From Art, Mind, and Brain: A Cognitive Approach to Creativity,

New York, Basic Books, 1982, 48-54.

Philosophy in a New Key Revisited: An Appreciation of Susanne

Langer

Howard Gardner

Much of what we learn, even within academic disciplines, is

picked up as general wisdom, as ideas that are “in the air”; such
knowledge can be absorbed simply as a part of breathing in an
intellectual atmosphere. Certain ideas and concepts are acquired in
more specific situations, in textbooks, discussion groups, or formal
courses, only to have their sources forgotten once the “point” has
been absorbed. Just a small part of our knowledge retains traces
from the moment of original encounter—we remember certain
“crystallizing” experiences, for instance, an occasional lecture, a
powerful poem, painting, or piece of music, a passage from the
Bible or the Iliad, and, infrequently, some pages from a path-
breaking work of scholarship, perhaps Sigmund Freud’s On the
Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
In the early 1960s, I, like many other students of that time,
encountered a book that had just such an enduring influence on me.
The book itself was physically unimposing: a thin Mentor
paperback, its cover bordered with bands of gold and decorated
with an odd montage consisting of a lyre, a dragon, and a Socratic
figure. But the book’s content was riveting, its messages
memorable. As I turned its pages with mounting excitement, I felt
myself confronting a set of issues that I had but dimly sensed
before, posed in a way that made sense to me. The work,
Philosophy in a New Key, by philosopher Susanne Langer, led me
to other books, including those by Langer’s mentor, Ernst Cassirer,
and to other courses, including one given by Nelson Goodman, and
eventually helped determine my major scholarly interest—the study
of human symbolic activity.
I think Langer’s slender volume had an equally potent influence
on dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other students. And yet the author
is not widely cited; she is ignored or disparaged by a significant
number of philosophers, and, despite an imposing shelf of books,
she never gained a permanent position at a major university. These
thoughts pervaded my consciousness as I returned to the book,
several years after the initial encounter, to discover whether
separation had diluted or reinforced the power it once held over me,
and in the process to ponder the justice of the fate met by its author.
Writing in 1941, Susanne Langer surveyed the entire
philosophical tradition, from the days of the pre-Socratic
philosophers to the rise of science in the nineteenth century. As she
saw it, a whole set of issues—the central philosophical agenda of
days past—had been invalidated by the emphasis on science. The
nature of truth, of value, of beauty, had been ruled “out of court,”
the bifurcation of mind and body was no longer taken seriously;
with positivism at the helm, there was tolerance only for hard,
material facts and no niche for ideas, emotions, values. Amid this
impatience with anything immaterial, Langer spotted a paradox.
The very empiricists who scorned all matters of mind held in
special regard a group of individuals (mathematicians) who worked
with the most abstract, least tangible of all elements—numerical
symbols.
Mathematicians were “special” because they made no claim to
be illuminating the issues of real life or the structure of the physical
world. They dealt exclusively with another level of discourse—that
of symbolic meaning. It was this symbolic domain that began, at
the end of the nineteenth century, to take hold of the philosophical
community. In fact, a dominant trend in philosophy at the time
Langer was writing entailed an obsession with symbols, one as
pervasive as earlier philosophers’ preoccupation with the senses of
man and the raw matter of the physical world.
The new agenda, the recently cut key of philosophy, consisted
of a concern with all manner of symbols-words, numbers, and other
abstract forms—and with the various meanings that underlie our
dreams, fill our imaginations, and draw us to treasure works of
civilization, ranging from the Parthenon to the string quartets of
Beethoven. As Langer put it in Philosophy in a New Key, in an
effort to contrast her vision of meaning with that of earlier times:
But between the facts run the threads of unrecorded reality,
momentarily recognized, wherever they come to the surface .
. . the bright, twisted threads of symbolic envisagement,
imagination, thought-memory and reconstructed memory,
belief beyond experience, dream, make-believe, hypothesis,
philosophy—the whole creative process of ideation,
metaphor, and abstraction that makes human life an
adventure in understanding. (pp. 236-237)
 Now these ideas, this new key, were already in the air at the
time Langer wrote. Few of the ideas she put forth in her work were
wholly new. Indeed, Langer takes great care to cite and pay tribute
to a raft of predecessors: semiotician Charles Peirce; neurologist
Kurt Goldstein; the students of language, I. A. Richards and Wilbur
Urban; philosophers Rudolf Carnap and Ludwig Wittgenstein; her
own professor, the great logician and metaphysician, Alfred North
Whitehead; and, above all, the man who had some dozen years
before completed a three-volume study of symbolic forms, the
redoubtable epistemologist Ernst Cassirer
In fact, a trove of articles and books had been a prelude to this
new key, but it would be a gross injustice to relegate Langer’s work
to the level of “mere” popularization. It was popularization, but it
