How to whistle something that can not be said

Philosophy of creativity in the becoming of the culture’s language

Abstract

Art languages are not easy to study because, even if their syntax can be analyzed, their semantics poses a difficult problem. Natural descriptive language with its semantics as a reference to external objectivity does not work as a model for this area because, firstly, in this case the specificity of art as such is lost, and secondly, such a model is not applicable to music, surrealist painting, and avant-garde poetry. Understanding artistic symbols as directly referring to human emotions also cannot form the basis of a semantic theory of art since the connection between expressive means and emotions may turn out to be natural and not conventional, which contradicts the very idea of a sign-symbol. The right path can be indicated by the concept of exemplification, proposed by Nelson Goodman. Within this concept, some object that has some natural commonality with the signified — for example, color — is in a relationship of back reference with a term or concept that semantically refers to this object. However, such a semantic solution does not seem sufficient in the case of such «non-objective» arts as music since it does not answer the question about the nature of the signified itself. As a possible solution, the concept of «showing» is proposed, which, as an alternative to «saying», was put forward by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Saying and showing are seen there as mutually exclusive: what is shown in the signs of language cannot be expressed through language. In addition to the logical form, the object of showing can be the «limit of the world», understood by Wittgenstein as a synonym for the «metaphysical subject». What is common in showing the logical form and the limit of the world is the «method of projection». Thus, a musical phrase as an example within the relation of exemplification indicates a way of projecting the world that shifts its limit and accordingly changes the «experiencing of the world as a whole».