whose conceptions of Beethoven certainly were not reflected, let alone deepened, by her performance. Musicians generally resent the modern ballet just because they believe it to be a musical art, and then find that it adds nothing to music, but on the contrary distorts and abuses it.
The illusion created in dance—any kind of dance, from square dance or social dance to the Russian ballet—is neither that of music, i.e. virtual time, nor the virtual space of plastic art. Dance is a separate art, with its own primary illusion.
What, then, is dance? Those dancers who do not regard it as a representation of music generally define it as a spatial art, and conceive it either as a pattern of motions with moments of statuesque arrest, or else as a succession of poses, like tableaux vivants, connected by motions. This is the “classic” point of view, comparable to the conception of painting as arrangement of colors, and of music as the combination of consonant or dissonant tones. For in the dance, motion is actual, not illusory, and a pattern of motions taken simply as such is aesthetic rather than significant. There is another school, however, sometimes frowned upon as “impure” in its aim, that treats all balletic motion as pantomime, i.e., formalized imitation of acts. The histrionic content here is of course thematic, and if it monopolizes or even distracts the beholder’s interest it debases the dance. Imitation, however important to a particular piece, is never an essential factor in an art. Yet the dramatic theory has its virtues, for it presents balletic motion as gesture. This immediately sets dance apart from mobile sculpture, from the rhythmic movements of machines, the sinuous grace of a hunting cat, or the weaving of gnats in the air. Gesture is in some ways a broader term than motion, and in other ways narrower: broader, because a pose, a look, a moment of rigor may be a gesture without being a motion; narrower, because not all motions are gestures. Gesture is expressive behavior. In actual life it is often unconscious, symptomatic of emotions and impulses; an attitude of weariness, for instance, is a sustained unconscious gesture. But gesture may be deliberate, too, and practical (pointing, beckoning, warning, etc.), or even symbolic, supplementing language (as when one says: “A fish as big as that”). The deaf-mute alphabet is a completely discursive system of gesture; another, less articulate but more self-evident, is the sign language evolved by Indian and white scouts, in which the principle of symbolization is pantomime, stretched to great lengths of meta-phorical use.
Gesticulation, however, is not art; it is expression, subjective self-expression or objective logical expression as the case may be, but as long as it is essentially either emotive or practical it is not art. If gestures could convey nothing but literal ideas—“I throw a ball,” “the swan dies,” “this is the way we wash the clothes”—they would not lend themselves to artistic uses. But they are more than involuntary or semantic acts: they are forms of behavior. As forms they may be abstracted, and treated freely to create rhythms, indivisible lines of action, the appearance of challenge and response, the illusion of powers in conflict, in balance, or in union. And here we have the ruling principle—the primary illusion of balletic art: all dance creates a realm of virtual Power, an illusory field of forces involved only with each other, weaving a fabric of freely rhythmic, continuous and coherent gesture.
The forces presented in dance may be physical, psychical, mythic or magical, but they are always felt, not computed or inferred. They are not the actual forces that move the dancers, bodily energies limited by gravity and friction, but lures and excitements, prescribed paths, engulfing rhythms, personal wills—all orgiastic, mystical, or musical causes, virtual powers that evoke virtual activities. In watching a ballet one is not aware of people running around, but of the dance driving this way, drawn that way, gathering here, spreading there. In a pas-de-deux the two partners seem to magnetize each other. The relation between them is more than a spatial one; it is a relation of forces.
The most elementary means of abstracting motion from the work it actually performs is rhythm. This is a psychological factor, not an intrinsic property of mechanical motions, where there is uniformity, but no accent. We organize uniformities mentally into arsis and thesis, to and fro, tick and tock. Rhythmization transforms walking into marching, prancing into dancing; for it establishes a conceptual control over motion and gives it a clearly sensible form. As soon as we feel the rhythm of a march, it dominates our walking; we “fall into step.” Ballroom dancing is one of the simplest abstractions of motion from the purpose of locomotion, which becomes subordinate. Through rhythm, and the gestive form of the step, the partners are oriented toward each other, and this virtual relation links them even without any physical contact. Artistically such performance has very limited possibilities, yet it creates its own little realm of virtual power, and is genuine dance.
In higher phases of balletic art, real activities are often simulated, and enter into the pattern of gestures as pantomime, or dance-motifs. But in so doing they are always transmuted into mere appearances: in representing flight from a pursuer, the dancers do not actually run as they would at an alarm of fire, but retreat in a rippling toe-dance or even pirouetting, or withdraw with a mere leaning gesture—anything, in fact, except turning around and running. If the dance is successful, they seem to be driven by a menacing force and to be carried by emotion.
