The Art of Expressing Selves

Abstract Edith Landmann-Kalischer's account of art's cognitive power is an important, though undeservedly neglected, early cognitivist-expressive approach to art. She contributes to the cognitivist-expressivist tradition in aesthetics by arguing that art provides a sui generis cognition of the self's “inner life” by expressing it. This paper explores questions regarding the nature and place of expression in our lives, both with one another and with art, that have not garnered much attention in recent decades. By so doing, it challenges Landmann-Kalischer's views of (1) art as expressing individuals' mental states, which art merely reflects, rather than shared forms of life, which art also constitutes, (2) the connection between the expressed and its expression, both in non-artistic and artistic contexts, (3) the mental as passively given to the self, and as requiring knowledge by discovery, (4) the individual rather than interpersonal character of expressions, both in non-artistic and artistic contexts, and (5) art's cognitive power as a matter of mirroring the individual appreciator's interior life, rather than as also, centrally, a matter of facilitating self-understanding by challenging and expanding our current forms of experiencing, valuing, and expressing. I argue that great art “makes” rather than merely “mirrors” our world partly by offering an expression that is analogous to that of another person, with whom we stand in a second-person relationship.