Susanne Langer Quotes on Knowledge
Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985), the American philosopher whose Philosophy in a New Key (1942) gave mid-twentieth-century philosophy of mind one of its most influential proposals, defended the case that symbolic transformation — not stimulus-response, not rational inference, not even communication in the narrow sense — is the fundamental distinctive activity of the human mind. The framework draws the distinction between discursive symbolism (organized in linear, articulated propositions, of which natural language is the principal instance) and presentational symbolism (organized in the simultaneous integrative wholes characteristic of music, ritual, and visual art), with the consequent epistemological case that the second is no less genuinely cognitive than the first. The three-volume Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967–82) develops the framework systematically.
Quotes
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Attributed to Susanne Langer:
“The mind is a symbol-making organ.”
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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.”
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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