Lightness and Brightness and Other Confusions

knowledge constitutes logical knowledge. (Baumgarten 1983, p 80). Baumgarten
contributes to traditional epistemology with an intuitive (aesthetic)
dimension. The tacit meaning of space, colour and light belongs to aesthetic
experience. Emotions and feelings are so closely connected to perceptions
that they could be regarded almost as part of the same phenomenon. They set
the tone or the mood. They give an intuitive hint about our situation – not
what it means, but how it is.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN 28 , in Tractatus, states: “Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one must be silent.” (Wittgenstein 1992, p 37), but he adds that what
is beyond the limits of (verbal) language manifests itself to the senses and can
be demonstrated. (Wittgenstein 1992, p 122). Susanne K. Langer’s aesthetic
philosophy is part of the epistemological tradition from Baumgarten. Connecting
to Wittgenstein she asks how we give mental and expressive form to
the tacit dimension. She claims that the emotional content we experience in
objects or spaces is symbolic in a special way. In the surrounding world we
perceive visual qualities that are spatially logical patterns of colour, light,
form and movements. Patterns of such qualities always belong to functional
situations in life, each one with their own characteristic emotional content.
Hence colour and form structures can give visual experience of the world.
Abstracted from their normal context – e.g. in designed objects and designed
spaces – colour and form patterns, according to Susanne Langer, can be experienced
or used as symbols for felt life (Langer 1957, p 60 and p 374). Susanne
Langer calls them logical expressive – or articulated – symbols. They
are what we may call the artistic or aesthetic dimension in pictures, in utility
goods, in architecture – in the surrounding world. (Langer 1953, p 31 and pp
51–52). Ludwig Wittgenstein says that feelings follow experience of a piece of
music, just as they follow courses in life. (Wittgenstein 1993, p 19). A piece of
music consists of a sequence of tones. It has a structural resemblance to
courses in life – rhythm, pauses and breaks, pitches, etc. – and thus it can be
used as an example. The auditive structure in music is not a course of life, but
felt life abstracted in a logical expressive symbol. This is also true of perceived
colour and light structures.
The ecological approach offers rational and coherent explanations for many
of those perceptual phenomena that cannot completely be described by physical
concepts or be explained by physical theories. It also builds bridges between
perception theory, philosophical aesthetics, art theory and scientific
theory about the material world. Thereby it helps to make human experience
of the world a multidisciplinary but coherent field of research.
We can describe the world around with concepts based on either physical
aspects or human aspects of reality. The concepts of the human experience
and the concepts of the physical reality constitute two equally valuable con-
28
Austrian-British philosopher, 1889-1951
26