Why Words Are Needed

8/10/2019 Why Words Are Needed

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/why-words-are-needed 1/6

Why Words Are NeededAuthor(s): Rudolf ArnheimSource: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Summer, 1998), pp. 21-25Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3333555 .Accessed: 14/07/2014 11:09

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Aesthetic Education.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 20 2.41.10.21 on Mon, 14 Jul 201 4 11:09:34 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=illinois

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3333555?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp





http://www.jstor.org/stable/3333555?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=illinois



Why Words Are Needed

RUDOLF ARNHEIM

It should be evident that words by themselves are not a sufficient instru-ment of thinking. Words are a referential medium, meaningless without thefacts of experience to which they refer.' It has been shown that the sensescontribute much more to the foundation of thought than was traditionallyassumed. Perception comes about in evolution not merely as the mechani-cal recording of projections by the sensory organs. It is a search for informa-tion and orientation and therefore takes the form of what I have describedas perceptual concepts.2

In vision, for example, there is a search for definable, recognizable kinds

of shapes which are prerequisites of learning. Eventually, these perceptualconcepts harden into what I will call intellectual concepts. They becomesomewhat independent of the immediate, transitory experience, as stableentities. They persist in memory and are available for use when required.By no means, however, is the term 'intellectual' intended to suggest that these

concepts are entirely detached from sensory experience, afloat in a no-man's-land of abstraction. Although more abstract than perceptual concepts,they too remain directly reliant on sensory experience.

Parallel to early thinking, there develops consciousness. It is reasonable

to assume that consciousness comes about gradually in the animal king-dom, from simple perceptual responses or choices to ever more complexones. This assumption is more reasonable than it is to believe, in a narrow-

mindedly human-centered way, that consciousness arises in homo sapienssuddenly and out of the blue.

Once we have stable concepts and consciousness, it would seem that lan-

guage must be either already involved in the cognitive process or else su-

perfluous. The obvious answer, which is universally given, is that languageis needed for communication. Developed from the primordial sounds bywhich animals exchange messages, language is handy, either as sounds or

Rudolf Arnheim is Professor Emeritus of the Psychology of Art, Harvard University.His most recent books are To the Rescue of Art: Twenty-Six Essays and The Split and theStructure: Twenty-Eight Essays.

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 32, No. 2, Summer 1998@1998Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois








22 Rudolf Arnheim

in writing or as whatever other signs and signals. The reference to commu-nication is certainly pertinent, but it is not a sufficient explanation of why

language is needed, unless we are also told what kind of medium the verbalmessages use for their communications; and the answer is by no meansobvious.

Philosophers, especially John Locke, have made so many relevant pointsabout the general nature of language that there seems to be little to add. K.W. von Humboldt observes somewhere in his writings on the origins of lan-

guage that language could not have been invented unless its kind of thing,its Typus, already existed in human reasoning. John Locke in his EssayConcerning Human Understanding says that words came to be used by the

signs of their ideas, not by any natural connection that there is between par-ticular articulate sounds and certain ideas. 3 And at the beginning of thenext chapter he says:

All things that exist being particulars, it may perhaps be thought rea-sonable that words, which ought to be conformed to things, shouldbe so too-I mean in their signification: but yet we find quite the con-trary. The far greatest part of words that make all languages are gen-eral terms: which has not been the effect of neglect or chance, but ofreason and necessity.4

And Locke concludes: Words become general by being made the signs ofgeneral ideas. 5

These few examples remind us that words are mere signs that do notcontain any of the meaning to which they refer. To acquire such meaningthey can rely on highly organized intellectual concepts in the mind. This,as I said above, makes us suspect that words may be involved already in theformation of intellectual concepts; but it also raises the question of what lin-

guistic signs are needed for. What do they add to what the mind is alreadyequipped for?

The answer I would like to suggest is that it is precisely the nakedness ofthe linguistic signs, their being devoid of any inherent reference to content,that makes them all but indispensable for thought at any higher level. Their

deficiency is their virtue.Intellectual concepts suffer from being inseparably derived from percep-

tual concepts. They leak. Consider as an example the concept 'cat' and theendless variety of connotations the concept conjures up: the domestic cat,cattiness, the other members of the cat family such as lions, tigers, leopards,or lynxes, and their physical and behavioral traits. To avoid the leakiness of

such a concept, scientists resort to technical terms. To discuss cats they canrefer to felix catus. Such a term is free of meaning unless it is endowed withsome.

Technical terms, however, are but extreme examples of what holds for

words in general. All words have a clean slate until we endow them with








Why Words Are Needed 23

connotations. Even outside of the sciences, a word may be given a standard

meaning, such as tort when defined by law, or when it is introduced by an

influential authority, such as Giorgio Vasari's definition of the Renaissance.But because of the very arbitrariness of linguistic signs, the meaning of aword can be changed with ease when someone derives new evidence fromthe world of experience, such as Newton's or Einstein's redefinition of

gravitation.The answer, then, to the question of why and when language is needed

at an advanced level of thinking is that it supplies thought with a mediumthat frees it from the unmanageable complexity of the experienced naturalworld. The deficiency of language is its advantage.

To answer the question of why language is needed, it does not suffice tocall linguistic signs a comfortable but imperfect expedient for the represen-tation of concepts. We must realize that their very abstractness is a positivefacilitation of thought. To repeat, I wish to suggest here that language is an

indispensable tool of thinking at an advanced level because it suppliesthought with a medium that frees it from the complexity of the experiencednatural world.

