Roman Ganzha. Sign of the times

Susan Langer. Philosophy in a new key: A study of the symbolism of reason, ritual and art / Transl. from English S.P. Evtushenko; general edition and subsequent V.P. Shestakova. - M.: Republic, 2000.

The main attraction of this book is the wild translation. I had a roommate in the Student House on Vernadsky, and he once translated a text about ancient sculpture from the enemy language. It said that the sculpture was derived from the relief by gradually separating the figure from the back wall. The wall there was the word base, and my neighbor, without any hesitation, depicted this process as “ascending from the base” or something like that, that is, not concretely, as required, but abstractly. The book by an American woman, Susan Langer, published in 1942 (I mean, she was born much earlier, in 1895) was translated in exactly this way. Glory to American philosophy, there were no particularly killer - from the standpoint of today - ideas in this book, so the meaning of most phrases was accessible to me as a person who has met quite a few tongue-tied people in my short life. However, in particularly piquant cases, I acted like this: instead of puzzling over another riddle, I mentally reconstructed the original Anglo-American text and then translated it again, sometimes with the help of a dictionary. A few illustrative examples. The word conception turned into a concept, although the meaning should have been understanding, concept. Or I meet someone suspicious social object and I understand that in the original it was common and should have been translated - a simple, ordinary object, in contrast to an unusual object - a concept. Or you read a remark that the cross is used as a “plus” sign, and in an inclined position - as a “times” sign . You, of course, guessed that it says times in the sense of multiplication. The translation of the first aphorism from Wittgenstein's Tractatus claims to be a hit: “The world is all that chance is . ” It’s clear that in Langer’s book it is not Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist, but the banal The world is all that is the case, but was it really impossible to consult at least one of the three publicly available translations: “The world is everything that has place" from the 1958 version of the edition, "The world is everything that happens" from Kozlova's translation or "The world is everything that happens to be" from Rudnev's recent translation? So what exactly is a case? And what else can be said about so published book?

And this book, no matter how naive it may seem to us today, in 1942 could really have been relevant, at least in the part that concerns music. Otherwise, this is rather a popular presentation of theories fashionable at that time. From the very beginning, the author declares that his point of view is presuppositionless: the study of symbols, they say, cannot be deduced from Cartesian or Kantian premises. It is not true. It is precisely the “Kantian premises” that underlie Langer’s reasoning. In No. 59 of the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant writes that any visual representation of a concept can either be schematic if the concept is comprehended by the mind with the help of a priori sensory intuition (for example, geometric concepts). Or it can be symbolic, if under a concept comprehensible only by reason, to which no sensory intuition can correspond, there is subsumed such intuition in which the actions of the faculty of judgment coincide with those performed during schematization only according to the general rule for them, in the form of reflection, and not in content . Schematic and symbolic are two kinds of intuitive, representing, as opposed to discursive, not representing. Langer uses the dichotomy of discursive and presentational, considering them two types of symbolic. Kant's analysis turns out to be more relevant due to the fact that he sees an essential difference where Langer finds only an indefinitely general one. Although, in essence, Langer, with his entire book, is trying to say what Kant needed three pages to say. So, Kant continues, diagrams are direct, and symbols are indirect images of concepts. The former operate through demonstration, the latter through analogy. Symbols can be found in language, due to which it is not exclusively discursive in nature. Words like basis , depend , (from which) it follows , substance and many others - not diagrams, but symbols. The word flow in the sense of following evokes the visible image of water flowing from a source, but there is no similarity between logical following and the flow of water. All our knowledge of God, writes Kant, is only symbolic. This was followed by a romantic reception of these ideas of Kant, about which I refer to: Todorov, “The Theory of Symbol”.

In addition to the definition of symbol, which is essentially Kantian (a symbol is something that does not represent the object itself, but is the bearer of a certain understanding of the object, that is, the concept), although too broad for Kant, Langer’s book contains more or less optional general cultural considerations. The mind is described as an organ that performs a symbolic function - an extremely fashionable phrase at that time. This function consists not simply in the passive connection of sensory data, but in the active transformation of the inert matter of experience. And, as in all works of this kind, everything comes down to the problem of the origin of consciousness. Langer's answer is extremely metaphysical: there is a basic human need - the need for symbolization, it developed naturally as a certain stage in the evolution of protein bodies. Human means symbolic. The discursive is also symbolic, since the primary function of language is not communication, but symbolization. That is, at first all language consisted of symbols, examples of which were given by Kant. Special techniques of symbolization are ritual, magic, myth, religion, art, science. In language and science, thinking is symbolized; in art, non-discursive emotional experiences are symbolically transformed and given an objective form. There is a certain historical continuity of symbolic forms. At the end of the book, the usual diagnosis for such works is made for modern society: it does not love symbols much enough.

The flawed and unnecessary nature of any such attempts to identify the common denominator of everything human reveals itself at the moment when the conversation turns to the genesis of consciousness and, consequently, totemism. Totemism is a good litmus test for any cultural theories that seek to explain everything. None of these theories has yet been able to really explain why a ground beetle or a praying mantis could be a totem. Such cases are silently passed over. So Langer sins with the same thing: totemism, they say, comes from the fact that animals embody certain qualities: strength, flexibility, dexterity and even wisdom, like an owl (yes, that’s exactly what she writes), and these qualities are human passionately wants to develop in himself. But this is by the way.

Perhaps only the chapter on music contains thoughts that, in the context of the musical aesthetics of that time, really look innovative, although for us they are trivial. The thoughts are: music is not representative, it expresses pure form not as decoration, but as its very essence. This idea was first expressed by Eduard Hanslick in 1854, during the era of the dominance of romantic music, which was difficult to interpret otherwise than as an expression of the emotions of the performer or composer. Hanslick stated that music does not convey any meaning at all, that the content of music is moving sound forms. Then there was Stravinsky, but Langer does not write about him. Langer writes that music still has meaning, but it symbolizes in a different way than language: not through the connection of established meanings of elements, but as a special holistic symbolic form, and therefore cannot be translated into the “language of feelings.” We can say that music conveys only general forms of feeling , what it is a logical expression of feelings, an incomplete and therefore universal symbol of life processes, a meaningful form without a generally accepted meaning. Yes, music expresses feelings - but only in the sense of isomorphism, the commonality of the structure of the sequential development of human emotions and the development of tones in a piece of music. Music is a tonal analogy for a person's emotional life. Langer's innovation consisted precisely in consistent anti-psychologism and an attempt to substantiate it theoretically. And finally, a small chronological inaccuracy: Langer writes at the very beginning that her book is a new key in philosophy, the turning point of which is precisely connected with the basic concept of the symbol, and although psychoanalysis or symbolic logic are equally the embodiment of this concept , it was she - Langer - who first articulated its fundamental, generative character. Although it was Kant, a century and a half before Langer, who pointed out a huge unexplored area related to the concept of symbol. So Langer arrived only at the very end of that era in the history of thought, the discovery of which she was so proud.