THE CULTURAL IMPORTANCE OF THE ARTS

SUSANNE K. LANGER

Every culture develops some kind of art as surely as it develops

language. Some primitive cultures have no real mythology or religion, but all
have some art — dance, song design (sometimes not only on tools or on the
human body). Above all, dances that seem to be the oldest elaborated art.

The ancient ubiquitous character of art contrasts sharply with the

prevalent idea that art is a luxury product of civilization, a cultural frill, a piece
of social veneer.

It fits better with the conviction held by most artists, that art is the
epitome of human life, the truest record of insights and feelings, that the
strongest military or economic society without art is poor in comparison with
the most primitive tribe of savage painters, dancers, or idol-carvers. Wherever
a society has really achieved culture, (in the ethnological, not the popular
sense of social forms) it has begotten art, not late in its career, but at the very
inception of it.

Art is, indeed, the spearhead of human development, social and

individual. The vulgarization of art is the surest symptom of ethnic decline.
The growth of a new style always bespeaks a young and vigorous mind,
whether collectively or single.

What sort of thing is art, that it should play such a leading role in
human development? It is not an intellectual pursuit, but is necessary to
intellectual life; it is not religion, but grows up with religion, serves it and in
large measure determines it (as Herodotus said, “Homer made the gods,” and
surely the Egyptians deities grew under the chisels of sculptors in strangely
solemn forms).

We cannot enter here on a long discussion of what has been claimed

before as the essence of art, the true nature of art, or its defining functions; in
a single lecture dealing with one aspect of art, namely its cultural influence, I
can only give you by the way of preamble my own definition of art, with
categorical brevity. That does not mean that I set up this definition in a
categorical spirit, but only that we have no time to debate it, so you are asked
to accept it as an assumption underlying these reflections.

Art, in the sense here intended --- that is, the generic term subsuming
painting, sculpture, architecture, music, dance, literature and drama --- may
be defined as the practice of creating perceptible forms expressive of human
feeling. I say “perceptible” rather than “sensuous” forms because some works
of art are given to imagination rather than to the outward senses. A novel, for
instance, usually is read silently with the eye, but it is not made for vision, as
a painting is; and though sound plays a vital part in poetry, words even in
poetry are not essentially sonorous structures like music. Dances require to be
seen, but its appeal is to deeper centers of sensation. The difference between
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dance and mobile sculpture makes this immediately apparent. But all works of
art are purely perceptible forms that seem to embody some sort of feeling.

“Feeling” as I am using it here covers much more than it does in the

technical vocabulary of psychology, where it denotes only pleasure and pain,
or even in the shifting limits of ordinary discourse, where it sometimes means
sensation (as when one says a paralyzed limb has no feeling in it), sometimes
emotion (e.g., as a situation is said to harrow your feeling, or to evoke tender
feeling). Or a directed emotional attitude (we say we feel strongly about
something), or even our general mental or physical condition, feeling well or
ill, blue, or bit above ourselves. As I use the word, in defining art as the
creation of perceptible forms expressive of human feeling, it takes in all those
meanings; it applies to everything that may be felt.

Another word in the definition that might be questioned is “creation.” I

think it is justified, not pretentious, as perhaps it sounds; but that issue is
slightly beside the point here, so let us shelve it. If anyone prefers to speak of
the “making” or “construction” of expressive forms that will do here just as
well.

What does have to understood is the meaning of “form,” and more

particularly “expressive form;” form that involves the very nature of art and
therefore the question of its cultural importance.

The word “form” has several current uses; most of them have some
relation to the sense in which I am using it here, though a few, such as: “ a
form to be filled in for tax purposes,” or “ a mere matter of form,” are fairly
remote, being quite specialized. Since we are speaking of art, it might be good
to point out that the meaning of stylistic pattern----“the sonata form,” “the
sonnet form” --- is not the one I an assuming here. I am using the word in a
simpler sense, which it has when you say, on a foggy night, that clearly, and is
the form of a man. The trees are gigantic forms; the rills of rain trace sinuous
forms on the windowpane. The rills are not fixed things; they are forms of
motion. When you watch gnats weaving in the air, or flocks of birds wheeling
overhead, you see dynamic forms --- forms made of motion.

