Art as Emotive Expression

 

Works of art so often arise from some deep personal feeling or crisis in the lives of their creators that emotion itself is commonly taken as the defining characteristic of art. Tolstoy (1828-1910) thought that art caused its audience to experience certain feelings, was art to the extent that it did so, and that its creator should have lived through those feelings to express them properly. Of course he also demanded that art express worthy feelings, preferably promoting the brotherhood of man, but even without its moral tag, Tolstoy's views raise enormous problems.

Do we know exactly what an audience experiences during a play? Then, to take Tolstoy's second point, there is the question of great political orators whose words may work audiences into frenzies far exceeding those a Shakespearean play. Thirdly comes the inconvenient fact that composers frequently work simultaneously on "happy" and "sad" passages of music.

The American pragmatist John Dewey (1859-1952) understood this interplay of medium and imagination but took a broader view of artistic activity. Even "experience" for Dewey means "a shared social activity of symbolically-mediated behaviour which seeks to discover the possibilities of our objective situations in the natural world for meaningful, intelligent and fulfilling ends." We are constantly making sense of ourselves and our surroundings, using our senses to maintain and develop our material and aesthetic needs. Experiences come to us in the light of half-remembered events, of mental and sensory constructions, of expected consequences. Art reveals to us how those experiences may be profoundly meaningful.

 

Art is not therefore the expression of emotion or even of the creative impulse. It arises from the interaction of many things — the artist with his medium, individual experiences with the cultural matrix, artwork with its audience. Art is a dialogue, and an artwork draws its life from the cultural life of the community. There is no one, settled interpretation, and the greatness of an artwork may lie in its profound appeal to many different groups and societies. All art has form, but that form is not something unchanging and abstract, but the way the work gives organization to experience.

 

But art does somehow involve emotion and — perhaps to modify Plato's condemnation of the pernicious effects of poetry — Aristotle introduced his famous "katharsis". The term means cleansing, removing the bad and leaving the good, and by its associations includes ritual purification, medical purges and bowel movement. In Aristotle's view, an audience is brought to feel fear, pity and even frenzy in public performances, coming away with heightened emotions and sharpened aesthetic judgements.

 

But catharsis from the first has been a troublesome term. Since Aristotle did not describe art in terms of emotional expression, he perhaps meant only that art raises emotions in an intense and justifiable form. Raising or releasing them? The two are very different. And cannot playwrights raise emotions without personally espousing them?

 

Perhaps art is not an expression of emotion, but a representation of that emotion. Since books, paintings, music etc. cannot express emotion as originally present in the artist's mind (supposing we persist with this approach) but only as conveyed in and with the medium concerned, art cannot in some sense escape being representational. But there is another view of representation: that art is emotion objectified in symbolic form: a philosophy developed by Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) and Susanne Langer (1895-1985).

 

Cassirer extended Kant's a priori categories so as to represent language, myth, art, religion and science as systems of symbolic forms. These forms are mental shaping of experience. They are culturally determined and are created by us. But they also and wholly constitute our world: all "reality" is a reality seen and understood through them.

 

An expanded article can be found on TextEtc.

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Emotive Expression

 

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