On Symbol Of The Artistic Philosophy Of Thought

Susanne k. Langer is one of the most outstanding American female theorists in the history of Aesthetics up to now. 'A decade after the War, there is not some theory of artistic philosophy compared to Susanne Langer to occupy a bigger superiority nearly in USA.' said an American critic. As a philosopher familiar with art, Langer examined every realms of art and applied her personal symbolic to the research of basic artistic problems. Her artistic philosophy of symbolism was considered as the third milestone in the history of western Aesthetics. In her life, Susanne published a lot of porcelain works, such as The Practice of Philosophy, Philosophy in a New Key, An Introduction to Symbolic Logic, Feeling and Form, Problems of Art, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, and so on. Especially in Feeling and Form, Langer surveyed different fields of art, and explained her theory that art was the creation of human feeling symbols.1 give a narration and comment on Susanne's artistic philosophy of symbolism in this thesis. There are five parts in all. The main content of each chapter is as follow. In the preface, I review Langer's biography, the work situation and the development of her academic thought in her life. Then, chapter one focuses its approach to Langer's new symbolism, which contains three parts, respectively elaborates the generation and evolution of symbolic, two theoretical resources of Langer's symbolic (Whitehead & Cassirer) and her new symbolic. Underneath the theoretical background of the symbolic, I focus on the one of the cores in Langer's artistic philosophy of symbolism-definition of art. At first, it circles and discusses Langer's conception that 'Art is the creation of the symbol form of humanity emotion'. It expounds Langer's definition of artistic essence from the following aspects: the special symbolical nature of art, emotion expressed by artistic symbol and creativity of the action of artistic symbol. Secondly, it discusses the intention and main characters of 'living form', which is the central conception in Langer's theory of artistic essence. The characters contain the organic unity, moving nature, nature of rhythm and growth. There is another important conception in relation to Langer's definition of art- artistic illusion.Nextly, Part one explains the intention of artistic illusion and the basic illusion; part two introduces division of artistic form according to the basic illusion and characters of every basic illusion of artistic form; part three illustrates the conceptual intension and characters of secondary illusion briefly. Chapter four introduces Langer's artistic intuition, commenting her theoretical intension and innovation mainly. In the concluding remarks, I appreciate dialectically the value, influence and limitations of Langer's artistic philosophy of symbolism.