Mind as Feeling; Form as Presence; Langer as Philosopher

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Mind as Feeling; Form as Presence; Langer as Philosopher Arthur C. Danto The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 81, No. 11, Eighty-First Annual Meeting American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division. (Nov., 1984), pp. 641-647. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X%28198411%2981%3A11%3C641%3AMAFFAP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V The Journal of Philosophy is currently published by Journal of Philosophy, Inc..

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THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY VOLUME LXXXI, K O

11, NOVEMBLR 1984

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MIND AS FEELING; FORM AS PRESENCE;

LANGER AS PHILOSOPHER

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H E philosophical ascent of feelings, through the long literary career of Susanne Langer, almost presents a political allegory. When we first encounter them, feelings have been dismissed, of course not by her, as the savages of mental life, among whom she moves i n the dignifying spirit of a n anthropologist rather than the redemptive condescension of the missionary, paralleling those expeditions among the Hopi and the Samoan-or the Mountain Arapesh-then being undertaken by her sisters in ethnography, for whom these people are n o more backward westerners than feelings, for Langer, are backward thoughts. Understood i n their own terms, the feelings have a cognitive contribution to make, a n d yield modes of symbolic representation not inferior nor alternative to those of rational thought, but to be set alongside them in the total economy of h u m a n life. T h i s was Philosophy in a ATew Key. By Feeling and Form, feelings have come a long way from those nondiscursive urges which take rituals and the festal dance as their outward forms: they are taken now as what artworks as a class objectify, and even figure in the definition of art-"The creation of forms symbolic of human feelingn-which is meant to compass the masterpieces of civilizations. But i n her final work the feelings have quite taken over: she has so imperialized feeling that even thought is but one of its modes. Thought, perception, imagination, as well as understanding-and of course but only incidentally the emotions-are so many provinces of the empire of feeling. Beginning with the suspicion that there is more to nondiscursive meaning than a scrap thrown to humanists in a gesture of arro-

'To be presented in a n APA symposium on the Philosophy of Susanne K. Langer, December 29, 1984. Ronald B. de Sousa a n d Stefan Morawski will be co-symposiasts; see this J O U R S A L , this issue, 647-643 a n d 654-662, respectively, for their contributions.

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gant generosity by the Logical Positivists, who believed they knew what meaning really was, Langer ends with a claim of almost preSocratic audacity and scope. "I a m using the word 'feeling' not in the arbitrarily limited sense of 'pleasure or displeasure', to which psychologists have often restricted it, but o n the contrary i n its widest possible sense, i.e., to designate anything that may be felt. In this sense it includes both sensation and emotion-the felt responses of our sense organs to the environment, of our proprioceptive mechanisms to internal changes, and of the organism as a whole to its situation as a whole." So she wrote in a prolegomena1 essay before undertaking her major work Mind: A n Essay o n Feeling, in which she says "Feeling, in the broad sense of whatever is felt in any way, as sensory stimulus or inward tension, pain, emotion, or intent, is the mark of mentality." It is as though she had followed some philosophical imperative which took her back through the etymological history of the term 'feeling' to the Greek word ' ~ ( ~ A A ~ i v ' - " t o pluck, twitch the harp, play a stringed instrumentm-and thence to the substantive ~cwh~.rjpiov-"astringed instrumentm-to rediscover the marvelous metaphor of the soul as a lyre, from which harmonies are evoked by the impingements of the world, and philosophy in a new key becomes abruptly literal. Like Simmias in the Phaedo, before he is bamboozled by a bad argument of Socrates, she sees the harmonies not as something apart with a life of their own, but as a phase of the instrument. Feeling, hence mind, construed as a physiological state, is something the study of which "leads down into biological structure and process until its estimation becomes (for the time) impossible, and upward to the purely h u m a n sphere known as 'culture'." A resolute materialist and a psychological realist, Langer regards what today would be called the categories of folk-psychology as at once ultimate and neurophysiological. As I find this position uniquely correct, I shall in this paper be less concerned with the assimilation of feeling to nervous matter than with the assimilation of mind to feeling. T h a t assimilation too may be correct, but it has to be defended by structures of argument different from those which may finally vindicate a retentive materialism. Scrutinizing Philosophy i n a N e w Key in the retrospective light of Mind: A n Essay o n Feeling, one may discern in it anticipations of the expanded view of feeling, which, in a curious way, Langer owes to the Positivists. For it was their polemical stance that a vast array of linguistic expressions, ranging from verbal grimaces through lyrical poetry to Die Welt als Wille u n d Vorstellung-or in

