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Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985)

Langer argued that not all meaning is the kind that language carries. Words are a discursive symbolism: they have a vocabulary and a grammar, string into sentences, and break down into units with settled meanings. But art, ritual, and myth work differently — they are presentational symbolism, apprehended whole, their elements meaning nothing apart from the pattern they compose. What this non-discursive symbolism articulates, Langer held, is the life of feeling: a piece of music or a painting presents the forms of feeling — its motion, tension, and resolution — with a precision that words, built for another purpose, cannot reach. She made this the basis of a general theory of art, defining a work of art as “the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling,” and late in life extended it downward into a vast, unfinished philosophy of mind that sought the roots of feeling in organic life. She built on Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms but turned it toward the one form Cassirer had left least developed — art — and toward the question of feeling he had not pursued.

Life

Born Susanne Katherina Knauth on 20 December 1895 in New York City, into a cultured German-speaking immigrant family; her father was a lawyer, and German was the language of the home. She studied at Radcliffe College — the women’s college affiliated with Harvard — taking her BA in 1920 and her PhD in 1926. There her teachers included the logician Henry M. Sheffer and, decisively, Alfred North Whitehead, whose seminar she attended and who served in effect as her mentor; he wrote the foreword to her first book. In 1921 she married the historian William L. Langer; they divorced in 1942.

For most of her career she held no permanent post — tutoring at Radcliffe, lecturing at Columbia and elsewhere, sustained by part-time and visiting appointments through the years in which she wrote her most influential work. Only in 1954, at fifty-eight, did she take a settled position: the chair of philosophy at Connecticut College, which she held until her retirement in 1962, after which a foundation grant freed her to complete her final project. She died on 17 July 1985 in Old Lyme, Connecticut.

Philosophy in a New Key

Langer’s breakthrough was Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (1942), one of the best-selling philosophy books of its century. Its “new key” is the idea that symbolism — not sensation, not mere reaction — is the central fact of mental life, and that the study of symbols is therefore the proper key to philosophy. The book’s pivotal distinction is between two kinds of symbol. Discursive symbolism, of which language is the model, is linear and successive: it has separable terms with fixed meanings, a syntax that combines them, and the capacity to be translated and paraphrased. Presentational (or non-discursive) symbolism — art, ritual, myth — is none of these: its meaning is given all at once, in a whole whose parts have no independent significance, and it cannot be translated into discursive terms without loss.

The consequence is a claim about feeling. Discursive language is poorly suited to the inner life, whose forms are not discrete and successive but continuous and simultaneous. Presentational symbols can articulate what language cannot — Langer spoke of art as expressing the “morphology of feeling,” the forms and patterns of emotional life. Here she drew on, and turned against, Wittgenstein: she took up the Tractatus distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown, but where Wittgenstein concluded that whereof we cannot speak we must be silent, Langer held that what discursive language cannot say, non-discursive symbolism can show — and that this showing is itself a kind of meaning, not a lapse into the merely emotional. The debt to Cassirer is explicit: symbolic activity is the human mode as such, and art is one of its forms.

Feeling and Form

Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (1953) worked the insight into a full theory of the arts. Its defining formula — “art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling” — treats every art as the making of an art symbol, a single presentational symbol whose import is the form of a feeling. Music she called “the tonal analogue of emotive life”: it does not arouse feeling or refer to particular feelings but presents their dynamic shape — rising, straining, easing — for contemplation.

Each art, on Langer’s account, creates its own kind of virtual entity, the “primary illusion” proper to it: painting and the visual arts create a virtual space, a purely visual scene that exists only for the eye; music creates a virtual time, the lived passage of time made audible; dance creates a realm of virtual powers, gesture detached from practical action; literature creates a virtual experience or life, and narrative a virtual past held in memory; architecture creates an “ethnic domain,” a virtual place; sculpture a virtual volume, drama a virtual future, film a virtual present. In each, something actual — pigment, sound, movement, words — is used to bring into being something that is not actually there but is wholly perceptible, and it is in this virtual object, not in the physical materials, that the form of feeling is shown.

The biology of mind

Langer’s last and largest undertaking turned from art to mind itself. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, in three volumes (1967, 1972, and an unfinished 1982), set out to ground the whole account in nature: to trace feeling, the basic mark of mentality, from its origins in organic and biological process up to the symbolic mind of the human being. Drawing on biology, ethology, and evolution, it is a non-reductive naturalism — feeling is not explained away but followed as the thread connecting life to mind to culture. Failing eyesight and age left the third volume curtailed, and the project unfinished.

Reception

For decades after her death Langer was undercited in professional philosophy — read widely outside the academy, where Philosophy in a New Key had sold in the hundreds of thousands, but treated as a marginal figure within it; her preference for writing accessibly and for the unfashionable subjects of art and feeling, and the climate facing a woman in mid-century philosophy, all told against her standing. Recent scholarship has reversed the neglect, with a dedicated research network, a full-length philosophical study (Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin, 2019), and renewed attention to her theory of symbol and the virtual as questions of mind, art, and mediation have returned to the centre.

Where Langer stops

Langer’s theory is built on a boundary it cannot itself cross. The art symbol, she holds, presents what discursive language cannot say; its import is non-discursive by definition. This gives her account its reach — it secures a region of meaning that propositional analysis misses — but it also fixes the point at which the analysis must stop. The philosopher can show that a work articulates a form of feeling, and can describe the virtual object in which it does so, but cannot translate that import into discourse, because to do so would be to deny the very distinction the theory rests on. The account arrives at the threshold of the non-discursive and, by its own logic, can only point across it.

And it is a theory of feeling, not of the other things art carries. By making the import of every art symbol a form of feeling, Langer sets to one side the ideas art advances, the world it refers to, the historical and social conditions it answers — the discursive and propositional dimensions of art that other traditions place at the centre. The reach toward the inner life was bought at the cost of the outer one. Her final attempt to underwrite the whole structure with a biology of feeling — to show how the symbolic mind grows out of organic process — was the natural completion of the project, and it was left unfinished at her death.

Key works

See also: Symbolic forms · Music and meaning · Cassirer · Whitehead · Goodman