An Analytical Study Of Susanne K. Langer's Music Aesthetics Thought

Susanne K. Langer was a famous female philosopher of weatern aesthetic history. She was the pool person of symbolic aesthetics, and had the characteristics of wisdom of artist, intelligence of philosophy and rigor of logician. Langer's aesthetic thought was very rich, her viewpoints were distinct and original, and she observed and thought about artistic problem with female unique acute senses and comprehensive power. So her aesthetic thought had an important position in the western aesthetic history. She studied artistic problem from the unique symbolic perceptive, and raised a distinct artistic conception—"art was the creation of human emotional symbol", then focused on this composition she constructed the theory on artistic symbolic aesthetic.Langer's artistic symbolic aesthetic thought had two main theoretical resources, the first one was Whitehead's logical semiotics, and the second one was Cassirer's human cultural semiotics. The influence of Whitehead mainly was thinking pattern. The influence of Cassirer was mainly content, whose symbolic idea influenced Langer's symbolic aesthetic thought directly and deeply, and we can say that it decided the construction of Langer's aesthetics. Langer's artistic symbolic aesthetics were composed of artistic semiotics, artistic mirage theory, life form theory and aesthetic intuition theory. And these four parts displayed artistic essence, artistic creation, artistic characteristics and artistic appreciation respectively, and they were roundabout and increased step by step, and built a rigorous aesthetic theory. Furthermore this aesthetic theory based on new-semiotics and adopted many virtues of representationalism, formalism and intuitionism and merged the theoretical background of psychology,physiology and logic,it became the representative of 20 century aesthetic schools finally.Musical aesthetics was the starting point of Langer's research about art. Langer's musical aesthetics was an important part of her artistic symbolical aesthetics which would be not integral without musical aesthetics;at the same time Langer's artistic symbolic aesthetics was the theoretical premise of her musical aesthetics which developed and deepened under the basis of artistic symbolic aesthetics. This essay inducts and displays her musical aesthetics from four aspects of flavor feeling symbol, audible illusive time, living arts and the assimilated principle of music, then recovers that as a symbolic aesthete Langer had her own characteristics in the process displaying musical aesthetics. Thus Langer's musical aesthetics had the great inspiration and meaning to musical art.Langer's viewpoints of musical aesthetics inherited Eduard Hanslick's, but they were different about musical intent and form and musical feeling problem. Langer proposed that music was to represent human feeling and stood for the dialectical relationship between musical intent and form which were supplement and complement each other; but Hanslick proposed that music couldn't represent feeling and intent was form, form was intent, then belonged to one. Contrary to them we can see that Langer's viewpoints were more scientific.