any case Sein und Zeit-are meaningless in respect to the favored way of being meaningful, namely verifiable through sense experience, but may in compensation claim a secondary mode of meaningfulness that the Positivists disdained to differentiate: invariably they express their users' feelings and have emotive meanings. T h e picture of the mind the Positivists endorsed, as a n island of discursivity in a sea of affect, is rather like the famous lZJew Yorker cover which divides the world into Manhattan and then simply everywhere else. Carnap's bisection has about that degree of sensitivity to nuance and extenuation as the partition of India: "Many linguistic utterances are analogous to laughing, in that they have only a n expressive function, no representative function. Examples are cries like 'Oh,Oh' or on a higher level, lyrical verse. Metaphysical propositions are . . . like laughing, lyrics, and music, expressive." If all this stammering \,astness of leftover mind is feeling (and we must adjoin moral discourse), Langer has practically been handed her thesis. All that remains is to colonize thought itself, already half achie\.ed in the suggestion that what she terms "discursive forms" e?cprrss thoughts as presentational forms express feelings, which have their proper forms much as thought has its proper forms. "The thought is the significant proposition" is Thesis 4 of the Tractatus, a work admiringly cited in Philosophy in a New Key, and though "thought" may, in post-Fregian ontology, more or less be "meaning," which ingresses propositions from Frege's paraplatonic T h i r d Realm, it is also possible to interpret a thought as a mental state in propositional form. For Aristotle, speech stands to thought as writing stands to speech, as though the same propositional form might occur in three distinct media. Spoken or written propositions might then express mental ones ( = thoughts)-or 06jectify them-in just the same way, though the forms will be nonpropositional, that nondiscursive forms objectify nondiscursive mental states ( = feelings). Langer's categories of feeling and form are subdued versions of Schopenhauer's categories of will and representation, and when i n her philosophy works of art are feelings objectified, the clear implication is that art is the outward form of feeling as discourse is the outward form of thought (for Schopenhauer, representation is "the will become object"). So it is clear she will want to distinguish symbols from symptoms, since humid palms, shallow breathing, dilated pupils more evince than express feelings-and for the matter even thoughts may have visceral concomitants: Darwin said "I remember well the time when the thought of the eye made me cold all over." A line can thus be drawn between 'Oh, O h ' as a kind of disciplined grimace and Ode to a Nightingale

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as the outward symbol of some feeling about nightingales (or about what nightingales themselves symbolize) it succeeds in expressing: feelings have forms perhaps only when they have contents or what today we might call "intentionality." T h e question then is what evidence we have that nondiscursive feelings have forms which artworks express just as thoughts have forms which discursive forms express, granting that both modes of expression may be classed as objectifications. Some evidence, or even a strong confirmation of Langer's general thesis may be allowed if we grant her claim that sense perception is a case of feeling. "All sensitivity bears the stamp of mentality," she writes, "seeing is itself a process of formulation." So forms that show what we see might then be objectifications of vision, a n d a bridgehead is established. O n the other hand, despite the support Gestalt psychology provides for sensing having form, it somehow seems a kind of cheating to pass from the mentalization of sensation to the further assimilation of sensation to feeling. A colleague once told me he especially admired Whitehead for leaving room in his metaphysics for feelings. A good while later, thinking it might be useful to see what Whitehead had to say, I found myself struggling with the concept of prehension, which feelings then exemplified. "A feeling," Whitehead wrote, "is the appropriation of some elements in the universe to be components in the real internal constitution of the subject." But when he steps outside the fiercely fortified language of his system he says: "As a simple example of this description of a feeling, consider the audition of a sound. In order to avoid unnecessary complications, let the sound be one definite note." Well, if this is leaving room for feelings, what philosopher down the ages, with the possible exception of Parmenides, has not? H e has merely left room for perception. At a certain point in the history of modern art, when painters were producing images so discongruent with what visual experience would lead us to expect if their aims were to present reality as seen, it was a genuinely illuminating explanation that they were more concerned to express their feelings about what they saw than merely to replicate it. But if seeing itself is feeling, one is also expressing one's feeling in painting what replicates the visual array. Something has been blurred in this expansion, which must surely also be what in his romantic heart moved my colleague to praise whitehead for leaving feelings in! Nor does Langer's discussion of the famous distinction between two orders of symbolic form particularly help, in part because her example of a presentational form is a picture of what we see ("the

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most familiar sort of nondiscursive symbol"), but more subtly because she at the time endorsed the curious pictorial semantics of Wittgenstein as her analysis of discursive forms. So it is as though we were contrasting two orders of picture, since, in her words which echo Wittgenstein's "The proposition is a picture of reality," "Language (is) our most faithful and indispensable picture of h u m a n experience, of the world and its events, of thought and life, etc." Wittgenstein was driven to the extreme of pictorializing language in order to connect it to the world, since the projective relationship supposedly exemplified in pictorial representation must have struck him as clearly understood or at least perspicuous. But in fact only in the case of quotations is a projective relationship between sentence and subject plausible, and it is not the projective relationship which explains how pictures in fact present. What Langer wants, I believe, is something closer to Plato's division of poetic representation into m i m e s i s and diegysis, a distinction which incidentally arises within language itself. In dramatic representation (Plato's example), the actor's words are the character's words, not a description of what they were. In this sense we have no idea of what c o m m e d i a dell' arte was like, since we lack the words: we just have knowledge of what they were to convey: jealousy, suspicion, passion, innocence, and contempt. T h e a v a n t garde artist Robert Morris once said of his blank works "They're not trying to represent anything. They're presenting a n object." But this is exactly mimetic presentation in Plato's sense: there has always been a suspected power in pictures and effigies, which explains their becoming objects of worship, since the icon might contain, as a bucket contains blood, the saint herself, rather than a mere projection of her features a n d emblemata. So we are dealing here with something more fundamental in cognitive address than anything that can be captured in the analog/digital distinction that Langer's argument and examples make it appear she is suggesting. And now, if there are forms that present feelings, as distinct from what we merely sense, then she will have made her point. Let me conclude by proposing how. Proust's readers are given a body of propositional knowledge regarding la m a z s o n d e T a n t e L t o n i e in Combray, which pilgrims to the actual site in Illiers will confirm. They will also realize, being pilgrims, that it is not at all what they have been led to expect: what the house is actually like cannot have been predicted from the descriptions; it is cramped and dark, with a garden far too tiny. But at a certain moment it dawns that i n the course of describing the house Proust has presented what it felt like to have lived there at a

