Emotion And Art

Susanne.K.Langer was a universally recognized artisticsemiotic aesthetician of the20thcentury, also, was a rare femalephilosopher who made lots of achievements in the history ofphilosophy. She thinks that art is the creation of human emotionalsemiotic form and emotion is the concentrated reflection of thehuman inner life. Art is produced in the necessary of emotion, whichis the logic form of emotion. Howeer, emotion makes the art havethe meaning of life when it is projected onto the art form. Finally,Langer opende the beginning of the human mind philosophy fromart.This paper is a research on the emotional ontology of Susanne.K. Langer’s artistic philosophy. It means that from the perspectiveof ontology, the place and significance of emotion in the art isinvestigated. Also, the problem of the expression of the human innerlife which is brought by the artistic symbol as the logic form ofhuman emotion is inspected. This paper takes emotion as the clue,and has six parts.In the introduction, the meaning of the emotional ontology andthe scholars’ literature view on Langer’s artistic philosophy theory is elaborated so as to explain the research aims and significancesof this paper. In the second part, the development process of theemotional expression theory in the art history is elaborated indetails. Also, in the background of western literary criticism of the20thcentury, the academic background and the theoretical premiseof Langer’s artistic emotional theory is investigated. We can seethat, the perceptual theory of gestalt psychology,“logic similar”theory and the theory of Jung’s collective unconsciousness inpsychoanalysis criticism have inspired Langer. She forms her ownspecial emotional theory based on the creative criticizing andinheriting expressionistic aesthetics and the artistic emotionalperspective of formalism aesthetics.The third and fourth parts are the main body of this paper. Basedon enough revealing of the contents, features and producing modeof Langer’s artistic emotional theory, the relationship betweenemotion and other categories in Langer’s aesthetics system isdiscussed in order to reflect its ontology meaning in the wholeLanger’s artistic philosophy, also, this is the innovation of this paper.Langer thinks that what art expresses is a kind of human emotion,which is the dynamic form of the human inner world of life, also ithas the quality of self-consciousness in the semiotic meaning andthe quality of transcendence in the meaning of ontology. It isproduced under the joint action of artistic abstraction and artisticintuition. As the concentrated expression of the whole human innerlife, emotion is the motivation and aim of artistic symbol creation, isthe main contents of the artistic illusion expression, is especiallythe essential factor which makes the artistic form have the meaning of life and it has the ontological meaning.The fifth part is a explanation of the concrete expressions ofemotion in various artistic forms so as to reflect the importance ofemotion in art. In the conclusion, it is pointed out that Langerignores the social property of art, and she just researches on theproblems of art and the existence of human from the spiritualactivities aspect, which is the limitation of emotional theory.Through the comprehensive research on the artistic emotionaltheory, we not only realize Langer’s artistic philosophy theory andknow the important place and role of emotion in art, but also exposethe special value of art which is taken as the real existence ofhuman life to the public.