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Panentheism. Revisionism. Anarchocapitalism.

From Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society,

XXXIII:1, Winter 1997, 149-160. An informed
critique from one who studied under Bernard
Lonergan and whose dissertation was on Langer’s
philosophy of art.

Susanne K. Langer’s
Philosophy of Mind
Richard M. Liddy

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I find it significant that Susanne K. Langer’s
Essays by Me earlier work on art and symbolism, particularly
Philosophy in a New Key (1942) and Feeling and
Essays by Others
Form (1953), received a significantly more positive
reception than her three-volume work Mind: An
Essay on Human Feeling (1967-1982). Her earlier
works were very enthusiastically received and even
now, many years later, continue to have an
influence.1 On the other hand, her later work
explicitly dedicated to “mind,” received, it seems to
me, a decidedly less enthusiastic response. Apart
from some who appreciate her work as prefiguring
recent advances in biological science, there has not
been a significant response from the philosophical
community.
Why is this? Why the different reception? In a
short paper on Langer’s “philosophy of mind” I can
only give a brief account of my own analysis; but I
am convinced that her later work is not about mind
but rather about the biological conditions for the
emergence of mind. On the other hand, her earlier
writings on art and symbolism gave more scope to
what is specifically human in human mentality, and
that is the source of the continuing interest in those
early writings.
My presentation will consist in three parts: first,
the intellectual character of artistic consciousness in
her early work; secondly, her writings on “mind” in
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 her later work; and finally, an overall evaluation.

I. The Centrality of “Understanding” in

Langer’s Early Work
There were several basic philosophical influences
on Langer’s early work. The first was the modern
studies of logic epitomized by the Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus of Wittgenstein. Throughout Langer’s
writings I find the ghost of the early Wittgenstein:
philosophy is a clarification and construction of
concepts with the aim of arriving at one unifying
language, one “conceptual system,” that somehow
will relate all our various languages to science.
“Science,” never explicitly analyzed, is the one
outside limit of our knowledge. This assumption
that we can construct some basic language that will
logically unite all the various sciences and all the
various languages, I find throughout Langer’s work.
Wittgenstein, of course, abandoned this view of
philosophy in favor of incommensurable “ordinary
language games,” and in the last pages of Mind: An
Essay on Human Feeling Langer complains about his
“despairing resort to behaviorism.”2
This idea of philosophy as the “logical
construction” of basic concepts to bring them in line
with science is connected in Langer’s thought with a
commitment to a certain type of naturalism.
That man is an animal I certainly believe; and
also that he has no supernatural essence,
“soul,” or “entelechy” or “mind stuff,”
enclosed in his skin. He is an organism, his
substance is chemical, and what he does,
suffers, or knows, is just what this sort of
chemical structure may do, suffer, or know.
When the structure goes to pieces, it never
does, suffers, or knows anything again.3
At the same time, in Langer’s early work her
praxis is not just one of conceptual clarification in
order to bring other languages into line with
scientific language. In fact, she is intent on standing
up to those who would say that science alone
represents the intellectual character of the human
person and she seeks to vindicate the intellectual
character of symbolic and artistic consciousness.
And here we find a further influence on her early
work and that is the neo-Kantian, Ernst Cassirer,
whose Philosophy of Symbolic Forms helped her to
focus on what she called the “unlogicized” areas of
life, such as myth, ritual and art. Thus, in her 1942
Philosophy in a New Key Langer sought to extend
the vision of “logical philosophy” by insisting on the
“intellectual” character of these non-scientific areas
of human life. Contrary to “empiricist,” “positi-
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 vistic,” behavioristic” positions, Langer held that
artistic creations were not merely emotive
expressions of present feelings; they are symbols of
what transcends the present. Far from being
“signals” of immediately present objects, they
mediate meanings that are beyond the here and
now.
This analysis of symbols as properly intellectual
and not reducible to immediate sense perception or
emotive response is extended to all art forms in
Feeling and Form. There two elements stand out.
On the one hand, Langer emphasizes the fact that
each area of art involves an “aesthetic illusion,” that
is, as she puts it, the very being of aesthetic forms is
to be perceived. “They exist only for the sense or
imagination that perceives them”; their perceptible
character is their entire being. Events recounted in a
story are “as bad as they sound.” As T. S. Eliot put
it: “You are the music while the music lasts.”
But Feeling and Form makes another point with
equal emphasis. The creation of a work of art
involves, not just feeling-influenced aesthetic
experience, but also the idealization of experience,
the grasp of what is important in experience as
important, and its objectification in a work of art.
Such objectification is a properly human and
necessary element in art. Prior to this creative act of
symbolization the aesthetic patterns are not fully
and humanly known.5 Objective expression is
necessary for the artists to “hold,” to “fix,” to
“contemplate,” to “understand,” the forms of their
free, feeling-influenced, aesthetic experience.6
Art, therefore, belongs to the same category as
language. It is intellectual. The appreciation of a
work of art involves a mental shift as radical as the
change from hearing noises to hearing speech.7 The
work of art effects the same sort of reorientation.
Just as sounds become words by reason of their
“meaning,” so colors on a canvas become a painting
because of their artistic significance or “import.”
This import permeates the whole structure of the
work and separates it from the host of surrounding
“insignificant” objects.8
Consequently, the “otherness” of the artistic is
due not only to its aesthetic character whereby
experience, liberated from other more practically
oriented patterns of consciousness, lives its own life;
but also to the fact that it has been “created” by
human intelligence and invites human intellectual
apprehension. Langer is quite clear in asserting that
art involves not only the level of perception and
experience, but also the level of insight,
understanding, contemplation.
The aim of art is insight, understanding
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 the essential life of feeling.9
The artistic symbol, qua artistic,
negotiates insight, not refference.10
Analyses of art very frequently fail to take into
account this intellectual character. On the contrary,
they consider art chiefly in terms of immediate
experience and/or, most frequently, immediate
emotion. The insufficiency of this tendency is in fact
the major emphasis in the chapters on art in
Philosophy in a New Key and in Feeling and Form.
Art is the intellectual creation for our contemplation
of an affect-laden image that liberates us from the
demands of practical life and immediate emotion.

