Ep. 292: Langer on Symbolic Music (Part One)

0:14 Mark: Our question for episode 292 is something like, what is artistic expression? And we read Susanne Langer's Philosophy in a new key from 1942, chapters 8 through 10. More information please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin, whose musical expressions can be classified with expressions like,

0:33 Seth: oh, this is Seth Paskin without natural models, but with support from Rhythm and Words in Austin, Texas.

0:40 Wes: This is Wes Alwan looking for the dynamic laws of life, power and rhythm in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:48 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey Breaking Vases in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:53 Wes: That's a good one.

0:54 Mark: We're finishing this off this book finally. I also had put forward. So she wrote basically a second volume of this that's much longer called Feeling and Form from 1953. I pulled out from some syllabus, another one about music. Chapter seven, the Image of Time. Kind of gives a little sense of where she went with this project. But, yeah, for something that's supposed to cover symbolism in general, we covered myth, now we're going to cover art in general. Well, music is the thing she's focusing on. She kind of left us at the end of myth with the Homeric epics and things like that.

There's something that was left as a concrete nailing down some of the myths and showing the creativity of humanity. And we don't really pick up with that. Chapter eight is on significance in music, you know, I guess as just the thing that is the furthest from actual speech and narrative in fiction. So she's telling a different story than she told in the other chapters. That was sort of the beefiest. And then the genesis of artistic import was chapter nine, which was more, again, sort of music mostly, but gets a little into the other arts. And then chapter 10, the fabric of Meaning is just about tying the whole book together.

It's not really about art in particular at all.

2:05 Wes: The focus on music, she's doing that for a reason. She's really giving an aesthetic theory here. And the way she phrases that, it's a little bit different than the way we've seen it in other texts, at least at first. Right. So she'll ask what distinguishes art from artifact? And if we say beauty, we beg the question. So this is a theory of the beautiful, in a way. But we don't hear a lot about the beautiful. What we hear about instead is this phrase significant form, that has to be the answer. And this is all in line with other aesthetic theories that we've seen about disinterest and all that stuff.

But the focus on music, it's a good way to get at this idea of significant form. Because music, as Mark alluded to, I think, is not unlike the other arts. It's not inherently representational. And so it's more formal and more pure. So the question of significance can be addressed in a clearer way. So it's not just that she's singling out music as her favorite thing. It's the particular kind of art form that it is and its formal aspect. And she thinks she can argue about the arts in general from the case of music. Just because it is, you know, pure in a way.

3:20 Dylan: There's a way in which there's more signal and less noise in the case of music. And in particular, it's not muddied by the fact that the other arts involve seeing things and involves spatial representations. And she. To the extent that you have things that you might say are representational in music, she does a pretty good job of basically saying, they said they're used in music. They're sound effects and they're not musical. Having birds tweeting or thunder crashing and stuff like that. She'll even say that that's not music, that that is sound and sounds are the components of music. She basically aligns music with being something of significant form that makes it artistic. So things that are musical is equal to something that is artistic sound.

4:11 Wes: If we're talking about the question of significance, we're tempted to significance in terms of representation or discursive reference propositions and sentences with truth values and all that good old analytic stuff. And she wants us to think about a different kind of significance. And so one of the things about the plastic arts or painting. There's a representational aspect there which can confuse the issue. We might think that significance is just about some aspect of representation. And then that's what it's going to turn out not to be.

4:43 Seth: In the process of exploring the notion of significant form, she's going to look at all the usual suspects. Artistic intention, you know, structure, et cetera, et cetera. But what she ultimately is going to come down to, or what she's driving towards. Is that significant form allows for the expression of artistic truth, which is a picture which cannot be represented discursively in language. So it's a form in a weird way, even though it's not representational, or at least not obviously representational. It does Allow for judgments of beauty based on artistic truth.

5:19 Dylan: I like your phrase that you just said, expressing things that are not linguistically expressive. And there's a linearity question there. I just wanted to point out that I think she would say exactly the same thing about the plastic arts. Especially when you think of something like abstract art maybe becomes more to the fore. But I think this only underlines why she chose music, is because it's so easy to get distracted in anything that's in painting or sculpture by whether or not it is representational, what is it representing or what is it showing as opposed to its significance. And I think she's right that it's just easier to articulate that with music.