If we regard dance as the envisagement of a realm of Powers and the presentation of their interplay, we can readily understand why dance holds a supreme position in primitive culture, why it is universally linked with religion, and why it usually reaches its highest development before music is more than a rhythmic accompaniment to it, and before painting has risen above traditional designs on pottery and textiles or on the human body. Elaborate ritual dances are found where poetry does not yet seem to exist. The reason is that imaginary Powers—mana, taboo, magic, godhead and doom—are the realities of primitive life, but not the prosaic realities: they constitute a closed and sanctified realm, the spirit-world.1 The center of this world—the altar—is the natural focus of the dance, which symbolizes and celebrates such Powers. The altar is the virtual force that organizes the whole field, and around it or its equivalent—the idol, the priest, the totem—the dance develops. Pantomime usually supplies the motifs, as physical objects furnish motifs for painting and sculpture. The magic circle governed by the god is the ideal choric stage, and ritual a constant source of purely expressive actions, thematic elements that weave themselves naturally into dance.
The proposition that artistic symbols are non-discursive forms, presenting the morphology of sentience which discursive forms cannot express, meets its test case, of course, in the literary arts. Certainly literature is composed of discursive symbols; and just as certainly it contains more than a logically adequate statement of propositions. This is most evident in poetry. Many books have been written on the problem of poetic quality, and different thinkers have attributed it variously to word-music, to imagery, to suggested associations, and to value-judgments implied by the poet’s selection of things to dwell upon. Dream symbolism especially has been held responsible for poetic appeal.
Word-music is a factor in poetic composition, but it is not what makes poetry. The same is true of imagery, word-pathos, “criticism of life,” and dynamic” phantasy. Sound and sense, implication and suggestion, derivations and metaphorical meanings, grammar, accent, dialect, strong and weak word-forms—all are materials out of which the elements of poetry may be made. But those elements are as non-discursive as the painter’s perceptual objects, the musician’s sonorous moving forms, the dancer’s virtual forces. They are created, i.e., are illusions achieved by abstracting semblances from the actual world, and then composing these sheer appearances into new forms that mirror the logic of feeling.
The nature of literary creations is most readily illustrated in a simple experience with words that probably everyone has encountered: that a perfectly familiar fact seems perfectly terrible when stated a certain way. I do not mean in a certain tone of voice, but with a particular turn of phrase. Surely everybody has at some time been told: “It sounds so awful when you put it like that!” Or: “When you say it that way, it seems silly.” Or: “He made it sound simply wonderful.” One does not protest that the fact is so awful because of the presentation, but only that it seems, or “sounds,” that way. But one might say quite truly: “When you put it like that, it’s an awful thought!” The thought is awful, although the proposition remains just what it was. And here, I believe, is the principle of all literature, which is most evident in lyric poetry. Poetry asserts propositions only as thoughts. The same proposition may be thought in countless ways, and each way has its own emotional value. The proposition, which might be expressed in logical symbols, is related to the thought as a physical object is related to a visual form that portrays it. The thought is what the poet’s way of stating the proposition creates; the thought is a poetic element.
Our actual thoughts chase each other in haphazard fashion, so that their complete form rarely develops. We think and act without taking stock of the way events and phantasies, beliefs and proposals and expectations really present themselves; yet such experiences constitute our personal history. Like all actuality, that history is only half perceived, and half intellectually constructed. For practical purposes we do not need to remember an unbroken past, but only to reconstruct salient moments, that mark successive stations in the progression of events known as our “life.”
Literary art, by contrast, creates a completely “lived” piece of experience. The piece may be very small, like the brief thought that constitutes a lyric such as:
A slight disorder in the dress
Giveth to youth a wantonness--
But it is a thought really seen in its passage, followed through from its whimsical rise to the final pronouncement of taste that closes it. The idea is fully entertained, without being foiled by the incursion of other, perhaps more important thoughts; and it seems to be entertained actively, at the moment, though it was written more than 300 years ago. The reason is that it is the semblance of a thought; that is why we read it as something essentially timeless. The present tense, which is characteristic of lyric poetry, is really a “historical present,” for it makes no reference to the actual situation of the poet, but to an envisaged piece of life. In that context, events and acts seemingly take place as they do in actuality—but only seemingly; the experience of them is virtual, and the form of the illusory occurrences is as much simplified, organized, and composed as a picture. But such illusory events are not discursive propositions. The propositional material has been transformed into experiential elements in a created semblance of life.
This total semblance is, I think, what critics often refer to as the poet’s “vision.” I can find no other justification for that word. In the framework of the present theory, however, it is perfectly justified. A poem is essentially and entirely a creation; the words beget virtual elements, that exhibit forms of sensibility and emotion and thus carry a meaning beyond the discursive statements involved in their construction. But the meaning is not something to be read “between the lines”; it is in the lines, in every word and every punctuation mark as well as in the literal content of every sentence. The whole fabric is a work of art.
