Philosophy in a New Key

Introduction

Susanne Langer, then a tutor in philosophy at Radcliffe College, wrote the book with Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms and the logic of her Harvard teacher Alfred North Whitehead in the background. She distinguishes discursive symbolism – language, with its vocabulary and syntax, which states things step by step – from presentational symbolism, which conveys meaning as a whole, as images, rituals and myths do. Music is her main example: not an outpouring of the composer’s emotions but a symbol that articulates the forms of feeling, its tensions and resolutions. Helped by a cheap paperback edition from 1948, the book sold well over half a million copies and was one of the most widely read philosophy books in mid-20th-century America.

Connections

Builds on

• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus1921 · Ludwig Wittgenstein
• The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms1923 · Ernst Cassirer

Taken up in

• Feeling and Form1953 · Susanne K. Langer

More works by Susanne K. Langer

• 1953Feeling and Form