Langer and Form

The central notion of Langer's Aesthetic theory is 'Significant Form', best exemplified, according to her, by Music. In her System, Form, in general, is Symbolic, meaning that it is less or more articulated, and it connotes something. The pre-eminence, for her, of Music, is not only that it is the most articulated among the Arts, but that, in a sense, it is itself the Art of Articulation, an insight that references to improvised Music would better support than those to composed Music. What distinguishes, for her, Music from verbal language is that the articulated components of the latter, i. e. words, have fixed connotations, while what the articulated phrases of Music connotes are emotions that vary from situation to situation. Accordingly, she also occasionally characterizes Significant Form as 'Unconsummated Symbol', and 'expressiveness'. The absence of any mention of Kant in these passages prompts wonder as to whether or not she has noted the similarity between the term 'expressiveness' and Kant's 'Purposiveness'. For, the limitation to subjective meaningfulness of Significant Form parallels Kant's analysis that Aesthetic Judgement is subjective, though potentially universally communicable. So, just as Kant's vestigial teleological commitments prevent him from treating the Artistic process as a relation between Form and Matter, that Form needs to refer beyond itself seem to prevent Langer from being satisfied with a definition of Music as 'the Art of Articulation'.