6:02 Wes: Yeah. With a poem, for instance, you know, at one level it's stated as a proposition, right? It's stated as if our attention is supposed to be drawn to or some sort of representational property that it has. And as we know from all our aesthetics episodes, what we should really be drawn to is the form. And then the question is, what does that mean? And there are theories where you would say, well, to really understand the aesthetic value of the poem, I have to interpret it in terms of things that I can say, critical propositions that I can make about the poem.

And then the same thing with music. And that's something she is also going to deny. Just to reinforce Dylan's point, even if your medium is linguistic, even if your medium involves language and representation, that does not mean that the significance of artistic form is its representational aspect. Even in poetry, Right? What's significant in poetry is formal.

7:01 Mark: But she's not just a Kantian in saying, just look at the form, ignore the content. Because what makes the form significant is that it is a type of symbol.

7:13 Seth: Right?

7:13 Mark: That's the whole premise to this book, is that she is introducing that there are more types of symbols that modern man, modern humanity has been shrunk, has been alienated from ourselves because to little tiny people. Yes, because we think too literally, right? We think too literally and scientifically. And we need to understand that just like in these earlier chapters, the way that language developed was through metaphors, was through free play of language that gradually got sedimented onto things. And that language is an ever expanding thing.

These non linguistic forms of symbolization, what they're really symbolizing are emotions or the movement of human nature, or just things about human experience, patterns of energy. So tension and release, things like that which we all can understand, we've all had tension and release is a very, very basic experiential thing. But you can communicate that so much more clearly through music where it's sort of like you're demonstrating it. This makes people even think. She says people might even think the music sort of is emotion or the artist has to feel very strongly and then that will show out through the music.

But no, really, the music, or whatever the art form is, is quoting, is representing the artist, the performer, the composer doesn't have to actually be sad to represent sadness. And the power of them is that they are not completely fixed, is that music is a language. He considers all these different writers who have tried to say, oh, this minor key, that means sad. You know, the basic tones. And they'll do psychological tests. Kind of like what we were doing with Hutcheson of do we like triangles better or do we like hexagons better? These basic human reaction tests.

Well, let's play two notes in a row and they're ascending and like how do you feel about that ascending phrase? And she just thinks all that psychology is kind of bullshitty because a work of art is a coherent whole, right? There's no vocabulary of music. It's not like minor chord always means sad or something. It all depends on the context. And so you could have a single rhythm that in fact can communicate opposites, she says, right within it. Because it's this non verbal communication uses a different kind of language than verbal communication.

Once you put something verbally, then you could contradict it. Whereas this kind of thing, like you can still sort of judge it. Like how adequately is this capturing a human experience? But you know, human experiences can be ambivalent. They're much less cut and dry than a word standing for a specific assigned thing. So this is supposed to give us a window into again that pre linguistic larger sort of symbolism that we actually need as human beings as a prerequisite before we start sinking into the literal symbols that we need to get concrete things done around the house.

Say this is more about what we need to be human in the first place.

10:13 Wes: You know, Mark, just to point about the relationship to self expression. I mean, that's the natural place to go, right? For significance in art. She starts out by talking about psychoanalytic interpretations and the psychology of this. You can talk about what motivates creativity, you can look for unconscious motivations, but those things don't really give us a criterion of artistic excellence. You know, they just as much apply to bad art as to good art. If there's something symbolic about art, we should be able to talk about a logical form for that symbol and the way in which that form in a way corresponds to something.

Before she gets to that point, she will talk about another natural option for talking about artistic significance, which is just. And Scruton was onto this a little bit as well. This idea that it's self expressive, that we're cathartically getting our feelings out in art, or at least the composer is defining the moment of catharsis for the performer. You could think of this in lots of different ways. But as Langer points out, you don't really need artistic form for self expression, right? You can just curse or you can do whatever needs to be done cathartically.

There's no reason to have artistic form there. And so she'll say if music has any significance, it's not symptomatic. That's her word for this type of expressive cathartic idea. It's semantic. If we think it's semantic, then we have to say, well, in what sense is it formally significant? And Mark, you were talking about the ways in which it's not about the expression of a feeling that the artist was having at a particular time, or that the artist is trying to get the performer to express. But maybe it is something like a picture of a human subjectivity, or the way she'll put it is very abstract, but something like the essential characteristic of life, movement, vital forms, things like that.

But something to do with human emotion and something that we can't simply express in words that has to be done whether it's through music or some other art form is ineffable, can only be expressed in these presentational images.

