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The arts

The other four branches gather thinkers; this one gathers none. It is the demonstration. In the arts the dynamic of meaning runs undisguised — the practice itself, meaning made in the moving of a medium, in plain view. Look at the doing rather than the saying about it.

The bridge into this region is Langer. She carried Cassirer’s symbolic forms — the world-forming codes of the philosophy of art — into the arts that represent nothing, holding that a work of art is a presentational symbol: it presents the forms of feeling directly, in a shape that cannot be paraphrased into discursive language. Music she called “the tonal analogue of emotive life” — the meaning carried in the motion of the tones, not in any content they point to. The fuller account is on her page and on the symbolic forms subject; what matters here is that it takes the dynamic into a medium with no reference to hide behind.

Music is the sharpest case. Its tooling is wholly shared — scale, register, metre, the conventions of a tradition, all of it common property a listener already carries. Its expression is wholly unique — this phrase, shaped now, like no other. And nothing is represented: a melody is not about anything, makes no claim, points nowhere outside itself; what it means is made in the playing and nowhere else. Shared tooling, unique charge, meaning in the moving — the dynamic itself, here with nothing to hide behind.

That is what makes the arts the demonstration. The same three things are true of a philosophical argument — shared concepts, a unique combination, meaning made in the working — but there the reference to a world lets the activity pass for representation, for a pointing-at rather than a making. In music the reference is gone, so the playing shows plainly as playing. What the thinking branches gather under many names, this branch simply exhibits.

Music is where the demonstration is clearest and most developed; the wider territory — abstract visual art, the other non-representational arts, the long argument over musical meaning — extends it. And what the arts show most vividly is the generative in the moment — the unique made from shared tooling, here and now. The longer loop, where the playing builds new tooling over time, runs through the gradient and evolution reach of semiotics.

Four branches show the dynamic named and renamed across the field; this one shows it done. In a medium that points nowhere, the motion of meaning is not inferred from a theory but watched in the act — the practice shown where it cannot disguise itself.

See also: Aesthetics (the surface this belongs to) · Langer · Symbolic forms · The philosophy of art