Susanne Langer

Susanne Katherina Langer (; Knauth; December 20, 1895 – July 17, 1985) was an American philosopher, writer, and educator known for her theories on the influences of art on the mind. She was one of the earliest American women to achieve an academic career in philosophy. Langer is best remembered for her 1942 book Philosophy in a New Key, which was followed by a sequel, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art, in 1953. In 1960, Langer was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Life Born Susanne Katherina Knauth, Langer was raised in Manhattan's West Side in New York City. She was the daughter of , an attorney, and Else Uhlich, both immigrants from Germany. Though she was American born, Langer's primary language was German, as it was strictly spoken in her household throughout her youth, and her German accent remained for her entire life. She was exposed thoroughly to creativity and art, most specifically through music. She was taught to play the cello and the piano, and she continued with the cello for the rest of her life. As a girl, Langer enjoyed reciting the works of great poets as well as traditional children's rhymes and tales. This formed her love for reading and writing, and she would often write her own poems and stories to entertain her younger siblings. Her love of nature began during the summers her family spent in their cottage on Lake George. She married William Leonard Langer, a fellow student at Harvard, in 1921, and in the same year the couple took their studies to Vienna, Austria. They had two sons and moved back to Cambridge, Massachusetts before they divorced in 1942. She died July 17, 1985.

Education Her early education included attendance at Veltin School for Girls, a private school, as well as being tutored from home. In 1916, Langer enrolled at Radcliffe College. She earned a bachelor's degree in 1920 and continued with graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard, where she received a master's degree in 1924 and a doctorate in 1926. She returned to Radcliffe as a tutor in philosophy from 1927 to 1942. She lectured in philosophy for one year at the University of Delaware and for five years at Columbia University (1945–1950). From 1954 to 1962, she taught at Connecticut College. She also taught philosophy at the University of Michigan, New York University, Northwestern University, Ohio University, Smith College, Vassar College, the University of Washington, and Wellesley College.

Langer's philosophy explored the continuous process of meaning-making in the human mind through the power of "seeing" one thing in terms of another. Langer's first major work, Philosophy in a New Key, put forth a notion that has become commonplace today: there is a basic and pervasive human need to symbolize, to invent meanings, and to invest meanings in one's world.

Beginning with a critique of positivism, Langer's work is a study of human thought progressing from semantic theory through philosophy of music, sketching a theory for all the arts. For Langer, the human mind "is constantly carrying on a process of symbolic transformation of the experiential data that come to it", causing it to be "a veritable fountain of more or less spontaneous ideas". Discursive symbolization arranges elements (not necessarily words) with stable and context-invariant meanings into a new meaning. Presentation symbolization operates independently of elements with fixed and stable meanings. The presentation cannot be understood by building up an understanding of its parts in isolation but must be understood as a whole. For example, an element used in one painting may be used to articulate an entirely different meaning in another. The same principle applies to a note in a musical arrangement—such elements independently have no fixed meaning except in the context of their entire presentation. Langer's analysis of this internal contextualization within a work of art led her to claim it was "nonsense" to think "form could be abstracted logically" from content.

Langer believed that symbolism is the central concern of philosophy because it underlies all human knowing and understanding. As with Ernst Cassirer, Langer believed that what distinguishes humans from animals is the capacity for using symbols. While all animal life is dominated by feeling, human feeling is mediated by conceptions, symbols, and language. Animals respond to signs, but stimulus from a sign is significantly more complex for humans. This perspective on symbols is also associated with symbolic communication, a field in which animal societies are studied to help understand how symbolic communication affects the conduct of members of a cooperating group.

Langer was one of the first philosophers to pay close attention to the concept of the virtual, as shown partly by her early use of the term "virtual experience". Inspired by Henri Bergson's notions of matter and memory, she connected art to the concept of the virtual. She describes virtuality as "the quality of all things that are created to be perceived". For Langer, the virtual is not only a matter of consciousness, but something external that is created intentionally and existing materially as a space of contemplation outside of the human mind. Langer sees virtuality as a physical space created by the artist, such as a painting or a building, that is "significant in itself and not as part of the surroundings". As an artist figures out the space of an art work, the artist builds a virtual world. Langer particularly considers architecture not as the realization of a space for being, but as the conceptual translation of space and being into virtuality for symbolic perceiving: "The architect, in fine, deals with a created space, a virtual entity." In contrast to Bergson, for Langer, virtuality is tangible and can cause a contemplative interaction between humans and machines.

In her later years, Langer came to believe that the decisive task of her work was to construct a science- and psychology-based theory of the "life of the mind" using process philosophy conventions. Langer established the use of symbols as the "epistemic unit of community", Claimed support of this perspective comes from Langer's statement that "language is intrinsic to thinking, imagining, even our ways of perceiving".

According to Arabella Lyon, professor at State University of New York, Langer holds that meaning arises from the relationship between a community, its discourse, and the individual.

Susanne Langer's other main influence was the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Cassirer was a neo-Kantian who studied theories of symbolization. Cassirer influenced much of Langer's ideas in Philosophy in a New Key, where she stated that the creation of symbols is the essential activity of art, myth, rite, the sciences, mathematics, and philosophy. She stated, "It is a peculiar fact that every major advance in thinking, every epoch-making new insight, springs from a new type of symbolic transformation". She drew from Cassirer's view in her belief that art theory must be interdependent with a theory of mind.

Selected publications Books The Cruise of the Little Dipper, and Other Fairy Tales (1924 illustrated by Helen Sewall) The Practice of Philosophy (1930, foreword by Alfred North Whitehead) An Introduction to Symbolic Logic (1937), Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (1942), Language and Myth (1946), translator, from Sprache und Mythos (1925) by Ernst Cassirer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (1953) Problems of Art: Ten Philosophical Lectures, 1957 Reflections on Art (1961) (editor) Philosophical Sketches (1962), Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, three volumes (1967, 1972, and 1982)

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