The arts make vivid the fact that words do not, in their literal form or number, exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
Interpretation
Art transcends the limitations of language, allowing for deeper understanding and expression beyond mere words.
Elliot W. Eisner's quote emphasizes that while language is a powerful tool for communication, it has inherent limitations that can restrict our thoughts and perceptions. Art, on the other hand, serves as a means to convey complex ideas and emotions that words alone cannot fully capture, thereby expanding our cognitive horizons and understanding of the world.
In practice
During a lecture on the role of art in society, one could use this quote to highlight the importance of artistic expression.
The important outcomes of schooling include not only the acquisition of new conceptual tools, refined sensibilities, a developed imagination, and new routines and techniques, but also new attitudes and dispositions. The disposition to continue to learn throughout life is perhaps one of the most important contributions that schools can make to an individual's development.
The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
The arts inform as well as stimulate; they challenge as well as satisfy. Their location is not limited to galleries, concert halls and theatres. Their home can be found wherever humans chose to have attentive and vita intercourse with life itself.
I've always considered myself an actor first and foremost.
Like dancers with choreography or actors with scripts, jazz singers could take material that was known, even loved, then risk interpreting and revising it. They could conceal even as they revealed themselves. Inflection, timing and tonality were their language, at least as much as words.
THE SUFFERING OF GENIUS AND ITS VALUE. The artistic genius desires to give pleasure, but if his mind is on a very high plane he does not easily find anyone to share his pleasure; he offers entertainment but nobody accepts it. That gives him, in certain circumstances, a comically touching pathos; for he has no right to force pleasure on men. He pipes, but none will dance: can that be tragic?
Architecture adds dimensions to my life that would be impossible to acquire if I retired. The beautiful thing about architecture is that every project is brand new. I am forced to renew myself with every project. Isn't that wonderful?
Space has always been the spiritual dimension of architecture. It is not the physical statement of the structure so much as what it contains that moves us.
How do you project a character if you don't have a sense of where she is from? I've always just gotten on a plane to go to the area to get a sense of what it is like, to smell it, feel the earth, hear people talk, go to the marketplaces.
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