442
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling." It is a means
of transforming and embodying subjectivity and giving it freedom in
the world at large; objectifying it for intuition. But it is not feeling itself
that art expresses, but ideas of feeling. These mediate the passage of
feeling to significant form. In the last chapters of
Feeling and
Form,
those on "Expressiveness" and "The Work and Its Public," she returns
directly to the defense of this view. Fully aware of the frequent criticisms
of her theory of symbolization, she lists, in fact, several of the crucial
logical and epistemological questions which must be answered in the
interest of philosophical cogency. I do not think she succeeds. When
Mrs. Langer comes to the precise task of specifying either the operations
of mind or the principles of judgment which apply to the process which
leads from feeling to the "life of feeling" and then to the art work, the
symbolic projection which objectifies this patterned sequence, her argu–
ments are simply not convincing. In the light of the many objections
to her use of the term "knowledge," a brief analysis of the following
sentence will suggest some of the difficulties I find in her final chap–
ters: "[The artist's] knowledge of life goes as far as his art can reach."
Yet the value of
Feeling and Form
does not rest upon the final
tightness of the argument. For all its logical development and internal
complexities, it finally confronts us with something of the "transparency"
which belongs not only to art but to philosophy. I feel that
Mrs.
Langer's main trouble is that she has not succeeded in finding a lan–
guage which is appropriate to the subtlety of her ideas and the com–
plexity of her insights-the kind of language we find in such philosophers
as Dewey, Santayana, or Whitehead; personal, never fully defined, com–
pletely involved with their thought. In
The Realm of Essence,
a book
which has many parallels to Mrs. Langer's theories, Santayana remarks:
"To find abstractions we must enter the psychological sphere and con–
sider the causal history of ideas." In this enterprise Mrs. Langer may
develop this language she needs.
Kermit Lansner
A UNIVERSAL MIND
CEZANNE. By Meyer Schapiro. H. N. Abroms. $12.50.
Whether we know anything at all about painting or not, we
are bound to learn a great deal from Meyer Schapiro's introduction and
his individual exposition of each of these fifty full-color reproductions.
Anyone who has ever listened to Professor Schapiro's lectures, as I
