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p In her writings Langer almost never uses the term “value”. This is quite understandable. In Philosophy in a New Key the author asks the question: “What is artistic value?" and answers: “It’s beauty" (see 3, 204). In Feeling and Form she gives a precise formulation of her interpretation of beauty. “Beauty is expressive form" (5,396). In Mind. .., insofar as expressive form is treated as a quality, the formulation acquires the following shape: it is this quality (the quality of expression) “that constitutes beauty in art" (10, 127). The author says that she means by “quality” not what the English empiricists called “ primary and secondary qualities”. “This quality is the projected feeling" (10, 106).

p Functioning as a quality of a created object artistic value is objective in the sense that it exists outside the subject. In connection with this Langer writes that although the work of art displays a subjective character it is itself objective. 167 For Langer artistic value is objective insofar as it represents a projection of knowledge of a feeling, of the truth about the actual state of feelings, and not a personal, subjective feeling. Moreover in every beautiful work of art this knowledge and this truth are new. The objectivity of quality, and therefore of beauty (of artistic value) does not in Langer’s conception have anything in common with the materialistic notion of objectivity. We must not forget that quality in Langer’s theory is the quality of expressive form, and the latter is not sensuous (physical) form, but ideal form, and it obtains in a virtual field, having a phenomenological nature. That is why there is every reason to assert that Langer’s writings are essentially concerned with a phenomenological conception of beauty. This conception is inevitably connected with the negation or underestimation of the role and place in art of sensually perceived components, as mentioned above. In actual fact, if the essence of art is to be seen in virtual expressive form, which has an imaginary status, it follows that the better the work of art the more it loses its material status, the less we perceive the actual properties, focussing our attention on its phenomenal virtual form, on pure phenomenon. This line of thought has a certain logic, but the conclusion to which it leads contradicts experience of human contact with art. This experience shows that real, sensually perceived components of art are the most important and necessary conditions for an authentic aesthetic perception of works of art.

p We should note that the American author, is not over-consistent in this question either. The ambiguity, in her reviewer Tejera’s phrase, of her approach to the ideal or sensuous nature of expressive form in art can also be felt in her notion of quality. In direct contradiction to its phenomenological treatment, the term “quality” is frequently understood as “sensually perceptible”. Thus is her book Mind... the author writes that the purpose of the work of art is to present his idea of some mode of feeling in the nameless but sensible quality (10, 124). She continues in the same “key” with her many qualifications to the effect that artistic form cannot make an integral impression if we abstract ourselves from 168 colour, weight, volume, etc. When we see the essence of Langer’s conception of “expressive form" it is not hard to make thd conclusion that these qualifications, which represent lipservice to common sense, or, to be more exact, to irrefutable experience of human contact with art, cannot be coordinated around the central idea of Langer’s aesthetics of the “ illusory”, phenomenal space, in which the work of art exists.

We have already noted above the influence of pragmatic philosophy on Langer’s views. This influence can also be detected in her concept of beauty. Like the pragmatist aestheticians Langer does not identify the specifics of aesthetic feeling. Understanding by beauty a projected feeling she is clearly stating that all types of feeling can be projected in art. The terms “aesthetics” and “aesthetic” are hardly used at all in her writings. Neither is this surprising, for the problems of “aesthetic quality”, “aesthetic perception" as specific phenomena, constituting the object of study of the science of aesthetics effectively do not exist for Langer.

p Langer’s works on aesthetics are extensively known (20; 27). They are reviewed in American, English, Italian, German, Polish and other journals, and provoke polemic responses. Two basic lines can be clearly discerned in the variegated opinions of her commentators. The first is the recognition that in modern (western) aesthetics Langer is in the front rank of writers on the philosophy of art, and is a respected and influential leading thinker in her field.  [168•1  The second is the sober realization that her works do not contain a fundamentally new resolution of the theoretical problems of art, which have already been identified by modern aesthetics and received a certain amount of illumination.

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p There is no doubt that there are grounds for the high esteem enjoyed by Langer. The writings of the author of Philosophy in a New Key have undeniable philosophical merit. She identifies and resolves the problems of art in the broad context of the problems of modern philosophy in general. Admittedly, this context is restricted largely to the problems of the neo-positivist (in the spirit of Whitehead and Wittgenstein), phenomenological (Husserlian) and neo-Kantian (in Cassirer’s version) schools. We should note Langer’s critical attitude (of course, from idealistic positions) to the conception of art in the theories of pragmatism, behaviourism and Freudianism. The American aesthetician’s arguments have the allure of being based on the achievements of modern psychology. The author has a particular proclivity for Gestalt psychology, which is attributable both to the undoubted practical achievements of this branch of psychology and to its close kinship to Langer’s own views with its phenomenological foundations. We should also note the refinement of her aesthetics. Langer is a connoisseur of art and art history, and makes use of a wealth of factual material from different arts.

p All this together explains the great popularity of Langer’s views, whose influence can be traced in many a monograph, article and paper read at conferences on aesthetics.

p There is a close kinship as well between Langer’s conception of art and those modern theories of anti-realist art which sanction the poetry of “pure meanings" without any similarity to reality (T. A. Meyer), and defend the theory of absolute music (E. Hanslick), etc.  [169•1 

p Langer’s aesthetics have had undoubted influence on the theory and practice of modernist art, and there is an obvious 170 connection between this influence and the formalist essence of her theory of art. The first, last and only objective of the artist’s work she declares to be the creation of form. But then what role, we might ask, is accorded in Langer’s aesthetics to the content of the work of art? In the terminology adopted in her writings, this is as follows: to elucidate the meaning of representation in art. In her earlier works she has a more “radical” position on this question. She regards as ideal art that which is free from imitation, from representation and which effectively communicates the meaning of expressive form. The latter, in Langer’s opinion, is the “quintessence” of art, which is what “so-called ‘abstract art’ seeks to convey”, and which is what “non-imitative arts have always expressed" (6, 107). Thus, Langer considers abstract art most suitable for the fulfilment of the tasks and objectives which it is required to fulfil by her theory.

p In her work Mind... the author talks of the “close link" between art and nature, of the “rationality” of the age-old and almost universal practice of representation in painting and sculpture. Here she expresses a different opinion of “abstract art": “Our present cultivation of non-representational art, for all its importance, is episodic in history" (10, 87). Thus, Langer’s attitude to content in art changed in the direction of a greater recognition of its value, but throughout she retained her basic premise: not form for content, but content for form, form is the goal, content the means. There is every justification to describe this approach as formalist.

In a general evaluation of Susanne Langer’s aesthetics we can say that she did not achieve a theory of art in a “new key”. The idealistic methodology in the American philosopher’s analysis of art prevented her from avoiding the “ paradoxes and anomalies" which are the inevitable concomitants of idealistic aesthetics.