12:18 Dylan: The reason that it can only be expressed that way, I think Mark was pointing out the possibility of containing contradiction. So this to me was one of the key parts to her claim was that there is truth value in an artistic significant form in music and art that is non propositional. And that's the mechanism by which you can have contradictions because they're not annihilating opposites. You're not being hypocritical in expressing those opposites together. At the same time, in fact, you are getting something more out of it, more truthful out of it by embodying that tension.

And I immediately got thinking about the Heraclitus that we've read, you know, and other philosophies that try to talk about motion and movement and flow and relation as being at the center of their ontology. And they seem to always involve a kind of leaning on sort of metaphorical language that's trying to do something like what she's saying that music does, for instance, on its own terms, which is express a tension. So you have the bow in Heraclitus, where he's trying to draw attention to the tension in the bow itself as being the relation that he's talking about.

And it's at least metaphorical in that it's not a proposition like a truth value proposition kind of thing that he's referring to.

13:47 Mark: Just a quote to support that on page 197. The bottom. The real power of music lies in the fact that can be true in quotes to the life of feeling in a way that language cannot for its significant forms have that ambivalence of content which words cannot have. This, I think, is what Hans Mersmann meant when he wrote the possibility of expressing opposites simultaneously gives the most intricate reaches of expressiveness to music as such. And carries it in this respect far beyond the limits of the other arts. Music is revealing where words are obscuring because it can have not only a content, but a transient play of contents.

It can articulate feelings without becoming wedded to them. The physical character of a tone, which may be described as sweet or rich or strident and so forth, may suggest a momentary interpretation by a physical response. I was finding it hard to see, like what is the ambivalence of about. Because there are things like you could write a love song that's sort of like, well, I love you, but I sort of don't like that I love. You know, you can express difficult feelings through that. But I don't normally think of that as something that is in straight instrumental music.

So I'm a little removed from this sort of analysis. Like a poem, you could express ambiguity well in.

15:00 Wes: But she talks at one point about the morphology of sadness possibly being the same as the morphology of joy. Even if they're opposites. So that you can give. A single musical phrase can mean a lot of different things. And in some case opposite things, things that are in tension. So I think what it reflects is in our emotional lives in the world, right? There are no contradictions. There's the law of non contradiction holds. But in our minds, especially emotionally, we can have the opposite feelings about things at the same time. And we can have conflicts. And I think the ideas of the arts, including music, can express those conflicts. Because the symbols aren't so fixed, they're polyvalent and open to the moment to moment shifting of emotional life.

15:48 Seth: Two things that kind of came to my mind during this conversation, but also when I was reading the book. So just to make it clear to talk about how music can represent something that you can't do linguistically, because she talks about. If you summarize and reword a poem, it no longer is what it was. Right. If you just say Ode on a Grecian Urn or whatever, it's about a vase, a broken vase that doesn't tell the story. But a good example to me is the flight of the Bumblebees.

16:18 Wes: She's not going to like this one.

16:20 Seth: No, she's not going to like it. But let me explain why I like it.

16:22 Wes: Rimsky-Korsakov. Right.

16:24 Seth: I'm not sure who wrote. But I was thinking, Mark and Dylan, that you guys should have brought instruments to this episode so you could illustrate the examples with music. But if you know the flight of the bumblebee, you realize that when you hear it, you go, oh, yeah. And you can immediately make that connection to the flight of the bumblebee. But that's not something that you could put into language in a way that would be adequate to what the music does. What the music does when you hear it. And words that you would try to put alongside, to translate.

Now it goes up, now it goes down. Now it's going over here, now it's going over there. You can't convey in language what is being presented to you. So to speak through the music. And that's, I think, a good example of that separation. But what you were talking about, Mark, the ambivalence and the contradiction. We have words to describe our feelings. Like when we say it's bittersweet, or how you can grieve and be happy in your grieving with others who are grieving. Right. There are complicated, contradictory emotions that you can feel simultaneously.

And words are not capable of representing that state. You can name it, I guess, to some extent, like with a word like bittersweet. But you can't paint a picture of it with words the way that she's saying you can do with music.

17:47 Dylan: I think she would disagree with you in the case of poetry. I think that she would say that poetry can do that, but it's doing it by the artistic utilization of verbal form.

17:59 Seth: Apologies. I should have been more strict. When I say words, I meant discursive. Discursive propositional statements.