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certain age. By a miracle of discursion he has not described but transmitted his feelings. T h e same can take place with pictures. T h e art historian Howard Hibbard told me once of driving u p and down the road to Benevento in search of a Roman tower he had seen in (in-nota bene) a n engraving of Piranesi and had been assured still existed. It was invisible, because he had expected something monumental rather than the stump of masonry someone finally indicated. T h e projection was exact, but what the engraving showed was the tower as felt by a man with a sense for Roman grandeur. But what is objectified in both these representations, verbal and pictorial, and as invisible to the senses as the feelings toward Combray transsubstantial in tea-steeped madeleine, is that kind of feeling Susanne Langer identifies finally as mind. Whether art alone objectifies feeling or whether it is objectified in everything we do, she is perfectly correct in saying that the subjectivity of felt experience, the lived presence of the world, is the central fact of mental life. It is not a fact psychologists have countenanced, let alone a p proached; and it has been made a problem for philosophers only recently, I believe, through the thought of Thomas Nagel. We have and may add to a body of propositional knowledge regarding the stimuli bats respond to, but there must be something that would answer the question of what it's like to be a bat which we know this knowledge will never give us. But we also know that propositional knowledge will never reveal what it is like to be, well, Susanne Langer or, closer still in the present case, Arthur Danto. I know a great deal about myself nobody else knows, or so I hope; but I could tell you all this at boring length without transmitting what it's like to be me, which I a m not sure I know, never having been anyone else. T h e truth, I think, is that, however discursive, we are largely invisible to ourselves, save perhaps obliquely through the manner in which others may present themselves through their words and actions: so invisible that there is a natural philosophical temptation to construe the mind as a pure transparency, a mere openness to the world, rather than the densely knotted tissue of feeling of which we are enfabricated. It may be that, through the cognitive asymmetries that discursive and presentational knowledge define, a way is open to fit thought into the substance of feeling. We know that people think certain things, can define the content of their thought, without having it in our power to think those things ourselves. What is it like to think the world flat, that I look irresistible in my Poiret frocks, that the Reverend Jim Jones would have saved me through his love, that

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animals have n o feelings or that flowers do-or that p u n k is where it's at? For me to think any of these things I would have to be a different person with a different mind, since a lot would have to be different among my other thoughts for any of these to fit effortlessly among them-and so I would live i n a very different world slnce my world is specified by my thoughts. But then the gaps between me and those who think differently than I-which is to say everyone, and not simply those segregated by the differences i n generation, sex, nationality, sect, and even race-must define the real boundaries of the self. T h e plane of contact between the self and the world, inestimably more complex i n its curvatures than those of its sub-areas i n which sense and stimulus make contact, is the reality of mind as Langer has sought to grasp it philosophically. Merely to have recognized its character, let alone carried its analysis so systematically far, has been to make as immense and transformative a contribution to philosophy as I can imagine. ARTHLIR C D A N T O

Columbia University

TELEOLOGY AND T H E GREAT SHIFT* [A] veritable gulf . . . divides human from animal mentality, in a perfectly continuous course of development of life on earth. . . Teleology is peculiar to vital process, and since it appears in psychical phase as the pattern of aims and voluntary acts, . . . it is a central theme in the study of mind; but it has had the least successful philosophical treatment of all our major problems.'

I

N tackling the "Great Shift" from animal behavior to h u m a n mentality, Susanne Langer has stressed four principles: 1. Look for a unifying biological perspective in which the emer-

gence of mind can be seen naturalistically as a "continuous course of development." *To be presented i n a n APA symposium o n the Philosophy of Susanne K. Langer, December 29, 1984. Arthur C. Danto and Stefan Morawski will be co-symposiasts; this issue, 641-647 and 654-662, respectively, for their see this JOI.RSAL, contributions. ISusanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Frrling, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1967, 1971, 1982), vol. I, p. xvi and p. 220. Subsequent references to Langer will be to that work and will appear in the text either by chapter or by volume and page number. 0022-362X 84 81 1 1 '0647$00 70

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of Philosophy, Inc.