was much more. In the tradition of the finest educational syntheses,
Langer drew illuminating connections among works whose
relationships had not yet been seen, avoided the perils of arid
formulas and moist metaphysics, and placed the entire movement in
a historical and philosophical perspective that had not yet been
articulated. Moreover—and here lies her claim to originality—
Langer articulated concepts that clarified issues in a still uncharted
philosophical region and raised questions that are still being
pondered.
The basic argument of Philosophy in a New Key is disarmingly
simple, and given the hindsight of today, it seems much less
arresting than it was on publication or even at the time I first
encountered it. Langer posited a basic and pervasive human need to
symbolize, to invent meanings, and to invest meanings in one’s
world. It was a property of the human mind to search for and to find
significances everywhere, to transform experience constantly to
uncover new meanings. But the symbols wrought by the human
mind were not all of the same sort and Langer found it necessary to
distinguish two kinds.
Consider, as an example, the proposition “George Washington
chopped down a cherry tree.” Its meaning can be conveyed in two
contrasting ways. The first, called discursive symbolism, involves
the expression of this idea in words or other kinds of “languages.”
One notes the meaning of each term, combines them according to
accepted rules of syntax, and arrives at a commonly shared
meaning. Most familiar ideas and notions could be expressed in
such coin.
Opposed to discursive symbolism is another, less understood
variety, which Langer labeled presentational symbolism. Here, an
equivalent idea could be gleaned from a picture. Such pictorial
symbols do not yield meaning through a sum of their parts, for
there are no reliably discriminable parts. They present themselves
and must be apprehended as a whole; moreover, they operate
primarily through shades of meaning, nuances, connotations, and
feelings (the appearance of the lad, the force of the blow, the
ambience that day), rather than through a discrete, translatable
message. Any consideration of the meanings with which our lives
are wrapped must take into account at least these two kinds of
symbol, the meanings they bear, how they work, their special
geniuses.
For most readers the distinction between these two forms of
symbol was the key concept of philosophy’s new key. In
introducing this contrast, Langer identified an important set of
similarities (both express meanings) and differences (they operate
in fundamentally contrasting ways) between words or mathematics
on one hand, and pictures, sculpture, and dance on the other. She
broached the possibility of analyzing feelings, emotions, and other
intangible elements of human experience through the relatively
public arena of symbol analysis. Clearly, she had helped to solidify
an appealing intuition, and by categorizing and analyzing it, offered
others the chance to dissect it.
This aspect of Langer’s work has undergone considerable
criticism at the hands of her colleagues in philosophy. Because she
offered no strict definition, it is difficult to identify examples of the
two forms of symbolism with reliability or to be certain that there
are only two such forms. And, even more damagingly, Langer’s
own examples were wanting. Language itself can operate in a
discursive or presentational way (compare a textbook with a poem),
even as pictures may wear a different symbolic garb (compare a
portrait with a map or diagram). Critics with a more finicky, less
intuitive approach than Langer’s have had a field day challenging
this distinction. Even those with a much more sympathetic eye have
gone on to adopt more carefully worked out distinctions among
symbol systems, such as those introduced by the philosopher
Nelson Goodman.
Langer’s purpose, however, was less to glorify this distinction
than to see where she could apply it. So she sought to identify the
origins of the various symbols that pervade the life of our culture.
In separate far-ranging chapters she examined the evolutionary
beginnings of symbolic activity in the thought patterns of animals
and young children; the cultural beginnings of symbolism in the
realms of myth and ritual; and the heights achieved by
presentational symbolism in such art forms as music. These
chapters are at best uneven. Many analysts have despaired of
accounting for the origin of myth or rituals because the possibility
of verification is so slim. Investigation of the symbol systems used
by children and animals, barely broached in 1940, is now
sufficiently advanced to render her empirical statements dubious.
An air of the treatises of the late nineteenth century, when authors
felt compelled (and entitled) to comment on every aspect of the rise
of civilization, is not entirely absent from Langer’s synoptic work.
But amid these somewhat disappointing chapters stands one that
has exerted a tremendous influence on many individuals: Langer’s
account of the significance of music. Langer rightly sensed that
music was a symbolic system but that it did not directly
communicate either reference (for example, the sound of waves) or
feelings (for example, the composer’s own sense of happiness or
anger). She proposed that what music presented was the “forms of
feelings”—the tensions, ambiguities, contrasts, and conflicts that
permeate our feeling life but do not lend themselves to description
in words or logical formulas. The composer presents in spaced
tones his knowledge of the whole of human feeling life, and such
nonarticulate symbols constitute the appeal and mystery of music.
In a passage that conveys the seductive appeal as well as the
maddening ambiguity of her prose, the philosopher suggests:
The real power of music lies in the fact that it can be “true”
to the life of feeling in a way that language cannot; for its
significant forms have that ambivalence of content which
words cannot have. . . . Music is revealing, where words are
obscuring, because it can have not only a content, but a
transient play of contents. It can articulate feelings without
becoming wedded to them. The assignment of meanings is a
shifting, kaleidoscopic play, probably below the threshold of
consciousness, certainly outside the pale of discursive
thinking. The imagination that responds to music is personal
and associative and logical, tinged with affect, tinged with
bodily rhythm, tinged with dream, but concerned with a
wealth of formulations for its wealth of wordless knowledge,
its whole knowledge of emotional and organic experience, of
vital impulse, balance, conflict, the ways of living and dying
and feeling. Because no assignment of meaning is
conventional, none is permanent beyond the sound that
passes; yet the brief association was a flash of understanding.
 The lasting effect is, like the first effect of speech on the
development of the mind, to make things conceivable rather
than to store up propositions. (pp. 206-207)
Taking music as the prototype of the arts, Langer suggested that
this knowledge of feeling life constitutes the perennial attraction of
artistic symbols; herein lie the reasons we treasure those statements
and works that to the logical empiricist have no meaning at all.
Langer’s concluding pages assessed trends in the world at the
time of her writing. At the start of the most awful war in human
history, it is scarcely surprising that Langer painted a gloomy
portrait of “the fabric of meaning” in her society. She saw a world
in which language was lauded above everything; where the inner
life was disparaged, ignored, even destroyed. Drawing on her own
analysis, she emphasized the importance, the necessity of an
existence in which various levels of meanings and ranges of
significance were tolerated. In place of “a philosophy that knows
only deductive or inductive logic as reason, and classes all other
human functions as ‘emotive,’ irrational or animalian,” she
proposed “a theory of mind whose keynote is the symbolic function
. . . the continual pursuit of meanings—wider, clearer, more
negotiable, more articulate meanings . . . the new world that
humanity is dreaming of” (p. 246). Were I her editor, I might have
been inclined to tone down these passages, but as a reader,
particularly one thinking back to his college days, I resonate to
these sentiments.
In large part Susanne Langer’s work has accomplished its
mission. Her ideas about symbolism, about meaning in art as well
as in science, about the nature of different symbolic forms, are
common coin; one need no longer read the little Mentor paperback
(now reissued at several times the original price by Harvard
University Press) to find out about them. Thus the book,
reconsidered, has a historical importance—as one of that small set
of pedagogical classics that has affected a multitude of students.
And yet the work retains a timeliness. Langer’s graceful
enthusiasm is engaging; the historical context in which the
“revolution” is set helps place in perspective contemporary
movements in the social sciences and the humanities; various
distinctions introduced and various analyses offered constitute a
genuine contribution to current discussions about human knowing.
Because Langer intelligibly linked the old and new traditions in
philosophy, because she legitimated a scholarly interest in
symbolism and the arts, and because she foreshadowed research in
psychology and philosophy that continues today, her work still
carries a message.
And what of Susanne Langer herself? In succeeding years she
went on to write an impressive set of books, volumes that plumbed
with increasing depth the pivotal themes introduced in Philosophy
in a New Key. This effort culminated in Mind: An Essay on Human
Feeling, without doubt the most comprehensive attempt yet
undertaken to establish a philosophical and scientific underpinning
for aesthetic experience. Langer has gone her own way in these
works; no longer in any sense popularizing, she has carefully
studied relevant humanistic and scientific texts and has not
hesitated to tackle the grand topics—mind, feeling, art—that
frighten so many of her colleagues in philosophy. It is not
surprising that she is more popular at small liberal arts colleges than
at technologically oriented universities; more appreciated by old-
fashioned humanists than by newfangled scientists. And it is not
difficult to understand why, anticipated by earlier philosophers and
succeeded by more disciplined minds, Susanne Langer has never
broken into the charmed circle of mainstream philosophers. Yet this
gifted philosopher, now nearing ninety, remains an inquiring mind
in the best sense of the word—a scholar blessed with a powerful
intuition, who knows no disciplinary bounds, who follows a
problem wherever it will take her, and who has the gift of
articulating the concerns of a generation of scholars and many
generations of students. That she cannot be catalogued may explain
why she has escaped certain honors—even as it suggests why she
may transcend her time.