18:05 Dylan: Yes. Yeah, yeah.

18:06 Mark: For the one thing, a poem is a piece of music, basically, right? The sounds of the words, the phonemes themselves. But then it's also creating artistic forms like a piece of literature. Like the way that Aristotle describes tragedy in terms of the plot being important, that the arc of A plot, that word arc. We can think about ideas or happenings in time being arranged in an artistically satisfying way so that you could have. The movie comes to a climax and it has the denouement in the same way that a symphony can. You're using words, but you're using them in large chunks to paint these bigger pictures.

18:45 Wes: The plot in a poem can be very abstract, right? So in a sonnet, there's a turn at a certain point. So one idea is being expressed, and then there's a sort of a contradictory thought. And then things head towards a resolution. But there's also a lot to be said about the figurative elements in poems, right? Metaphor, that's one of the forms of symbolism that Langer is highly interested in. So metaphor does a lot. And even, you know, it gets even more complicated than that because poems often do have arguments. They do have ideas. They have theses, you know.

Right. Milton's Paradise Lost tells you the argument of each section. The argument begins, and they'll summarize it. This is what I'm arguing. So you can even use rational argument. You could even use discursive argument. Can become the matter, can become the clay out of which you make a artistically significant form. Anything can be treated as the matter.

19:42 Dylan: Shortly after what Mark was reading earlier on page 198. Because no assignment of meaning is conventional. None is permanent beyond the sound that passes. Yet the brief association was a flash of understanding. The lasting effect is like the first effect of speech on the development of the mind. To make things conceivable rather than to store up propositions. Not communication. But insight is the gift of music. She has a couple other places where she says things like this regarding the case of music. And I think she's clearly applying it to art in general.

That you're trading in conceptual and conceivable ideas and relations without storing up propositions. I confess that I find it a little bit hard to compare. Completely get my head around that transition between having something being conceivable or even having a semantic. Because she argues strongly against the idea that basically that there's no truth value in art. She thinks that there is actually tremendous truth value in it, but where the boundary between conceivable and what gets added or subtracted, such as that you end up with propositions.

Because in this way she would put language, especially linear language and propositional language, sort of partway between, maybe halfway between artistic expression and mathematics. So mathematics is sort of at the far end where it doesn't have any of the Tension that is present in music. Any of the lack of propositional expression. Sort of pure proposition. And I guess I find myself wondering what gets added or subtracted. From this experience of the making of things conceivable. That happens in the development of the mind. And she has all the stuff we read earlier about.

She's tying this symbolism, the symbolification and our processing of them. From our very earliest experiences as children. But also the very earliest evolution of human mind and human culture. That this presence of symbolism happens before you have propositions, before you have this is your primary experience with the world. And, in fact, it's a precondition for the existence of language. So then that way, art is somehow primal in a way. And it contains the very features of language that we lay onto. In that they have truth value. They reveal concepts you can exchange and learn.

And she says, not communication, but insight. I'm not sure why communication is excluded. In the quote that I read. What we add or what we subtract from that primordial formation. Of the preconditions for language to get. End up with discursive language. And then end up with mathematics.

22:35 Wes: Well, one element which I think we should emphasize. Which I think is what you started with. Is just the conventional aspect. Which is that this form of artistic symbolism. Or more primal symbolism. Is not conventional. So in conventional assignments, in everyday language. That means that if I use the word dog. It can connote the concept dog. Or refer to a particular dog. But I could be using a French word or any other sort of word that's conventionally assigned to that. But the symbolism in music and other arts is not actually conventional. Which means it's not fixed exactly.

Right. It can mean different things. To be different people at different times. Although for psychological or cultural other reasons. We expect some sort of shared meanings. Right. In the same way that a culture can share its mythical meanings. But that's not simply because we said, hey, I'm assigning this meaning to this particular symbol. And that's what it's going to mean. It's something deeper than that which Dylan, as you pointed out, language is actually built on top of. To take an example of that. She gets into the symbol of the cross. So it can have significance that's built on historical events like Christ.

But it can also just look like things. Right. It can be symbolic just by virtue of looking like a human being. A cross could take on a certain symbolic resonance. There are lots of ways in which things can become symbolic. That don't involve conventional assignment of meanings. You know, you Were asking a big question, Dylan. That's only a tiny part of it.

