Susanne Langer’s Aesthetics of Consciousness

Abstract

To engage with something aesthetically you must be conscious of it. But can consciousness itself be an object of aesthetic appreciation? Is consciousness aesthetically interesting? If it is, there may be room for a theory of how this can be: of what is interesting about consciousness (or some particular form of it), from an aesthetic point of view, and what our relations to it must be for us to engage with it. Such would be an ‘aesthetics of consciousness’. I argue that such a theory is already available, in the work of Susanne Langer. Langer’s account is primarily a theory of art. She tells us both what makes something art, and what differentiates its various forms: what each art form has to offer that is distinctively its own. Langer takes the defining feature of art to be that it articulates for us the nature of various conscious states, and perhaps that of consciousness itself. This is art's mission, and to appreciate art, as art, is to appreciate it as articulating forms of consciousness. But, more than this, it will emerge that on Langer’s view, to appreciate a work of art is to appreciate the conscious states it expresses. Her view thus tells us both that it is indeed possible for those states to be objects of aesthetic engagement, and how this can be. It thereby offers us at least a good part of an aesthetics of consciousness.