Significant Formation: An Intersubjective Approach to Aesthetic Experience in Cassirer and Langer, by Anne Pollok
In Ernst Cassirer’s late writings, art is understood as a language that forms its subject matter not to convey an understanding of the world, but to create “a manifestation of inner life” (Essay on Man, p. 169). And even though its boundaries are within the subject (“inner”), such a manifestation rests on a social act, defying attempts to disqualify this Neo-Kantian approach as “merely subjective.” Such an act expands the subject’s grasp on her experience of this inner life, and enables her to transcend mere subjectivity. What Cassirer describes, in particular in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942), as an interplay between artistic manifestation and creative appropriation gets a new twist with Susan Langer’s perspective on symbolic formation in the arts as a realization–and a fundamental formulation–of “felt life” (“Living Form,” p. 48). For Langer, the constitutive force of aesthetic formation explains their ability to enable and share our understanding of ourselves as sensitive actors in a mutually conceived world.
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Anne Pollok is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of the book Facetten des Menschen: Zur Anthropologie Moses Mendelssohns (Meiner, 2010). She has also published a number of articles on the history of early modern philosophy and the philosophy of culture, including “The First and Second Person Perspective in History: Or, Why History is ‘Culture Fiction’,” in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer: A Novel Assessment, ed. J. Tyler Friedman and Sebastian Luft (De Gruyter, 2015); “The Power of Rituals: Mendelssohn and Cassirer on the Religious Dimension of Bildung,” Religious Studies (2014); and “Kant’s Defeated Counterpart: Moses Mendelssohn on the Beauty, Mechanics, and Death of the Human Soul,” in Kant’s Philosophy of the Unconscious, ed. Piero Giordanetti, Riccardo Pozzo, and Marco Sgarbi (De Gruyter, 2012).
Anne Pollok, “Significant Formation: An Intersubjective Approach to Aesthetic Experience in Cassirer and Langer,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 37:1 (2016), pp. 71–95.