24:09 Mark: It's funny how she's. As chapter 10 reveals, she's very much a pragmatist about facts. And we can talk in more detail about what her account of a fact is, but it's sort of like she defines it behavioralistically, like.

24:20 Wes: Right.

24:20 Mark: It's not just sort of like Wittgenstein. This is the basic unit of metaphysics or something.

24:27 Wes: See, I took her to be describing someone else's point of view there, Right. So I'm not sure that that's her view, but the reason I bring it

24:33 Mark: up is because I feel like it's all about how it is used. And insofar as you want to actually communicate, then it has to have a conventional meaning. Even if you say that the convention has roots in nature, it's not purely arbitrary. Right. Most conventions, this word, naming that thing, are just arbitrary. But she, you know, had considered onomatopoeia and, you know, these other kinds of early ways that you might use words to attach to a particular thing. And so even just to say, like, I'm capturing the motion of my psyche or something. So I like the flight of the bumblebee example. The thing that's wrong with it is that we call it a bumblebee, Right. The fact that it's trying to be on a.

25:17 Wes: Well, it's onomatopoetic, as she puts it. And that's precisely the kind of significance she's rejecting.

25:23 Mark: But if it wasn't presented to you as the flight of the bumblebee, if it was just like, here's a very fast piece, twitters this way and that, then everybody could sort of relate to that. You could come up with your own analogy. In fact, I think it's not so much the bumblebee, it's somebody trying to keep track of the bumblebee. So it's about our eyes, it's about our focus. So there's a common pattern of human activity, speed and motion, that is being captured there. And so that is conventional insofar as other people are going to understand that it has something to do with speed and motion.

You know, it's not conventional in the sense of completely nailed down. Like, this is what it means that there's a lexicon of music and you could come up with maybe varied interpretations of what this. If you had to put it in words or draw a picture, what does this song make you think of? Try to draw a picture of it. You know, everybody's going to probably come up with a different picture, although something in common with it. So it's not that it's completely unconventional, it's less conventional, but certainly for us to understand, right? She sees tonal music, you know, the fact that we all recognize major chords and things now like that is an achievement.

And it is something that, you know, if you bring somebody from a culture that doesn't use that, they're not going to really get that right away. They're going to need to be more immersed in it. So we have all these idioms, right? The blues and whatever. And even though they might be ambiguous, right? The blues is not actually always sad, right? Blues music, there's plenty of jolly blues bands that you go and see at a bar. And they're just having a rip roaring time playing the blues. There's a range of expressions that that idiom is known to have such that you'd really have to be a.

I don't know, they're probably still room for cutting edge blues artists that would actually surprise you. Like you found something new in the blues. But I feel like that is an idiom that its various facets have been explored pretty thoroughly. And so again, it's not a single meaning. It's not like this is what the blues or, you know, this particular often used guitar lick in the blues. It's not that it has a particular single meaning, but it has a range of things that we as blues listeners will be familiar with. I don't know if that completely addresses Dylan's question, but it seems like, you know, just part of that.

How much do words get narrowed down. That even in early linguistic structures, as she's described it, stemming from ritual and things, you've got a certain vagueness that's built in that she thinks is actually good. And so it's just. That's the spectrum I'm seeing this on.

27:54 Wes: I think this gets confusing because she'll say, right on page 188. Music has no literal meaning, right? This is in the context of onomatopoeia. Apart from a few onomatopoetic themes that have become conventional. The cuckoo, the bugle calls, and possibly the church bell. Music has no literal meaning. And yet it may be a presentational symbol and present emotive experience through global forms that are indivisible. So we can use language to talk about our emotions, to talk about emotive experience. We can use language to express our emotions. And she's saying that music is not simply a way of doing either of those things.

Language is perfectly good at Doing either of those things, expressing emotions, talking, referring to emotions. Rather, it can replicate the logical structure, in a way, of our inner life and our emotional life included. Still, maybe this is part of what Dylan's puzzlement is, too. I find it kind of a puzzling, difficult idea. You know, what's the difference between referring to or talking about. Or giving linguistic descriptions of our emotional life. And then doing it through these artistic, presentational forms?

29:03 Seth: One way you might get at it is thinking of qualia. If we go back, what is it like to be a bat? We can use perfectly adequate words to describe all the various ways in which an experience might be had or held by an entity, by a thing. But that isn't the actual experience itself. And what she's saying is music somehow has a morphology that allows it to express something about that experience that's true in the same way that something is descriptively true, but that could not be described. And it's not simply that it engenders a feeling in you. It's not simply that you're having an aesthetic experience.