I have used the same argument in 1932 to show that the film mediumobtains its aesthetic possibilities by its deficiencies, which distinguish it

from the perception of the natural world.6What is the consequence of this insight for the aesthetic media of litera-ture, poetry, and prose? The freedom offered by the abstractness of lan-

guage is evident in poetry. When Emily Dickinson writes, I reason, earth is

short, and anguish absolute, 7 anguish and earth go smoothly with reasonand absolute. No medium but the verbal could accomplish this feat. Meta-

phors or similes are good examples of how scenes belonging to different

settings in the sensory world can be united at the same level in language. Ina visual medium such as film, it takes special effort to override the differ-

ence in space or time between the scenes, if one wishes to unite them in or-der to point to their common denominator. To overcome this obstacle,

thought has to rise to a level of abstraction beyond perceptual discrepancy.8The words of language, being at a level of abstraction in the first place, haveno such trouble, even though concepts must rely on concrete imagery.When Delacroix depicts liberty, he shows a woman brandishing the flag ofrevolution on the barricade. He represents a concept by an image. Lan-

guage does the opposite. It uses the verbal sign of liberty to conjure up the

image.

It is worth referring here to Marcel Proust, whose acute sense of observa-tion makes him note some relevant relations between language and what hecalls reality. As a youngster, confined to the narrow environment of his par-ents' Parisian home, he relies on what he has read and heard about thetowns in France or abroad he longs to visit. In Du Cotd de chez Swann he has








24 Rudolf Arnheim

a chapter on names of places, in which he remembers the names of the sta-tions listed in the timetable of the trains to the Normandy coast.9 He says

that words make the corresponding images more specific and thereby morereal. Words present us with a clear and familiar little image, as are put upin schools to give children an example of what is a workbench, a bird, ananthill, things being conceived as all others of the same kind. 10 He saysthat the heavy syllable of the word Parme, the French name of the town ofParma, appeared to him as compact, smooth, mauve, and gentle. And headds that such images are false because they are forcibly simplified. 11

What are the consequences for verbal descriptions of works of the visualarts? It is well known that such descriptions can never match the full expe-

rience of a painting or sculpture when it is directly looked at. Why is this so,and what can verbal descriptions offer instead?I will limit myself to two quotations from the great nineteenth-century

art historian Jacob Burckhardt. When he discusses Rembrandt's Descent

from the Cross-presumably the version of 1633 in the Alte Pinakothek inMunich-he says: Rembrandt has made himself aware, with the greatestlove of reality, of the kinetic forces demanded by the action, the pull backfrom the foreground at a lower level and the forward push from behind at alevel higher up, while the stem of the cross is already rooted in the ground. 12

Because language stands for an assemblage of concepts, Burckhardt selectsone category that is particularly relevant to the painting he is describing,namely, the kinetic forces of action. He barely indicates the spatial relationsbetween the two forces. The further description of the painting is left to fur-ther selections of such particular features. (It is also significant that without

consulting an illustration of the painting, one has no idea what the descriptionrefers to.)

When, however, Burckhardt wants to do justice to a whole composition,as he does while discussing Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper at Santa Maria

delle Grazie in Milan, he writes:Each figure is an animated whole within itself, and yet, how they allbelong together: try to remove a single figure, and the painting is de-stroyed. Every hand, every movement of a finger looks indispens-able. One believes that the idea of the whole painting must have ap-peared suddenly and in one and the same moment in his mind, andone cannot persuade oneself that each figure, each group should havebeen conceived and invented by itself.13

Burckhardt cannot present in words the wholeness of the painting, nor

could I myself do so in my writing. It is beyond the ability of language. Thisis so because to give reality to a gestalt, the total interaction of all compo-nents of a whole in their structural hierarchy, is the privilege of organicfunctioning.14 It can be observed in approximation in the structure of the

bodies of animals and plants. Such wholes can also be perceived by the








Why Words Are Needed 25

senses, especially by vision, hearing, and touch, because percepts are equiva-lents of processes taking place in the nervous system, which is at the core of

organic functioning. The senses provide us with the experience of works ofart in their fullness, to which we falteringly refer when we communicate inwords.

What is the upshot? Words are needed because they provide languagewith sets of signs that let us detach our statements from the meanings towhich they refer. The rich meanings for which language is commonly givencredit are owed to the perceptual and intellectual concepts which draw onlife's sensory experience. Words make language possible by the very bareness

they offer as a base.

NOTES

1. Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali-fornia Press, 1969).

2. Perceptual Abstraction and Art, in Rudolf Arnheim, Toward Psychology fArt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 31-50.

3. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Dover,1959), p. 8.

4. Ibid., p. 14.5.

Ibid., p.16.

6. Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley nd Los Angeles: University of CaliforniaPress, 1957).

7. Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson (New York: Modern Library, 1890), p. 173.8. Abstract Concepts and the Metaphor, n Arnheim, Toward Psychology fArt,

pp. 266-82.9. Marcel Proust, A la Recherche u Temps erdu Paris: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de

la Plkiade, 1954), p. 387. I am indebted for the references o Proust to ProfessorMarcel Muller.

10. Ibid.11. Ibid., p. 389.12. Jacob Burckhardt, Kulturgeschichtliche ortrdige Leipzig: Kr6ner, n.d.), p. 129.13.

Jacob Burckhardt,Die Kunst der

BetrachtungK61n:

Dumont, 1984), p.42.

14. But see Wolfgang K6hler, Die Physichen Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationdrenZustand (Braunschweig: ieweg, 1920).






Why Words Are Needed

Documents

Transcript of Why Words Are Needed