The first task that confronts an artist is always to establish the primary illusion, i.e., to close the total form and set it apart from actuality. That is the purpose of poetic structure—of meter, rhyme, divisions, repeated or imitated lines, and pure sound-effects like hey-nonny-no and daffy-down-dilly. How much of this artifice is needed depends on what other elements there are that will assure the “psychical distance” of the work. A heavy discursive content usually requires a strict poetic form, as for instance the sonnet; there is such a thing as a true sonnet idea, which calls for every device of fabrication, from word-music to interlacing rhymes, to keep the thought in the realm of imagination. If, on the other hand, great imagery and a certain unrealism of subject matter already perform this function, the poetic structure may be very free, as in the Psalms of David. In poetry as elsewhere, the means of creating virtual elements are various, and almost every one—sound allusion, imagery, archaism, dynamic sym-bolism, ambiguity, etc.—has its possible alternatives.
The most prevalent single device, probably the first to beget literature at all, is narrative. The image of experience is most readily obtained as we obtain it in actual life, namely as memory. Marcel Proust finds this to be, indeed, his only key to authentic composition, for memory leaves much out but intensifies what it retains, and usually completes its reconstructions of life by the principle of association rather than real causal connectedness. The process of intensification seems to him the essence of all poetic experience, and certainly there is much to be said for his analysis. Memory is formative, and produces perspectives of deeply felt events. In literature the unfolding of a story does the same thing. Even a simple narrative is such an organizing force that we usually speak of it as the “plot,” i.e., the ground plan, of the work in which it is utilized. Where the principle of narration enters into poetic structure all other devices have to adjust themselves: the choice of imagery is no longer free, as in the pure lyric, but is determined by the need of heightening some events and perhaps preparing others, and of slowing or hurrying the course of action. The descriptions of witch-fires and water snakes and “slimy things” in the Ancient Mariner make the story move with terrifying slowness while the ship is in doldrums. The same effect may ruin a work, where the story ought to move and is delayed by long descriptions introduced for their own sake, as in many romantic poems and novels. The verbal problem, on the other hand, becomes much simpler where narration holds the total structure together; the intensive poetic cadence that is the magic of the lyric is no longer needed, so a much simpler form, e.g., the colloquial language and regular meter of the ballad, may take its place. The prime virtue of story is that it constructs a much bigger span of experience than a presentation of entirely subjective events can effect. It creates in free and full scope the primary illusion of literature, which is a virtual Past.
As the lyric and the ode use the present tense to convey thoughts that are really timeless, so the ballad is normally in the past tense, because it achieves the illusion of history. The perfect tense is, in fact, characteristic of literature as a whole; the use of the present is a special device, for the semblance of experience made with words is always complete, like memory. But it is a powerful device, the historical present, and does not by any means always achieve “timelessness”; it may intensify a past event, as strong feeling intensifies memories to the point of making them almost eidetic, so people sometimes say: “It’s just as though it were now!”
The ballad is built on one straightforward story, and has therefore a fundamentally linear structure, reflected in its simple and fast-moving meter. There are broader planes that give one a sense of contemporaneousness of events, and consequently of history as a fabric rather than a sequence of actions. Such a design is the romance, which uses a new technique, namely a detailed account of how things are done instead of the mere statement of their occurrence. Here description serves for something more than to delight the imagination by dwelling on events; this being dwelled on gives the events new form—like the creation of visual forms suddenly in three dimensions instead of two. That, far more than the introduction of occasional contemporaneous happenings, gives the romance the appearance of a fabric instead of a thread of history. The descriptive principle, in fact, is so effectual that the persons in the story may be quite schematically rendered, human types rather than individuals, actors in a very colorful scene, like figures in a tapestry.
As the resources of narrative are developed, the office of pure diction, i.e., poetic statement, becomes less vital; the romance retains its literary virtue even in prose, as in the Spanish “novella.” Finally the full-fledged novel, the chief fictional work of our age, presents an entirely different appearance, for its most important creations are “characters,” individual human agents. These are so obviously its pivotal elements that popular judgment, and often even the professional critics, treat only the personalities in a novel as the author’s creations, and literary criticism is led into a new danger, namely that of regarding the novelist as essentially a psychologist, a reporter on typical human reactions. Any novel that presents a lifelike personality is likely to be hailed as great literature. The peripheral characters, the places, the impersonal events, all these are passed over. But in fact they are all cut out of the same cloth as the central personages. Not only the brothers Karamazov, but the dim figures of the Elder the lame little girl, the inn-keeper and the officers of the law are literary creations; if they are undeveloped it is not because Dostoevsky did not know their prototypes intimately enough to give them more articulate form, but because he because he really created, not copied, them—created their outlines as he needed them, without detail but with perfect truth. Furthermore, the inn, the garden, the days and nights are all creations—elements in a virtual Past which bears the stamp of vivid memory, yet is not anyone’s actual recollection.