That's not it. Instead, it formalizes the individual experience. One of the things that she talks about with language is. And maybe I might be getting confused, it might be Cassirer who pointed this out, but what we call universalization is really abstraction. The process of getting to the point where the term dog represents all these things is a process of. You're not reifying some kind of universal, but you're just more abstracting from the particular. And I think she wants to say that what art does is. It also universalizes in a certain way.

That's why it's not about your individual subjective experience, but instead it's about how the work of art is able to express this thing which you recognize and can appreciate. And you can conceive of it. Maybe you can't conceive of it in words, but you can at least conceive of it in the same way that you conceive of any of your emotional states. But that doesn't mean that you're feeling it right. It doesn't mean that you're actually going through it. And so, insofar as a work of art does that successfully, it's adequate or inadequate, there's adequation.

So a good work of art will be a universal, but it will be a universal in some respect, of some aspect of human experience that you can recognize in it.

31:11 Mark: Well, she gets specific in this Image of Time chapter from Feeling and Form, that it's not just any aspect of human Experience. It's our experience of time. And that is what music is about. I found this too reductionist myself. I'm not sure that I really buy it, but it was at least something I could easily understand that. We've gotten this from Bergson. She refers to the idea we had something similar in Heidegger, right? That there's a difference between the time that as science measures it, it is divided into seconds and minutes. You know, moment to moment, it goes one direction.

Each of the moments is identical to each other moment. You can measure it. But that is an abstraction that civilization has created for practical uses out of our experience. Time in which some things seem like they take a long time. And so, you know, it just depends how interesting the things that are going on are. And so she says specifically that is what music is capturing. It is a way we all have the same experience of subjective time, just like we all maybe have. I don't know if we all have the same qualia of seeing the red or whatever. Maybe depending on how your eyes are set up, you might have a different.

So maybe different people might have slightly different takes on time, but we all have basically something it's like to be a creature who experiences time like a human being. And that is a thing that music can capture. At least I want to say that is one of the aspects of. That it can capture. Rather than like she's really captured the essential thing about it. I don't. I don't know that I buy that here.

32:43 Wes: I'd be interested in knowing how this time is related to this idea that music has something to do with the emotions. So what I'm thinking of again, just getting back to our puzzle about what it would mean for music to represent or symbolize our emotional life in some form or another. I think, as Seth pointed out, in rejecting these expressive ideas about music, there's a rejection of the idea that we are simply so. For instance, if the music is about something terrifying, that doesn't mean that its function is to induce terror in the audience.

Nor is it even to induce sympathetic empathy for, you know, whatever terrified imaginative figure that we might conjure up. Or it might be there in an opera, for instance. Rather, this is the way she puts it on page 180. And I think this is very useful. Despite the romantic phraseology, this passage states quite clearly she's just been talking about another philosopher, but that music is not self expression, but formulation and representation of emotions, moods, mental tensions and resolutions. A logical picture of sentient, responsive life, a source of insight not A plea for sympathy.

Feelings revealed in music are essentially not the passion, love or longing of such and such an individual inviting us to put ourselves in the individual's place, but are presented directly to our understanding that we may grasp, realize, comprehend these feelings without pretending to have them or imputing them to anyone else. Just as words can describe events we have not witnessed, places and things we have not seen, so music can present emotions and moods we have not felt, passions we did not know before. Its subject matter is the same as that of self expression, and its symbols may even be borrowed upon occasion from the realm of expressive symptoms.

Yet the borrowed suggestive elements are formalized and the subject matter distanced in an artistic perspective.

34:38 Mark: Yeah, so this is getting at her version, you know, twice removed from Kant, of what the distance thing is. So I did read Cassirer, in the book that we were reading alongside this, his chapter nine is Art, and it's quite long. And I did read that in advance of this. And there's a quote in here that. I'm not sure if this is a paraphrase, but I thought actually really communicated that Kantian point in a way that I didn't really understand as well in Kant. This is on 190 in the Cassirer book. Aesthetic freedom is not the absence of passions, not Stoic apathy, but just the contrary. It means that our emotional life acquires its greatest strength and that in this very strength that changes its form. The passions themselves are relieved of their material burden. We feel the dynamic process of life itself. We transform our passions into a free and active state.