It is in the sense of an apparition given to our perception, that a work

of art is a form. It maybe permanent form like a building or vase or a picture,
or a transient, dynamic form like a melody or a dance, or even a form given to
imagination, like the passage purely imaginary, apparent events that
constitutes a literary works. But it is always a perceptible, self-identical whole;
look a natural being, it has natural being, it has a character of organic unity,
self-sufficiency, individual reality. And it is thus, as an appearance, that a work
of art is good or bad or perhaps rather poor; as an appearance, not as a
comment on things beyond it in the world, nor as a reminder of them.

This, then is what I mean is “form”; but what is meant by calling such
forms “expressive human feeling”? How do apparitions “express” anything —
feeling, or anything else? First of all, let us ask just what is meant here by
“express”; what sort of “expression” we are talking about.

Most people believe that music and poetry are expressions of emotion,
and will further agree that a picture is a glimpse of reality seen through a
temperament. Even a Gothic cathedral is supposed to express the religious
emotions of its countless, anonymous builders. Its age makes the process
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indistinct enough to put it beyond very searching question. But it is harder to

imagine how a modern office building or a fine, flung-out overpass across a
highway— an architectural work of art, as many of our offices and ramps and
bridges are— could be, in any essential way, an expression of its designer’s
emotion or state of mind. To treat it just like a lyric or an easel picture seems
a bit silly.

The incongruity, however, points to misunderstanding that becomes

apparent only when we try to conceive the skyscraper as an emotional
exhibition, but that really confuses our judgment of the lyric and the picture
as well. It is a misconception of what is meant by “expression” in art.

The work “expression” has two principal meanings: in one sense it

means self-expression – giving vent to our feelings. In this sense, it refers to a
symptom of what we feel. Self-expression is a spontaneous reaction to a
situation, an event, the company we are in and the emotions that stir us. In
another sense, however, “expression” means the presentation of an idea,
usually by the proper and apt use of words. But a device for the presentation
of an idea is what we call a symbol, not a symptom. Thus a word is a symbol,
and so is a meaningful combination of words, A common word, such as
“horse”, conveys an idea even when no one is exclaiming over the presence
of a horse, or offering his kingdom for one – for instance, in the phrase “White
Horse Whiskey,” or in the dictionary, somewhere between “horror” and
“horticulture”.

A sentence, which is a special combination of words, expresses the

idea of some state of affairs, real or imagined. Sentence are complicated
symbols-so complicated, sometimes, that we have to consider them word by
word and analyze the way they are put together to understand the meaning
they convey. And sometimes the meaning is an idea we never had before, or
concerns something we have never seen-a new animal, a foreign place, or
what not. Language will formulate new ideas as well as communicate old
ones, so that all people know a lot of things that they have merely heard or
read about. Symbolic expression, therefore, extends our knowledge behind
the scope or our actual experience.

If an idea is clearly conveyed by means of symbols we say it as well

expressed. A person may work for a long time to give his statement the best
possible form, to find the exact words for what he means to say and to carry
his account or his argument most directly from one point to another. But a
discoursed so worked out is certainly not a spontaneous reaction. Giving
expression to an idea is obviously a different thing from giving expression to
feeling by laughing, crying, blushing, or quivering. You do not say of a man in
a rage that his anger is well expressed; you either try to calm him down, or
you rage back at him, but in either case you understand quite well that he is
furious. The symptoms just are what they are, there is no critical standard for
symptoms. If, on the other hand, the angry man tries to tell you what he is
fuming about, he will have to collect himself, curtail his emotional expression,
and find words to express his ideas. For to tell a story coherently involves
“expression” in a quite a different sense: this sort of expression is not “self-
expression,” but may be called “conceptual expression.”

Language of course, is our prime instrument of conceptual expression.

The things we can say are in effect the things we can think. Words are the
terms of our thinking as well as the terms in which we present our thoughts,
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because they present the objects of thought to the thinker himself. Before
language communicates ideas, it gives them form, makes them clear, and in
fact makes them what they are. Whatever has a name is an object for
thought. Without words, sense experience is only a flow of impressions, as
subjective as our feelings; words make it objective, and carve it up into things
and facts that we cannot, remember, and think about. Language gives
outward experience its form, and makes it definite and clear.

