Susanne.K.Langer's Artistic Ontology

Susanne.K.Langer was a famous aesthetician with illustrious reputation in western philosophy history. By the theory of artistic philosophy, she established the ontology position of art. She paid close attention to the human activity in art, studying how the human establish himself and surmount himself through the art activity.This article includes four chapters:Chapter one mainly discusses the basic ideological line of Artistic ontology. Susanne.K.Langer inherited E.Cassirer's Symbol philosophy. E.Cassirer defined the art as the symbol which was the starting point of artistic philosophy. From this point, Susanne.K.Langer divided all symbol forms into discursive symbol and presentational symbol. Art was typical of presentational symbol. It corresponded to mankind's inherent subjective world and turned human subjective experience into an external form that can be perceived.Susanne.K.Langer made two steps to establish the ontology of art. First of all, through investigating human symbol development and primitive function of symbol activity, Susanne.K.Langer proved that presentational symbol and discursive symbol had equally important status. Secondly, Susanne.K.Langer looked the art as the reflection of the human inherent life, and probed into the secret in human inherent life. As for her, the art activity is not the special way of the human to hold the world, but the creation way of people's life and the human's specific life style. In this way, the artistic philosophy was no longer epistemology yet, but a question of ontology.Chapter two, three and four mainly summarized the artistic ontology from these three respects: the essence of art, the function of the artistic symbol, art activity. First of all, art represented human's emotion in the form of symbol. Secondly, as regards function of the artistic symbol, artistic symbol depended on human intuition thinking ability, which was even more original than ration. Moreover, art was the embodiment of human's creative life activity. Human's life activity was thrown outside in the art form. And a great deal of essential features of human's life activity had also appeared in the art activity.