35:30 Wes: Yeah, that sounds very much like the Nietzsche position. Right. Nietzsche kind of turns the Schopenhauer in. So Schopenhauer, right. It's a continuation of Kant in a way, because it's. The aesthetic allows us to step back from our will, not feel desire, not be engaged with our will. Except in the case of music, where we get this paradoxical re. Engagement with the will. But for Nietzsche, right, It all turns out to be goodwill towards appearance. So we can turn all of this distancing and disinterest into a form of willing, you know, which is what it sounds like Cassirer is talking about there. And towards this kind of second level passion, towards the formal, towards the aesthetic.

36:09 Mark: Yeah, So I think we can read that into the Langer as well. Right. After that, Cassirer just emphasized that like speech, art is dialogical and dialectical. Spectators repeat and reconstruct the creative process. In order to understand art, the passions are turned into actions, a means of self liberation. I Was not sure, since Langer is more focused on the creative act itself, how we are putting art together, and less on the reception of it like that. The reception is that we are being artists vicariously. We're sort of repeating it. But this would maybe clarify more for us if Langer was more clear about the reception of artistic symbols.

36:51 Wes: Right.

36:51 Mark: She says that an artist will put something together based on an idea, and an idea not just hashed out of their brain, but something that they observe in the world. Something about their own reaction, something about their own behavior, something they're some idea. And then they create this thing, a musical piece or whatever that organically grows out of this idea. And it has internal. This reminded me of the Hutcheson, the idea of there has to be an internal coherence to a work that. You know, I think one of the definitions of beauty is that with which, if you took something away, it would be worse. If you added something, it would be worse.

37:28 Wes: Like there has to be real, organic unity among variety.

37:32 Mark: Exactly. So you get a lot of repetition. She says, even if you're introducing new musical themes, maybe it's a musical theme that you thought of two years ago and you say, oh, I could insert this. But through the context, it becomes this organic whole. So you're creating this thing, but then what exactly is the listener doing to that? Is it just that they're sort of moving sympathetically to it? Are they recreating? They're somehow getting a hold of that idea that the artist is trying to communicate?

37:59 Dylan: I think you're hitting on this kind of tension, at least for me, in it. There's gotta be communication going on there. Right. You know, in order for the recipient of the art to understand it as a whole, they have to be able to perceive it that way. I mean, I guess in some cases there's going to be context that they have to gather. Maybe her story would be something like there's this primordial aspect of symbol making and distinctions of this from that. That happens even in our experience with the physical world, that happens in our emotional world.

And then you don't get communication until you get convention. I guess Wes was bringing this up, too, and that before that, it's highly individualized what that is. And you have to develop convention or have repetition in it in order for people to get it. For it to be a successful communication as an artistic enterprise, to have there be concepts. Right. I mean, I guess you could have individual concepts that were only those of the individual. But for it to be successful art, it seems to me, you've got to have it be. How can it be artistic if it's not somehow communicating something?

39:14 Seth: Let's not lose sight of what we talked about a couple episodes back on the same topic, which was when we were talking about the social aspect of language. Remember the wild children, the feral children? The feral children and all that. The whole concept of the development of language was that it was a free play of vocalizations and conceptualizations in any group of children. But they require some kind of a mirror or sounding board. If this is functioning in a similar way symbolically, you must have the same dynamic in place. And she doesn't talk about the reception, but when we talk about conveying something or recognition, or if you're talking about truth, we have to have some fidelity to that. And say, you know, an artist who produces a work of art that is essentially unexperienceable or unreadable, that really wouldn't be art. I mean, it requires an audience of some sort.

40:10 Dylan: Yeah, I think you just articulated why abstract art or Pollock or somebody like that can be very challenging, is the people who are receiving it don't have the artistic vocabulary to experience it.

40:25 Seth: Yeah. And she talks about that at some point in talking about cultivating and being, I guess you'd call it artistic sensibility in some sense. That's what it's commonly referred to. But I'm just saying, Mark, I don't think that's a gap here that she failed to address or isn't acknowledging that ultimately, if there is a concept of artistic truth, and if a work of art is articulating a truth, it has to in some way be recognizable as such, which means it has to have an audience.

40:54 Mark: One more thing before we wrap up part one, I want to get out here. She refers to, right at the end, our knowledge of art as knowledge by acquaintance. So she's using this distinction that Russell had come up with of there's propositional knowledge and there's knowledge by acquaintance. And those are just fundamentally different kinds of things. And we've talked about it in Qualia. So you could know all the things about red that are in books. You could know all the propositions, but unless you've actually seen red yourself, then you're not acquainted with it.

