Three observations on Languages of Art

Abstract

Languages of Art is a significant work that stands the test of time. This it does because it hits its mark more than any other work written in English and of its view known to me. The main theme takes art as a special kind of symbolic system. Goodman's analysis proved that this kind of symbolic system has indeed nothing in common with language sensu stricto. Goodman's arguments and reflections paralleled the semio logical research carried out in France and Italy since the 1960s. However, his method was different and his contribution more closely approaches, as I see it, the findings of the phenomenologist Mikel Dufrenne than those of the semiotician Umberto Eco. I entirely sympathize with Goodman's conclusion that art cannot be considered in the strict sense a language even in the sense of a script (as literature, or to some degree theater or film), because it is notoriously at odds with the requirements of notational scheme, i.e., syntactic disjointedness and semantic lack of ambiguity. My own methodological orientation does not rest on logical analysis applied as the principal procedure. However, the more I admire Goodman's subtlety in treating art, the better I realize how the analytico-logical approach has usually neglected or omitted the peculiarly aesthetic charac? teristics. Not until Goodman's well-conceived achievement had any traveler on his philosophical route been able to employ its intrinsic method to defend the view that fundamentally art is equivocally articulated (with growing obscurity that leads to 'density'), expressive ('meta? phorically exemplificational') and both syntactically and semantically endowed with fullness that entails contingency ('replete'). When situated with regard to the paradigms of present-day aesthetics, Goodman's results are not novel. None the less they are original because of the way Goodman arrives at them. Another fresh idea is his strategy for coping with works of art as sets of symbols and accordingly of comprehending the arts in a general theory of symbolic systems. In his introduction