# The Primary Illusions and the Great Orders of Art ![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/article0.00998d930354.png) ## Metadata - Author: [[anthonyflood.com]] - Full Title: The Primary Illusions and the Great Orders of Art - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The text discusses how different art forms, like music and dance, create illusions of time and power. Music uses sound to represent the passage of time, while dance conveys motion as an actual experience. Both arts form their unique illusions, highlighting their essential unity despite differing expressions. - URL: http://www.anthonyflood.com/langerprimaryillusions.htm ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > All art is the creation of forms expressive of human feeling, from the primitive sense of vitality that goes with breathing and moving one’s limbs, or even suddenly resting, to the poignant emotions of love and grief and ecstasy. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jh88msgzcasm2ddgbd1q2gqm)) > painting is technically as different from sculpture as it is from piano playing; but it is near to sculpture and far from piano playing, because the primary illusion it creates is virtual space, and what music creates is something else. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jh85mt3dsrq1qt7r9hxyzakq)) > The function of plastic art—”to make space visible, and its continuity sensible,” as Hildebrand stated it—has been generally overlooked, because a much less important but more obvious function commanded people’s first interest: imitation of things that are visible in actuality (which space is not). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jh85smasct0nxt44cwr1pcf5)) > **Yet music is the most enthralling, i.e. illusionistic, phenomenon in the world. What we hear in listening to sounds “musically” is not their specific pitch and loudness, duration and timbre. Often we are not even specifically aware of melody, harmony, or rhythmic figure, yet the music is perfectly meaningful. What we hear is what Hanslick has properly described as “*tönend bewegte Formen”*—“sounding forms in motion.” We hear movement and rest, swift movement or slow, stop, attack, direction, parallel and contrary motion, melody rising or soaring or sinking, harmonies crowding or resolving or clashing; moving forms in continuous flux.** > **But in all this progressive motion there is actually nothing that moves.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jh7k0erjjjgbhykfp6pt1q1v)) > The motion of sounding forms, like the forms themselves—everything, in fact, but the sounding—is sheer appearance, illusion. The forms are virtual, their motion is virtual, and the whole composition is a semblance. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jh895qmeb9bkex0zvbq4pkx8)) > Just as the space of experience is not the space of geometry, so experienced time is not the time we establish by clocks. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jh85wbha0tjhzp2precdvd51)) > Why space should be less real is hard to understand, but his doctrine has a true intent none the less: for “spatialized” time is time conceived through a *metaphor* from space experience, and the time-concept thus attained is “clock time” in the broadest sense, culminating in the useful but artificial construction we call “scientific time.” It is not based on the feeling of passage, but on the comparison of physical *states* and the observation of differences between them. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jh7k50s1n50dz9yxfjyfsxar)) - Note: Interesting to think of this first sentence in relation to Louise Richardson' M's Problem paper > Besides the property we commonly call “length,” and treat as its one dimension, it has another that I can only denote, metaphorically, as *volume*. Subjectively, a unit of time may be great or small as well as long or short. The slang phrase “a big time” is psychologically more accurate than “a pleasant time” or “a quickly-passed time.” It is this voluminousness of the direct experience of passage that makes it, as Bergson says, indivisible. But even its volume is not simple; for it is filled with its own characteristic forms, as space is filled with material forms; and each order is really conceivable only because it is divided by the things in it, whereby it may be noted and measured. The forms that fill time are *tensions*—physical emotional or intellectual. Time exists for us because we experience tensions and their resolutions. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jh7k772w62a0awpkxq7508wm)) > Subjective time is perceived in actual life only in a haphazard and confused way. For practical purposes we largely ignore it and let the formal measurements of the clock predominate, because they are designed pragmatically in the universal framework of astronomical events, so that we can all agree on them. Like actual space, which we measure in geometric abstraction or else accept vaguely as a mixture of views, things, and places, so actual time is either a scientific datum or a confused experience of physical and mental strains—of waiting, expectation, fulfillment, surprise. It has no unified perceptual form, no clear continuity. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jh898jbwares3na70t2my5zx)) > anything is a musical element that enters into the illusion—that serves to create, support, and organize the virtual image of time. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jh86faa6ykw4beetnvbdgwg0)) > Gesticulation, however, is not art; it is expression, subjective self-expression or objective logical expression as the case may be, but as long as it is essentially either emotive or practical it is not art. If gestures could convey nothing but literal ideas—“I throw a ball,” “the swan dies,” “this is the way we wash the clothes”—they would not lend themselves to artistic uses. But they are more than involuntary or semantic acts: they are *forms* of behavior. As forms they may be abstracted, and treated freely to create rhythms, indivisible lines of action, the appearance of challenge and response, the illusion of powers in conflict, in balance, or in union. And here we have the ruling principle—the primary illusion of balletic art: all dance creates a realm of virtual *Power,* an illusory field of forces involved only with each other, weaving a fabric of freely rhythmic, continuous and coherent gesture. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jh88b1ndn890gd985yqaf487)) > Artistically such performance has very limited possibilities, yet it creates its own little realm of virtual power, and is genuine dance. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jh887an7tttwf5ysg370nqn2)) > But it is a thought really seen in its passage, followed through from its whimsical rise to the final pronouncement of taste that closes it. The idea is fully entertained, without being foiled by the incursion of other, perhaps more important thoughts; and it seems to be entertained actively, at the moment, though it was written more than 300 years ago. The reason is that it is the semblance of a thought; that is why we read it as something essentially *timeless*. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jh7khdst5y0jbzzyexz8cwnz)) > Nothing has been said, so far, about that ancient and eminent art form, the drama; and in the compass of this essay little can be said, save that I believe the *drama is not strictly literature at all*. It has a different origin, and uses words only as *utterances*. It is a kindred art, for it produces the same primary illusion as literature, namely the semblance of experienced events, but in a different mode: instead of creating a virtual Past it creates a virtual Present. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jh8a5cfe9v0mtr371pnj4ww2))