The Philosopher as Prophet and Visionary: Susanne Langer's Essay on Human Feeling in the Light of Subsequent Developments in the Sciences

There are at least five major areas in which Susanne Langer's work—taken as a whole, with the three-volume Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling as its defining achievement—anticipated significant developments in the biological and psychological sciences that have taken place since the publication of the first volume of Mind in 1967. The first is her belief that consciousness, or subjectivity, is the defining subject matter of psychology. The second is her attempt to develop a conceptual framework for grounding a theory of mind and consciousness in the biological sciences. The third is her proposal that a phenomenology of conscious experience (which she believed could be found in the arts) can serve as a unique source of insights into the phenomena of life and mind that we are seeking to understand in terms of the sciences. The fourth is her thesis that a perfectly continuous evolutionary history has given rise to a difference between human and animal mentality that is "almost as great as the division between animals and plants" (1962, 113). And the fifth is her theory of imagination, which provides a bridge from the biological sciences to the study of human culture and the symbolic resources that support it.

1. Symbolic Transformation, Imagination, and the Theory of Art

A central theme of Langer's work, which received its most extended treatment in Philosophy in a New Key, is that human beings are distinguished by a capacity for "symbolic expression and symbolic understanding" (129) which is not shared by other animals and which underlies the range of practices that make culture a uniquely human mode of existence. Langer argued that the process she called the "symbolic transformation of experiences" (1942, 44) is a spontaneous activity of the human brain by which conceptual structures are derived by abstraction from the stream of perceptual experience. The symbolic or conceptual rendering of experience—a process that is central to Langer's definition of imagination—produces "an enormous store of symbolic material," an accessible "fund of conceptions" (41) that find expression in the formation and elaboration of images, are used to ground "the great systematic symbolism known as language" (1962, 147), and furnish the material for dreaming, myth, ritual, narrative, and the arts. The primary function of imagination, through all of its various symbolic expressions, is to "make things conceivable" (1942, 244)—to shape the human world as a "fabric of meanings" (280) by constructing and elaborating the networks of conceptual representations that formulate and organize our experiences, connecting them together into larger, coherent patterns.

Underlying all the varieties of symbolic expression and symbolic understanding, Langer believed, is a fundamental capacity to apprehend forms, gestalten, or patterns in experience. "By the recognition of forms we find analogies," she wrote, "and come to understand one thing in terms of another" (1930, 88). When we see that two things exhibit a common form or pattern, we may use one of them to formulate a conception of the other—to serve as a vehicle for symbolization; and any medium in which we can construct and manipulate complex configurations of distinguishable elements can help us to formulate a conception of something else that exhibits a similar pattern. Langer argued that different kinds of apprehended patterns or symbolic forms are appropriate to different objects of knowledge. Some domains of experience and understanding fall readily into the discursive forms of language; but we are also able to apprehend and manipulate patterns that have "too many minute yet closely related parts, too many relations within relations" (1942, 93) to be adequately expressed in the medium of discourse. In a painting, for example, "the balance of values, line and color and light, . . . is so highly adjusted that no verbal proposition could hope to embody its pattern" (1930, 160). In Philosophy in a New Key, Langer proposed that the dynamic tonal forms found in music might serve as a symbolic formulation of "the ever-moving patterns, the ambivalences and intricacies of inner experience" (1942, 100–101) that language cannot express.

In Langer...