The core concept of modern western symbolism aesthetics. Symbolism aesthetics is differentiated from symbolism philosophy and is a part of symbolism philosophy. Its founder is the modern German philosopher Ernst Cassirer. His symbolic philosophy studies human culture from the perspective of human nature, so he calls his philosophy the philosophy of human culture. He believes that the fundamental difference between man and animals is that man is a rational animal, because man and his creation have many irrational elements; It is not that people are social animals, because animals also have their own society; But that man is a symbolic animal, which animals don't have and is unique to people. When he said that man is a symbolic animal, he meant that man can think symbolically and act symbolically. In On Man, he said: "Symbolic thinking and symbolic behavior are the most representative features of human life, and all the development of human culture depends on these conditions." "It is this system of human activities that defines and depicts the circle of' human beings'. Language, mythology, religion, art, science and history are all components and departments of this circle. " People's symbolic thinking and symbolic behavior have created human culture, and various cultural forms have become symbols created by people. People live in this symbolic universe, and everything except symbols is meaningless to people.

Cahill thinks all cultural forms are symbols, but he doesn't think all cultural forms are the same. In Philosophy of Symbolic Form, he divided people's spiritual ability into two kinds, one is the logic of analytical reasoning and the other is creative imagination. It is believed that the former can create language and the latter can create myth. These two are twins of the earliest human culture. Later, religion and art developed on the basis of creative imagination of myth, while science developed on the basis of logical reasoning of language. These two cultural forms have different meanings and functions to both the subject and the object. The former is expressive and emotional. The latter is reappearance or pure meaning. Later, in On Man, Cassirer further emphasized the emotional function of myth and art, thinking that "the real matrix of myth is not the matrix of thinking, but the matrix of emotion"; "One of the greatest privileges of art is that it has never lost this' era of God'", that is, expressing people's feelings through imagination. However, unlike Croce and Collingwood, he does not think that the emotion expressed by art is purely personal, and he advocates giving emotion a form. "Art is indeed expressive, but it cannot be expressed without configuration. This configuration process is carried out in some kind of perceptual medium. " These theories laid a theoretical foundation for Susan Langer to put forward the concept of "emotional symbol".

In Cahill's view, although he distinguished various cultural forms, he focused on the unity of various cultural forms, although he "sought the unity of activities, not products, but the creative process". This difference became obvious in his student, American aesthetician Susan Langer. Langer divides the whole symbol system into two categories: one is reasoning symbol, whose representative form is language; One is the expressive symbol, whose representative form is art. She said in "The Art Question": "Language can make us realize the relationship between things around us and between things around us and ourselves, while art can make us realize the subjective reality, emotions and emotions" and "enable us to truly grasp the whole process of the emergence, ups and downs and disappearance of life movements and emotions. "These two symbolic forms come from two human instincts and needs. On the one hand, people have the ability and need of rational practice, which is the foundation of language. People think abstractly according to language and deal with the relationship between people and things around them. People also have the ability and need to express their emotions, which is the basis of producing art. Based on this, people transform people's emotions into visible and audible forms, realize the expression and communication of inner life, and further develop people's own living ability. It is on the basis of this theory that Langer put forward the concept of "emotional symbol" in Emotion and Form, and believed that this is the essence of art, and art is the creation of symbolic forms of human emotions.

Langer, like Cahill, thinks that art is the expression of human emotions, but he doesn't think that art is a kind of self-expression. She deeply criticized the traditional expressionist aesthetics, holding that "the law of venting emotions is its own law, not the law of art", "pure self-expression does not need art form", and "black-handed partisans who take pleasure in lynching shout around the gallows; The mother is at a loss in the face of a seriously ill child; The infatuated person who just rescued his lover from danger is shivering, sweating, or crying and laughing. These people are venting strong emotions, but these are not what music needs, especially for music creation. " So, what kind of emotion does art express? Langer believes that art expresses the universal feelings of human beings. It is this common feeling of human beings that endows art with special significance, so that people can have the same feeling and understanding of the art created by individuals. She emphasized that the artist's personal feelings are not meaningless to artistic creation, but only when they are consistent with human feelings can they play a role in artistic creation. It can be seen that Langer's so-called emotional symbols actually refer to human emotional symbols.

Emotional power is powerful and can shock people's souls, but it is abstract, empty and has no objective form. Therefore, the expression of emotion by art can never be regarded as creation or art, as Croce and others said. Langer and Cahill both criticized Croce's view that the process of emotional expression is the process of objectification. However, objectification, as they say, is not to record or model emotions with words, colors and sounds, but to give them a form, that is, to express them through other objective objects. Langer said: "How can we capture, possess and grasp emotions, and make emotional content … present in our consciousness in a universal form?"? The answer is: you can achieve the above goal by creating some objective object. " She believes that the process of artistic creation is a process of reconstructing an objective object with human emotions, and the form of art is embodied in this reconstructed objective object. These are all the meanings of her definition of art as a symbolic form of emotion.