Abstract
Popular usage has it that art is a language. For example music is a language, the language of love, or the universal language. In reply to this bit of folk wisdom some philosophers have pointed out that a language is made up of symbols. A symbol is something carrying a meaning, and as such it exists to be understood, to impart information whether conceptual or factual. If a work of art is a symbol, then its value is either cognitive or practical and its purpose is to carry information. Almost with one accord, though, aestheticians deny that art is either cognitive or practical in its proper function. Consequently most of them reject the theory that a work of art is a symbol as a visciously intellectualistic theory which misses the whole meaning of fine art.
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References
“L’art est l’expression de l’invisible par des signes naturels qui le manifestent.” T. Jouffroy, Cours d’A esthétique … “To be called beautiful a thing must be significant in virtue of its sensible character or of the sensuous images it arouses in our minds, which is to say that the symbolism must be natural or’ second nature’, not conventional or accidental.” E. F. Carritt, An Introduction to Aesthetics, London, p. 23.
The footprint might also be responded to as a signal or a symptom, in which case it is taken as a stimulus to action with no consciousness of the conformation in pattern between the symbol and the symbolized. A bloodhound would respond to the footprint as a signal.
Language and Myth, trans. S. K. Langer, N.Y., 1945, see especially chapter 6. Also cf. C. H. Hamburg, Symbol and Reality, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague/Netherlands, 1956, Chapter II.
Poetics, xxi, trans. Bywater.
E.g. N. Cazden, “Toward a Theory of Realism in Music,” Jl. Aesth. and Art Criticism, X, (1951), 135–151.
Essay on Man, Yale, (1944), p. 168; also of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, New Haven, 1953, vol I, p. 177 ff.
Ibid., p. 146.
Philosophy in a New Key, Harvard University Press, 1942, chap. 9 More recently she has said that dynamic pattern “copies the form of vital feeling,” Feeling and Form, N.Y. 1953, p. 67.
Journal of Philosophy, XL, no. 12, 1943, pp. 325-326.
Feeling and Form, p. 31.
Ibid., p. 380.
“Aesthetic and the Theory of Signs”, Jl. of Unified Science, VIII 1939, 131-150; Signs, Language and Behavior, New York, (1946), chs. v, vii. “Science, Art, and Technology,” Kenyon Review I, Spring, 1939; Cf. Mrs. Louise N. Roberts, “Art as Icon; An Interpretation of C. W. Morris” Tulane Studies in Philosophy, vol. IV, pp. 75-83. Cf. also Max Rieser “The Semantic Theory of Art in America”,J. of Aesthetics and Art Crit. XV, (1956), pp. 12-26.
Ibid., p. 193.
“On Semiotic Aesthetics,”J. of Aesthetics and Art Crit., X, (1951), 67-77.
Morris also defines the iconic sign as “any sign which is similar in some respects to what it denotes.” and adds, “iconicity is thus a matter of degree,” Signs, Language and Behavior, N.Y., (1946), p. 191.
“One of the dangers of the use of models in science, for instance, arises out of the temptation to ascribe to the subject matter of a theory properties of the model illustrating the theory which are not involved in the theory itself,” Ibid, p. 23.
Another difficult problem, growing out of the preceding, is the problem of determining the degree of similarity (iconicity) between symbol and referent in the aesthetic situation. I shall suggest later that this problem belongs to the psychology of the aesthetic experience.
Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, ed. J. C. Meredith, Oxford (1911) 175-176.
“Poetry, Myth and Reality,” The Language of Poetry, ed. A. Tate, Princeton, 1942.
Cf. Appendix.
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Ballard, E.G. (1957). The Aesthetic Symbol. In: Art and Analysis. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-8843-2_4
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