The Philosophy of Susanne Langer by Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin;

Author:Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Five notions of form: Tatarkiewicz

In his book A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics (1980), Polish philosopher of art Władysław Tatarkiewicz notes that there are at least five senses in which the word ‘form’ is being used: first, as ‘the arrangement of parts’; second, as ‘what is directly given to the senses’; third, as ‘the boundary or contour of an object’; fourth, as ‘the conceptual essence of an object’ (as in Aristotle’s notion of entelechy); and fifth, as ‘the contribution of the mind’ (as in Kant’s forms of perception).122 Tatarkiewicz points out that some of the confusion surrounding the term can be traced back to the single Latin translation of what were originally two words in Greek:

From the outset the Latin forma replaced two Greek words: morphe and eidos; the first applied primarily to visible forms, the second to conceptual forms. This double heritage contributed considerably to the diversity of meanings of ‘form’.123

Interestingly, referring to Cassirer’s notion of symbolic forms, he comments,

We recall the words of the contemporary philosopher Ernst Cassirer who wrote that to see the forms of things (rerum videre formas) is no less important a task for man than to know the causes of things (rerum cognoscere causas) (Essay on Man, 1944, chap. 9). Though beautiful, this formula is not quite precise because it is unclear which of the … concepts of form discussed above Cassirer intends.124

Tatarkiewicz’s observation may helps us to see how Langer’s two different notions of form – relational structure and overall shape – can be seen as an advance on Cassirer. While her notion of form as relational structure is chiefly conceptual and derived from symbolic logic, her notion of form as shape is predominantly perceptual and derived from Gestalt theory. What we will see is that both notions of form play a central role in her theory of music and art, although not always entirely clearly distinguished. The first, structure-based notion typically applies to the internal configuration of a symbolic form, the second, shape-based notion applies to the overall contours of its external appearance. This difference maps onto different kinds of artistic expressions. Music, for instance, can be seen as the logical expression of feeling in terms of its internal structural analogy with sentient life, visual art is often experienced as logical expression of feeling in terms of its overall spatial analogy with a perceived object.

Confronted with a flood of criticisms and misunderstandings of her notion of ‘the art symbol’ in Philosophy in a New Key and Feeling and Form, Langer continued to look for better terms to describe what she had in mind.125 In Problems of Art she rejects the then popular term ‘significant form’ as used by Clive Bell and other formalists for its connotation with signals and signification and writes, ‘I prefer Professor Melvin Rader’s phrase, which he proposed in a review of Feeling and Form: “expressive form”. … I have used it ever since.’126 Even so, Langer’s underlying conception remains the same: art and music are not models but images of feeling.

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