Susanne Langer Quotes on Nature
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. This page collects quotes attributed to Susanne Langer on the topic of nature, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
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