The analysis of forms I have just presented leads from the simplest—the use of words to abstract the appearance and feeling of propositions as they figure in our thinking—to the very elaborate composition of virtual events filling a whole human consciousness, even an extended, imaginary “social consciousness.” Historically, however, the very complex was first; for all literary devices—rhythmic cadence, story, imagery, realism and supernaturalism and mythical symbolism, dramatic characters, lyric utterance, dialogue—all may be found in the epic, which is the cradle of literature.
All—yes; but not all at once. The epic is the matrix, for in its great structure there is a constant variety of forms due to the alternating use of techniques each of which produces its own perspective. The purer literary genders have been derived, I believe, by specialization, through the discovery that any principle may become central, and may, in fact, stand proxy for any other, given the circumstances. It is this possibility of alternating the techniques of creation that keeps the several forms (lyric, ballad, novel, biography, etc.) so closely related; but it also begets their multiplicity, which is presumably not exhausted yet.
Nothing has been said, so far, about that ancient and eminent art form, the drama; and in the compass of this essay little can be said, save that I believe the drama is not strictly literature at all. It has a different origin, and uses words only as utterances. It is a kindred art, for it produces the same primary illusion as literature, namely the semblance of experienced events, but in a different mode: instead of creating a virtual Past it creates a virtual Present. It is related to literature as sculpture and architecture are related to the graphic arts. But this categorical statement must remain an “aside”; our subject is already too great for the allotted pages.
In the scaffolding of this theory of art, which was derived by generalization from the more limited study of significant forms in music, the first result is a very radical setting apart of the major arts. Yet oddly enough, as soon as they are duly distinguished, their basic identity comes to light, because their respective principles, whereby each is an autonomous realm, are analogous, so their abstract formulations coincide, and make one set of propositions expressing the broad and universal principles of Art. But, to borrow Rudyard Kipling’s phrase, “That is another story.”
1 The dichotomy of primitive life into sacred and profane was noted and developed by Cassirer in Die Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, vol. 2. See also Language and Myth and An Essay on Man.
Why Langer Matters Today
Aesthetics
Langer remains one of the great modern philosophers of art, especially music, dance, and the performing arts. Her insights resonate deeply with contemporary explorations of the arts as relational, world-creating, and therapeutic.
Emotion & Embodiment
Her account of “forms of feeling” anticipates modern cognitive science on embodied meaning, affective neuroscience, gesture studies, and the pre-linguistic foundations of thought.
Philosophy of Mind
She challenged the assumption that consciousness is primarily linguistic, arguing that it arises from deeper temporal and emotional patterns of feeling—echoing process philosophy’s rejection of substance-based models of mind.
Interdisciplinary Bridge
Langer stands at a rare crossroads connecting philosophy, semiotics, art therapy, performance studies, anthropology, dance, musicology, and process theology. Her work provides a conceptual bridge between the arts, the sciences, and process-relational metaphysics.
Resonances with Whitehead’s Philosophy
- Feeling as Foundational
- Langer: Feeling is the basic structure of inner life.
- Whitehead: Feeling (prehension) is the most primitive mode of existence.
- Both reject the primacy of consciousness and ground experience in embodied, affective immediacy.
- Forms of Feeling = Subjective Forms & Emotional Potentials
- Langer’s “forms of feeling” parallel Whitehead’s “subjective forms”—the patterned ways occasions feel their world.
- Whitehead also speaks of “pure potentials of the subjective species,” eternal objects that function as emotional potentials.
- These potentials shape how an occasion could feel, just as Langer’s forms of feeling articulate the virtual structures that make emotions, rhythms, and experiential contours possible.
- Both see emotional patterning as real, structured, and rooted in a metaphysics of possibility.
- Art as Revelation of Pattern
- Whitehead: Every actuality aims at intensity and pattern.
- Langer: Art presents the virtual forms of vital experience.
- Art thus becomes a mode of disclosing the patterned nature of reality.
- Processive Conception of Mind
- Langer sees mind as an ongoing flow of symbolically mediated feeling.
- This aligns with the process view of psyche as a stream of concrescing occasions.
- Non-Reductionist Naturalism
- Both offer a middle path:
- not physicalism
- not supernaturalism
- but a naturalistic account of mind rooted in process, feeling, pattern, and symbolism.
- Both offer a middle path: