Susanne K. Langer

Art Philosopher

• Born: December 20, 1895
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: July 17, 1985
• Place of death: Old Lyme, Connecticut

American philosopher

Langer was one of the major influences on twentieth century thought in the fields of philosophy and aesthetics. Her work in the realm of “symbolic transformation” helped to establish logical philosophical frameworks for art and the social sciences, areas not formerly thought to adhere to any ordered system of ideas.

Areas of achievement Philosophy, scholarship, education

Early Life

Susanne K. Langer (LAN-guhr) was born to Antonio Knauth and Else M. (Uhlich) Knauth on the upper West Side of New York City. Along with her two brothers and two sisters, Langer was surrounded by a rich German heritage of academic and artistic influences. Her father, a lawyer from Leipzig, was an accomplished pianist and cellist. One of his fondest diversions was to invite friends to his home to play chamber music in the evenings. The children all played musical instruments. Langer was a pianist, but later, as an adult, she became a proficient cellist.

Else Knauth instilled a love of poetry in her children, and as a young child, Langer often created and recited her own verses. Later, her creative flair extended to drama, and she wrote pageants drawn from classical subjects that she and her siblings presented to family and friends. A wealthy family, the Knauths had a vacation retreat at Lake George in upstate New York, where they spent many happy summers. A love of nature and of the natural sciences was born here that was evident in all aspects of Langer’s later life and writings.

Else Knauth never became easily fluent in English, so German became the preferred language at home. This had its disadvantages when Langer attended school, and as a result, much of her learning was self-motivated, with reading constituting a large portion of her activity. Her childhood thirst for knowledge of all subjects was prodigious: In a 1960 New Yorker interview with Winthrop Sargeant, she spoke of having read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason simultaneously as a teenager. In spite of the respect for knowledge in the home, Langer’s father hated what he interpreted as masculine qualities in females and would not agree to send any of his daughters to college. After his death, however, Langer enrolled at Radcliffe College with the encouragement of her mother. Out of her broad early education arose an interest in philosophy, and she received her bachelor’s degree in the field in 1920. In 1921, Langer was married to William Leonard Langer, a Harvard graduate student of history, and the couple spent a year studying in Vienna, Austria. On their return to Massachusetts, Susanne began graduate studies in philosophy and earned a master’s degree in 1924 and her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1926. For the next fifteen years, she served on the Radcliffe faculty and taught occasionally at Smith and Wellesley Colleges as well, while her husband was a respected professor of history at Harvard from 1936 to 1964.

Life’s Work

Langer’s ventures as a published writer began not with philosophical works but with a volume entitled The Cruise of the Little Dipper, and Other Fairy Tales (1924). The book was illustrated by Helen Sewell, an artist who was a lifelong friend and on whom Langer depended later for critique of her writing about aesthetics. Since childhood, Langer had been fascinated by the world of myth and fantasy. The subject carried over into her later work as myth became a central focus in her study of the human formulation of symbols. At Radcliffe, Langer was in contact with the major philosophical minds of the age, and their influence can be traced throughout her work. Her professors Alfred North Whitehead, the English mathematician and philosopher, and Henry Sheffer were largely the catalysts for her writing.

The Practice of Philosophy (1930), Langer’s first philosophical treatise, contained a preface by American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. The book discusses the purposes and methods of philosophy and the importance of symbolic logic in contemporary thought. The book’s premise was that training in logic frees the mind. Henry Sheffer’s influence on Langer is most obvious in her second book on philosophy, An Introduction to Symbolic Logic (1937). She employed his methods of symbolic logic to create a textbook on the subject and an essay on logic.

Langer defined philosophy as the clarification and articulation of concepts. She saw the purpose of philosophy as making explicit what is implicit in people’s beliefs and actions. An awareness that modern society seemed to function without a defined philosophical base was always of major concern to Langer. In 1942, she published Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. The book, which was dedicated to Whitehead, established Langer as a leading figure in the field of aesthetics.

The most direct influence on her thinking at this time was the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, whose 1925 book Sprache und Mythos was translated into English as Language and Myth by Langer in 1946. His work in the philosophy of symbolism served as a framework for Langer’s formulation of “new key” concepts. This book had varied reception among scholars in the field but was nevertheless a landmark. Langer expounded on the idea that there are things inaccessible to language that have their own forms of conception. She refused to accept the common premise that language represented the limits of rational experience. It was in this book that she delved into what she considered the human need for “symbolic transformation” that humans are constantly creating new symbols for different areas of life and thought. Langer intended to create a frame of mind that would lead people to treat with the same seriousness as is given to the sciences, areas such as art and social sciences that had previously not been thought to lend themselves to philosophical logic. The book laid the groundwork for Langer’s work on the larger problem of the structure and the nature of art, a subject that became the focus of her continued writing.

