| Susanne Langer constructed her aesthetic thoughts on the basis of her philosophy.She regards philosophy as the study of meaning,and her whole philosophy is thinking about how to interpret human life as a process of generating meaning through the symbolic transformation of experience.She believes that human beings must indicate and reproduce things through symbols,and symbolization is the unique need of human beings different from animals.Art is a unique symbolic form.It is different from the discursive symbol of language,but a presentational symbol.It is a symbolic form created by artists to express human feelings.It reflects and reveals the form of life in a way that language cannot.This thesis takes the two terms of “life” and “expression” as the core to construct Susan Langer’s symbol aesthetics building.These two common terms in the history of aesthetics are included in the symbol logic by Langer and given new meanings,and become the most important representation and function of artistic symbols.The “living form” of art means that art itself is an abstraction of the real life situation,and the“expression” of art is not simply the expression of the artist’s emotional,but the expression of the artist’s life experience.This thesis is divided into five parts.The first part expounds the philosophical basis of Langer’s aesthetic thought.Her semiotics theory is formed on the basis of Whitehead’s philosophy of symbolic logic and Cassirer’s theory of symbolic form,and is connected with some important viewpoints of her contemporary philosophy,psychology and aesthetics;The second part focuses on Langer’s theory of symbolic form,focusing on her mature elaboration of the concept of symbol conversion based on modern semiotics,the difference between signal and symbol,and the difference between the discursive symbol and the presentational symbol,as well as the history and characteristics of language as the discursive symbols;The third part discusses the examples of presentational symbols in rituals,myths and arts,focusing on the general characteristics of art as expressive symbols,and constructs artistic symbols as a “form of feeling” through representation,form,abstraction,intuition and other related concepts;The fourth part explains how Langer proved the“form of feeling” through the analysis of specific art forms.She believes that all kinds of art forms have their own “basic illusions”.These illusions not only make art abstraction possible,but also find the similarities between art structure and life structure;The fifth part further examines the living forms embodied by art symbols.Each art work is not only an organic form,but also shows the complex life processes such as growth and rhythm.Therefore,art enters the soul through its inherent living forms.Susanne Langer’s aesthetic theory based on symbolic form is one of the most systematic and perfect theories in modern aesthetics.Her description of the expressive characteristics of artistic symbols,redefinition of art,interpretation of artistic illusions,and reflection on the living form contained in art are very enlightening to contemporary art theory;Her terms such as symbol,life,expression,feeling and abstraction are not only the core concepts of aesthetics in the 20 th century,but also the aesthetic concepts worth in-depth discussion until the 21 st century;Although she did not clearly explain“living form”,the view that “art form is similar to living form” has had a significant impact on artistic creation practice;At the same time,she applied philosophy,psychology,logic,biology and other disciplines in a new comprehensive way to aesthetic research,which also expanded the methodological perspective of aesthetic research.It is true that Langer’s distinction between signal and symbol seems to fall into a dualism which is strongly opposed by modern philosophy,and the stipulation of artistic illusion of different art types is also suspected of dogmatism and absolutism.However,her reflective expansion of British and American semiotics and her theoretical courage to innovate are still worthy of our admiration and learning. |