And so she's saying, when you encounter an artwork, you are learning something. Actually, she still puts this in terms of the discovery. Right. The aesthetic feeling is the discovery that someone who is an artist. And so I guess the spectator is going to have to do something likewise to make this discovery. That it's not unlike discovering something in science or discovering a great proof in math or anything. It's an aha moment where by articulating this, it's not just like I'm experiencing sadness. Let me try to copy that into my poem. By articulating it, you are sketching something out that was not even visible.

41:59 Wes: Right.

41:59 Mark: Maybe it went by too quickly so you couldn't observe it in yourself or in others. But you're laying it out so that then when other people see it, they'll say, oh, that's so true. They will also see that reflected in them. It's funny, though, to say it's knowledge by acquaintance and then to also say that it's a symbol because it's not being acquainted with the symbol. It's like the symbol is such an elaborate model of something that you are, in effect, becoming acquainted with an articulation of something in the real world, in emotional life, or our sense of time, or whatever it is through this artistic thing. So yes, she does want to separate the symbol from what it is symbolizing. But after a certain point, she does allow herself to say, by seeing the symbol, this artwork, you are being acquainted with the thing.

42:47 Dylan: I think that's a great observation and a great way to put it, Mark, because I think that's exactly what she's doing. You have to explain experience the music or experience the art in order to have it be communicated to you. So, you know, by acquaintance with it. Even if that music, that art, has been manipulated and it is an artifact that someone else created.

43:09 Seth: Yeah.

43:10 Wes: I think the acquaintance has something to do with the non conventionality of the symbol. Right?

43:15 Dylan: Sure.

43:16 Wes: Because if it's just it's words that are conventionally related to something else, then there's nothing in the language that acquaints you with what it's referring to. But the symbol contains what it speaks to.

43:28 Dylan: In a sense, it's a little bit like the experience of looking out to a landscape that you've never seen before. And then starting to pick out the things that are there. And you have to become acquainted with it. You know, any kind of. I'll call it new experience. You have to break it down into your own pieces. You break it down according to your acquaintance with it. And it's going to have to do with how that experience resonates with your own internal context. As well as how it sort of develops over time. And so you see how it relates to itself in that way.

I think of a lot of great music is you have an IDIOM that is presented along the way. That gets developed and you return to over and over again. So there's a kind of self expression that comes out of it. And I don't mean by like the self expression of the composer, but the music itself. You come to know what it's saying over the time and expression of the music. Because you have a repetition of themes and forms that happen throughout it. So that you understand it after the whole thing is over, you've experienced it. You understand things that happened at the beginning in a way that you.

By the time you get to the end. Because you have the other things that happen, other musical events that render that beginning articulate in a way that it wasn't when you first heard it.

44:55 Wes: I think before we wrap up, just to remind ourselves of what is being symbolized. When she talks about in this chapter, truth value. It's not really about truth value exactly. It's about adequacy or inadequacy to the ideas that forms are meant to embody. She has a really good way of describing it. Just a little bit farther back in the chapter, she'll say the emotive content of the work is apt to be something much deeper than any intellectual experience. More essential, pre rational and vital. Something of the life rhythms that we share with all growing, hungering, moving and fearing creatures.

The ultimate realities themselves. The central facts of our brief, sentient existence. So whether it's by looking at a statue or reading a poem or listening to music. I think is supposed to be applicable across all of those artistic endeavors. There's something that's communicated that's not simply about inducing a feeling exactly. But it's still an emotive theory. She'll say this is an emotive. You know, there's something here about emotions. But it's not referring to emotions in the same way as language. But I find it very complicated. But I think it's a really interesting supplementation of the sort of aesthetics of disinterest that she's pivoting off of.

46:11 Mark: Yeah. So a lot more ways we can go in trying to make this concrete as far as music goes and applying it to other art forms. Then the anthropological stuff on the genesis of artistic import we didn't really get into from Chapter nine. And there's a lot more we can say about chapter 10, the fabric of Meaning. If you want to hear that, you can come back for part two. If you are already a PEL supporter in some way, it'll be the next

46:35 Seth: thing in your feed.

46:36 Mark: Or if you Support us through Apple. You'll see it there next week in your feed. Thanks.