[lit-ideas] What is philosophy? Susan Langer writes....
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Anthro-L <ANTHRO-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 26 Dec 2006 23:49:59 +0900
One of the great pleasures of living with a library accumulated over forty
or fifty years or so is browsing the books that have hidden themselves on
the backs of shelves until, one day, they reveal themselves as we rummage
through those that, normally, sit in front of them. Today the book that
spoke up and said "Read me, again" is Susan Langer (1953) Feeling and Form:
A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key. In it, on pages 4
and 5, Langer writes,
"There are certain misconceptions about philosophical thinking that have
arisen, oddly enough, from the very concern of modern philosophers with
method—from the acceptance of principles and ideals that sound impeccable as
we avow them in conferences and symposia. One of these principles is that
philosophy *deals with general notions......*
"The immediate effect of the principle is to make people start their
researches with attention to generalities: beauty, value, culture, and so
forth. Such concepts, however, have no systematic virtue; they are not terms
of description, as scientific concepts, e.g., mass, time, location, etc.,
are. They have no unit, and cannot be combined in definite proportions. They
are 'abstract qualities' like the elementary notions of Greek nature
philosophy—wetness and dryness, heat and cold, lightness and heaviness. And
just as no physics ever resulted from the classification of things by those
attributes, so no art theory emerges from the contemplation of 'aesthetic
values.' The desire to deal with general ideas from the outset, because that
is supposed to be the business of philosophers, leads one into what may be
termed 'the fallacy of obvious abstraction': the abstraction and
schematization of properties most obvious to common sense, traditionally
recognized and embodied in the 'material mode' of language."
But how do we avoid the fallacy of obvious abstraction? One answer is that
proposed by Clifford Geertz, whose death left anthropology bereft of one of
its most prodigious minds. Plunging into 'thick description' of whatever we
are trying to understand, working our way through detail piled on detail, we
may come at last to Geertz' ideal, descriptions complex enough to capture
something of the world's complexity, while retaining the clarity that makes
simplistic ideas so appealing.
Geertz' essay on thick description begins with a citation from Langer. Now
it is time, it seems to me, to revisit the philosopher herself.
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
http://www.wordworks.jp/
Other related posts:
