Symposium on Susanne K. Langer: Introduction

Although it would not be correct to say that Susanne Langer has been one of the "forgotten figures" in American philosophy, it is certainly the case that she has been rather on the margins than in the center of professional philosophical discussions. Her career was in fact more "purely" philosophical than "professionally" philosophical, in the sense that her rather unorthodox academic teaching career was not integral to her ultimate impact. Langer's heritage is not in the amount of students she influenced directly in the classroom, though one would be extremely rash to say she had no immediate pedagogical impact. Her main influence lives on in the diverse groups of readers who have continued and applied her ways of thinking developed in her masterworks of philosophical reflection, synthesis, and conceptual construction.

Langer's philosophical interests were comprehensive yet distinctive. Over the course of her whole intellectual career she was engaged in developing a "new key" in philosophy, exemplified in her most popular and successful book, Philosophy in a New Key. The new key proposed by Langer was meant to open philosophy in America to novel currents of thought not just from other philosophical traditions, especially those dealing with the deep problems of the roots of meaning and symbolization, but from a variety of non-philosophical sources dealing with imagination, language theory, myth, and the great orders of art, especially music, which Langer held to be of the deepest importance, both personally and theoretically. Her attempt to establish the contours of a coherent philosophy of art culminated in Feeling and Form. As her thought progressed and deepened, Langer set herself a task in the years of her "high maturity" that most others would have thought quite undoable. This task was to rethink from the ground up, so to speak, our fundamental model or image of mind, using all the resources of the empirical sciences, both natural and cultural. The result was her trilogy, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, the third and concluding volume of which appeared three years before her death in 1985, some months before her ninetieth birthday. It is a remarkable achievement that was not meant to close off but to open new paths for thinking about the place of mind in nature. Langer's sober but non-reductive philosophical naturalism connects her both to key themes in the American philosophical tradition and to practically all of the major issues surrounding that vast complex of themes and topics that go by the name of "cognitive science" or the "sciences of mind."

The March 2007 meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy devoted a special session to Langer's work that had as its main goals (a) to place her philosophical project as a whole within its different and parallel contexts and sources and to indicate its upshot, (b) to examine core features of her approach to art and aesthetics by bringing it into dialogue with what might seem a competing, yet central, position, namely, that of John Dewey, and (c) to explore Langer's "visionary" value as an interpretive forerunner of a framework for a unified "science" of mind by schematizing the ways her vision can both "spike out" into and inform such a network of research strategies and concerns. The results of this session are presented here in three papers exploring these three areas: "Placing Langer's Philosophical Project," "Vital Rhythm and Temporal Form in Langer and Dewey," and "The Philosopher as Prophet and Visionary." We hope they lead readers to a direct engagement with and extension of Langer's own work.

Figure 1.

Susanne K. Langer at her rented cabin near Ann Arbor in early spring, 1954 when she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan. Photograph taken by her niece, Susanne Dunbar, then an undergraduate at the university.