Susanne Langer Quotes on Nature
Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key (1942) and the three-volume Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967–82) gave mid-twentieth-century American philosophy one of its most distinctive engagements with the philosophical analysis of the natural and symbolic dimensions of human life. The central thesis of the late trilogy is that the human animal differs from other natural beings through the symbolic transformation of experience — the capacity to project felt life into the discursive and presentational forms of language, ritual, art, and myth — and the corresponding philosophical biology must accommodate this distinctive symbolic dimension within a broader naturalistic framework that respects the continuities Langer also tracked. The framework, drawing on Cassirer, Whitehead, and the broader phenomenological-naturalist tradition, shaped subsequent philosophical aesthetics and the contemporary engagement with the philosophy of biology and feeling.
Quotes
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Attributed to Susanne Langer:
“The mind is a symbol-making organ.”
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“If we would have new knowledge, we must get us a whole world of new questions.”
Ch. 1, p. 10 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 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