There is, however, an important part of reality that is quite inaccessible

to the formative influence of language: that is the realm of so-called “inner
experience,” the life of felling and emotion. The reason why language is so
powerless here is not, as many people suppose, that feeling and emotion are
irrational; on the contrary, they seem irrational because language does not
help to make them conceivable, and most people cannot conceive anything
without the logical scaffolding of words. The unfitness of language to convey
subjective experience is a somewhat technical subject, easier for logicians to
understand than for artists; but the gist of it is that the form of language does
not reflect the natural form of feeling, so we cannot shape any concepts of
feeling with the help of ordinary, discursive language. Therefore, the words
whereby we refer to feeling only name very general kinds of inner experience
– excitement, calm, joy sorrow, love, hate, etc. But there is no language to
describe just how one joy differ so radically from another, or what the
experience of hate is really like, how it can interplay with feeling usually called
love, how it burns and then goes cold in almost the same moment. The real
nature of feeling is something language as such – as discursive symbolism –
cannot render.

For this reason, the phenomena of feeling and emotion are usually
treated by philosophers as irrational. The only pattern discursive thought can
find in them is the pattern of outward events that occasion them. There are
different degrees of fear, but they are thought of as so many degrees of the
same simple feeling.

But human feeling is a fabric, not a vague mass. It has an intricate

dynamic pattern, possible combinations and new emergent phenomena. It is a
pattern of organically interdependent and interdetermined tensions and
resolutions; a pattern of almost infinitely complex activation and cadence. To
it belongs the whole gamut of our sensibility, the sense of straining thought,
all mental attitude and motor set. Those are the deeper reaches that underlie
the surface waves of our emotion, and make human life a life of feeling
instead of an unconscious metabolic existence interrupted by feelings.

It is, I think, this dynamic pattern that finds its formal expression in the
arts. The expressiveness of art is like that of a symbol, not that of an
emotional symptom; it is a formulation of feeling for our conception that a
work of art is properly said to be expressive. It may serve somebody’s need of
self-expression beside; but that is not what makes it good or bad in art. In a
special sense one may call a work of art a symbol of feeling, for, like a symbol,
it formulates our ideas of inwards experience, as discourse formulates our
ideas of things and facts in the outside world. A work of art differs from a
genuine symbol – that is, a symbol in the full and usual sense – in that it does
not point beyond itself something else. The word “symbol” does not originally
connote any representative function, or reference to something beyond itself;
it means “thrown together” . . . . . But in English usage it has come to mean a
sign that stands for something else to which it directs our attention. This is
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something a work of art does not do. Its relation to feeling is a rather special
one that we cannot undertake to analyze here; in effect, the feeling it
expresses appears to be directly given with it, as the sense of a true
metaphor, or a value of a religious myth, is not separable from expression. We
speak of the feeling of, or the feeling in, a work of art, not the feeling it
means. And we speak truly; a work of art presents something like a direct
vision of vitality, emotion, subjective reality.

The primary function of art is objectifying feeling so we can

contemplate and understand it. It is the formulation of so called “inward
experience,” the “inner life,” that is impossible to achieve by discursive
thought, because its forms are incommensurable with the forms of language
and all its derivatives (e.g. mathematics, symbolic logic). Art objectifies the
sentence and desire, self-consciousness and world consciousness, emotions
and moods that are generally regarded as irrational because words cannot
give us clear ideas of them. But the premise tacitly assumed in such a
judgment – namely, that anything language cannot express is formless and
irrational – seems to me to be an error. I believe the life of feeling is not
irrational; its logical forms are merely very different from the structures of
discourse. But they are so much like the dynamic forms of art that art is their
natural symbol. Through plastic works, music, fiction, dance, or dramatic
forms we can conceive what vitality and emotion feel like.

All this time I have been expounding, word by word, what I mean by
the definition of art proposed at the beginning of this lecture: Art is the
practice of creating perceptible forms expressive of human feeling. We have
dwelt in the exact sense of “form,” and “expressive,” and “feeling.” Form in
this context means a configuration, something seen or heard or imaginatively
grasped as an entity, an integral whole given to perception like an apparition.
Every work of art is a form in this sense. It may be a solid form, or a dynamic
form like a whirl or a stream, or it may be a sounding form like a melody, or
even the image of events known as a story, that, like dreams or memory,
presents its form to imagination alone. “Expression” is here taken to mean
articulation, not self-expression or venting of one’s feeling. And “feeling,”
finally, is used in the broadest sense, denoting anything that can or could be
felt – sensation, emotion, every tension in a sentient organism, from the
feeling of vitality.