In what Langer termed a sequel to Philosophy in a New Key, she wrote Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (1953), in which she further developed her theories of symbolism and logic. Dedicated to the memory of Cassirer, Feeling and Form is the application of her theories to each of the arts separately. She defined such words as expression, creation, symbol, and intuition in such a way that art might be better understood in those particular terms. The book was not intended to further the cause of such things as criticism of artistic masterpieces, nor was it to help in the creation of art. The expressed purpose was to define simply the logical and philosophical basis on which art rests and the relationship of art to feeling. Langer’s Problems of Art followed in 1957 and remained true to the concepts set forth in her previous book. She maintained that art is not an expression of the artist’s own feeling, but is rather an expression of his knowledge of feeling in nondiscursive terms (symbols). It is an expression not possible to the same extent by verbal means and for which art provides humans with a set of symbols whose meanings may vary as necessary. Langer believed strongly that the importance of this concept was that once an artist is supplied with a secure framework in logic and symbolism, it is possible for his knowledge to exceed even the limits of his own experience.

Langer had left Radcliffe in 1942 and spent a year teaching at the University of Delaware in Newark before teaching from 1945 to 1950 at Columbia University. With the support of the university and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, she wrote Feeling and Form. She continued to work as a guest lecturer and to contribute articles and chapters to books in the area of art and aesthetics. In 1954, she was made chair of the Department of Philosophy at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut. She remained there until her retirement in 1962, when she was named a professor emeritus and a research scholar in philosophy. In 1956, with a grant from the Edgar J. Kaufmann Charitable Trust of Pittsburgh, Langer began the project that was to be the pinnacle of her career. The depth of the work was such that she committed herself totally to the writing and in 1967, the first volume of Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling was published. Two more volumes were to follow; the second in the series was published in 1972 and the final installment appeared in 1982. These products of Langer’s latest years assumed a certain familiarity with the earlier suppositions she advanced in Philosophy in a New Key and Feeling and Form. Langer examined in great detail the course of development of human feeling as it departed from the level of the animal who possesses feeling without intellect. The work was the culmination of her understanding of philosophical symbolic logic as applied to abstract areas of human existence.

Langer was recognized by a number of disciplines for her work through the years. Equally comfortable lecturing to educators, philosophers, artists, or scientists, she was a frequent guest at conventions and conferences. In 1950, she was the recipient of the Radcliffe Alumnae Achievement Award, and in 1960, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Honorary doctorate degrees were bestowed on her by Wilson College, Wheaton College, and Western College for Women.

After her retirement from Connecticut College, she remained in her colonial home in Old Lyme, retreating when necessary to the solitude of an old farmhouse in Ulster County, New York, where she avoided all modern conveniences including electric lights and especially the telephone. Fiercely independent, she organized her life to suit her needs. Communing with nature, quiet time spent writing and thinking, and occasionally playing chamber music with friends filled her days with favorite activities. After her husband died in 1977, her children and grandchildren provided companionship during their welcome visits as did her lifelong friends from her professorial days. Langer died in 1985 at her Connecticut home at the age of eighty-nine.

Significance

Langer entered a field in which few women received serious recognition, and her work had a profound effect on philosophical thought of the twentieth century. Her hunger for knowledge and experience in almost every realm of human existence from the most scientific fields to simple, as well as sophisticated, artistic forms of expression provided a rich backdrop for her ideas. From her thinking emerged some of the most scholarly work that exists in the fields of philosophy and aesthetics. Her contributions to education in these fields and her influence on the approach to philosophy and education brought about a distinct change in the framework of the logic on which human feeling and art are interpreted.

Bibliography

Danto, Arthur C. “Mind as Feeling, Form as Presence; Langer as Philosopher.” Journal of Philosophy 81 (November, 1984): 641-646. Danto follows the progression and development in philosophical thought that occurred in Langer’s literary career. The article is one of three in this special issue that formed the basis of a symposium entitled “The Philosophy of Susanne K. Langer” for the American Philosophical Society in December, 1984.

De Sousa, Ronald B. “Teleology and the Great Shift.” Journal of Philosophy 81 (November, 1984): 647-653. The “great shift” from animal to human behavior and its philosophical implications are explored by de Sousa based on Langer’s Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling.

Hagberg, Garry. “Art and the Unsayable: Langer’s Tractarian Aesthetics.” British Journal of Aesthetics 24 (1984): 325. Hagberg reconsiders Langer’s theory that art is a creation of forms that symbolize human feeling, picking up where language ends.

Langer, Susanne. Philosophy in a New Key. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942. This book, with a preface by the author, is the treatise on which all Langer’s later writing in the area of philosophy and aesthetics is based. Her basic tenets about the importance of symbolic logic as applied to human expression are detailed.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Why Philosophy?” TheSaturday Evening Post, May 13, 1961, 34-35. Langer discusses her personal life and career and major factors that influenced the direction of her philosophical thought. Her views about the lack of apparent philosophical framework in modern society are also presented.

Morawski, Stefan. “Art as Semblance.” Journal of Philosophy 81 (November, 1984): 654-662. Morawski grapples with Langer’s theories of symbolic logic in aesthetics and Langer’s role as a pivotal philosophical figure in the 1950’s.

Sargeant, Winthrop. “Philosopher in a New Key.” The New Yorker, December 3, 1960, 67-68. In a lengthy and intimate interview, Sargeant questions Langer about her life and career, revealing information about her method of working and lifestyle not available in a formal biography.

Schultz, William. Cassirer and Langer on Myth: An Introduction. New York: Garland, 2000. A detailed overview of Langer and Ernst Cassirer’s ideas about myth as symbolic form.