Placing Langer's Philosophical Project

The thematic concerns shared by Susanne Langer and the classic American philosophical tradition join them together in mutual reinforcement, supplementation, and vital tension. The thread that stitches together Langer's philosophical project and the American philosophical tradition is Langer's crucial and indispensable insight that a focus on the "logic" of signs, symbols, and meanings, her lifelong concern, does not take philosophical reflection away from experience, the axis point of American philosophy, but throws new light on just how experience itself is structured and accessed (see Innis 1994 and 2002). This is a deep and strong "tie that binds."

At the very beginning of her intellectual career, and even much later with a nod to James, Langer asserted that philosophy as a distinctive discipline was fundamentally concerned with the descriptive and critical analysis of meanings and their orders and not, like the sciences, with the discovery of facts. Langer wanted to determine "how to make our ideas clear" about meaning, a deeply pragmatist concern. At the same time, like the pragmatists, she famously proposed a "new key" in philosophy: the way philosophy, more as an activity than a doctrinal superscience, was to be "practiced," already the theme of her first book, was to recognize once and for all that meanings are "embodied in forms" that have a distinctive kind of "logic" and history, both "ideal" and "real." Under the influences of Henry Sheffer, her logic teacher, Whitehead, her "great teacher and friend," and the great German scholar, Ernst Cassirer, Langer thought the analysis of meanings had to be rooted in a precise and comprehensive account of the "logic of signs and symbols" and of the "symbolic forms" this logic structured and made possible. Such a way of thinking distanced Langer from the concerns and procedures of Anglophone analytic philosophy, which came to dominate the American philosophical scene. At the same time, while admitting that Peirce had made great strides in developing such a logic, she did not take over any of the Peircean technical terminology, although she reconstructed, or at least duplicated, his chief distinctions, using different sources. The "logical" and "semiotic" schemata she worked out in her first book, The Practice of Philosophy (1930), and then deepened, expanded, and applied in her classic Philosophy in a New Key (1942), were never repudiated. They function as a categorial and critical backbone for her whole work, with implications for the theory of art presented in her Feeling and Form (1953) and for the naturalist, but non-reductive, "metaphysics" of mind that Langer ultimately tried to construct, culminating in her trilogy, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967, 1972, 1982), which parallels in important respects Dewey's Experience and Nature and Peirce's metaphysical reflections and speculations.

The more abstract "logical" dimension of the practice of philosophy was complemented for Langer by a more concrete "hermeneutical" dimension, an engagement with "formed content." Langer thought of philosophy as fundamentally an interpretive discipline. But this does not mean that philosophy is just interpretation, which it certainly is in practically any format; it rather means that philosophy studies the contexts, means, criteria, consequences, and contents of interpretation. Relying on the tripartite paradigm of sense-functions of expression, representation, and pure signification that informs Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Langer, like Peirce, wanted to show how the world at every level is accessed, projected, and interpreted through the construal as well as the construction of signs and symbols, and how the world of interpretations, the experienced continuum of embodied meanings, goes far beyond language and its close cousins, logic and mathematics. Interpretation as meaning-making is importantly and insightfully "pushed down" by Langer to the primary stratum of awareness or sentience, just as Peirce and Dewey, with different emphases, did. What I am calling here "interpretation" Langer calls "symbolic transformation" on the human level, the "new key" in philosophy, but Peirce calls, quite generally, "semiosis." The multiform and multileveled duality of a sign and meaning model is to replace the old duality of a percept and concept model as the axle around which the philosophical wheel turns. This is the "semiotic turn" that Langer...