Review of Problems of Art, by Susanne K. Langer (1957)

Abstract

This short review is included because it expresses why Susanne Langer (1895–1985), such a seminal figure in Anglo-American aesthetics, was largely discounted by Wollheim in subsequent writings. As in her Philosophy in a New Key (1941) and Feeling and Form (1953), works of art are presentational symbols of ‘non-discursive’ communication that are not apprehended as the sums of individual, largely conventional elements, as in the grammatical and logical functions of language. Non-discursive symbolic artefacts have natural, non-conventional meanings, ones that manifest the ‘life of feelings’. The big problem is that to consider artworks as symbols consigns their makers to the role of mere discoverers of symbols, as if they had their meaning independent of the activity; whereas artworks are things newly composed, their meanings made. The lesser problem highlights Langer’s eagerness to accommodate criticism of her theory by verbal reformulation, which is a sign, as Wollheim sees it, of the blithe attitude that ‘deep down inside [she] possesses the truth, if only [she] could bring it to the surface’.