Art, Emotion, and Motion

Langer defines Art as "the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling". This definition is based, in large part, on her observation that Music expresses feelings. In the same passages in which she details those observations, she also notes that Music expresses "visible movement". What the connection is between Feeling and Movement, she never makes clear, but the lack of reference to the latter in her definition of Art suggests its subordinate status for her, as does the reduction of the observation "all music is dancing" to the definition of Dance as "emotive gesture". Her subsequent suppression of her original insights about the centrality to Art of Movement reflects two general commitments. First, the distinction that she draws between Form and Symbol, i. e. that the latter, but not the former, is connotative, is vestigial Teleology, analogous to Kant's Aesthetic Judgement, in which Form cannot be conceived as meaningful without reference beyond itself. Second, and she is hardly alone in the Philosophical tradition in this, she accepts Feeling as an unanalyzed primitive phenomenon, just as Emotion, Passion, etc. are typically taken. In notable contrast, for Sartre, Emotion is nothing but thwarted Motion, just as in several other doctrines, Sensation is nothing more than nascent motor activity. Hence, the Artistic expression of Emotion is the release of the latter into Motion, which might also explain the real nature of Catharsis. Accordingly, if Feeling is a species of Movement, and Form need not be connotative, Langer's definition of Art is transmuted into "the creation of forms of movement", with hers as a special case. Furthermore, if, as Spinoza and Nietzsche assert, creativity is joyous, Art has intrinsically concomitant 'emotional' content--grades of Movement felt as modes of Joy, just as specific colors are modes of Light.