Susanne Langer Quotes
Susanne Knauth Langer was an American philosopher of mind, art, and language and one of the first women to achieve a major reputation in twentieth-century American philosophy. A student of Whitehead at Harvard, she developed a philosophy of symbolic forms in conversation with the work of Cassirer, articulated in her widely read Philosophy in a New Key and the three-volume Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. The quotes below are attributed to Susanne Langer, organized by topic.
Browse Susanne Langer by topic
Susanne Langer on Justice
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“The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it—right or wrong—may be given.”
Ch. 1, p. 1
Susanne Langer on Knowledge
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“If we would have new knowledge, we must get us a whole world of new questions.”
Ch. 1, p. 10 -
“Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.”
Ch. 10, p. 216 -
“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
Ch. 1, p. 6 -
“Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.”
Ch. 3, p. 40
Susanne Langer on Life
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“Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.”
Ch. 1, p. 27 -
“Tragedy dramatizes human life as potentiality and fulfillment. Its virtual future, or Destiny, is therefore quite different from that created in comedy. Comic Destiny is Fortune—what the world will bring, and the man will take or miss, encounter or escape; tragic Destiny is what the man brings, and the world will demand of him. That is his Fate.”
Ch. 19, p. 352 -
“The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.”
Ch. 6, p. 101
Susanne Langer on Mind
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Attributed to Susanne Langer:
“Art is the symbolic expression of human feeling.”
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Attributed to Susanne Langer:
“The mind is a symbol-making organ.”
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Attributed to Susanne Langer:
“Music is the morphology of feeling.”
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Attributed to Susanne Langer:
“Symbols are the principal instruments of human thought.”
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Attributed to Susanne Langer:
“A philosophy without an aesthetic is a philosophy that has not understood mind.”
Susanne Langer on Nature
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“The men in the laboratory [...] cannot be said to observe the actual objects of their curiosity at all.[...] The sense data on which the propositions of modern science rest are, for the most part, little photographic spots and blurs, or inky curved lines on paper.[...] What is directly observable is only a sign of the "physical fact"; it requires interpretation to yield scientific propositions.”
Ch. 1, pp. 15–16 -
“The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling.”
Ch. 5, p. 94