Presentational Symbolism

Presentational symbolism is one half of a distinction that philosopher Susanne Langer spent her career establishing as the most important boundary in the philosophy of mind. Its counterpart, discursive symbolism, is the mode of language and logic: sequential, decomposable, combinable by rules, each element carrying a meaning stable across contexts. Presentational symbolism is the mode of music, visual art, and felt experience: simultaneous, holistic, relational, meaningful as a whole through the configuration of its parts rather than through the sequential parsing of its elements. A sentence delivers its meaning word by word; a musical phrase delivers its meaning all at once, and its significance cannot be recovered from an inventory of its notes. A face expressing grief is not identified by measuring the angle of each feature and summing the results; the grief is perceived immediately, as a quality of the whole configuration, and changing any single element changes the meaning of every other. This is