Susanne K. Langer
Making symbols is the basic human activity, and art is a kind of symbol that expresses the shapes of feeling that words cannot.
Placement
American philosopher of art and mind: symbol-making is the basic human activity; beyond discursive language, art is “presentational” symbolism that articulates the forms of feeling.
Key ideas
- Symbolic transformation
- Presentational vs. discursive symbols
- Art as the form of feeling
Teachers: Alfred North Whitehead
Influence
Influenced by 3
Alfred North Whitehead studied with
studied with
At Radcliffe Langer studied logic with Henry M. Sheffer and with Whitehead, attending the lectures that became Process and Reality (1929); Whitehead supervised her doctoral thesis (1926) and wrote the introduction to her first book, The Practice of Philosophy (1930). IEP “Langer, Susanne K.”
Evidence: AI draft
Alfred North Whitehead › 1861–1947
Ernst Cassirer
influenced by
Langer took from Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms the idea of humans as symbol-making animals (Philosophy in a New Key, 1942) and translated his Language and Myth (1946). S. K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (1942); E. Cassirer, Language and Myth, tr. S. K. Langer (1946)
Evidence: AI draft
Ernst Cassirer › 1874–1945
Ludwig Wittgenstein
influenced by
Langer modelled discursive symbolism on the Tractatus’ picture theory, then argued that art and myth are ‘presentational’ symbols beyond its limits (Philosophy in a New Key, 1942). S. K. Langer, The Practice of Philosophy (1930); Philosophy in a New Key (1942); L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921/22)
Evidence: AI draft
Ludwig Wittgenstein › 1889–1951
Works
The need to symbolise is basic to humans: myth, ritual and music are presentational forms, not failed language.
- 1953Feeling and Form
A theory of art: each art creates a “virtual” form – space, time, power – that presents the life of feeling.
Position
Langer took from Cassirer the idea that humans are symbol-making animals and from Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” the thought that language pictures facts – and then asked what lies beyond the limits of language. Discursive symbolism, the language of propositions and science, is only one kind. Myth, ritual, dream and above all art are “presentational” symbols: they present forms of feeling all at once, as a picture does, rather than piece by piece. Music, she argued, is not an expression of the composer’s emotions but a symbol of the morphology of feeling – it sounds the way feelings go. Each art, she later argued, creates its own virtual dimension: painting space, music time, dance power.
Life & context
Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985), born in New York to German parents, studied at Radcliffe College under Alfred North Whitehead and taught there and at other colleges for decades without a tenured post until Connecticut College appointed her in 1954. “Philosophy in a New Key” was a bestseller in paperback. Her last years went to the three-volume “Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling”, which she finished almost blind.
Further main works
- Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (3 vols., 1967–1982)
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