2. “Mind” in Mind: An Essay on Human

Feeling
It would seem that Langer’s work on art
confronted her with the following dilemma: how are
we to reconcile intelligence, operative in artistic
creativity, with “feeling,” somehow involved in
artistic expression? That these two realms could be
reconciled represented her faith in “the unity of
science, one and the same scientific framework
underlying all areas of empirical research.11 A
cardinal assumption of Mind: An Essay on Human
Feeling was that ultimately that one framework
would form a logical continuity with the science of
physics; for “any science,” she notes, “is likely to
merge ultimately with physics as chemistry has
done.12 This is a major assumption behind Langer’s
work: that there is a logical and conceptual
continuity between all the sciences.
According to Langer the function of philosophy is
to clarify language in an effort to unify the
languages of the different sciences.13 As physics
deals with matter, res extensa, so also do the other
sciences, although at a higher degree of
complexity.14 In biology Langer’s major adversary
is vitalism:
the conception of “life” as a special essence
different from “matter,” something that
pervades “living matter,” and sets it apart
from “mere matter” which obeyed the laws of
physics.15
In order to attain the logical coherence of biology
with physics, Langer assumes from the latter realm
the basic concept of “natural event”; on this
foundation she is able to construct the basic
biological notion of “act” as a particular sort of
event. This concept has the advantage of not
implying the prior notion of “agent,” and thus allows
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 one to trace the origins of life in the inorganic world;
for “action,” the formal aspect of “act,” is common
to both living and nonliving beings.
If Langer’s basic argument for the reduction of
biology to physics is the a priori conviction that this
must form one conceptual framework around the
one object, “matter,” she feels called upon to proffer
particular evidence for the biological status of
“feeling.” She finds this evidence in art. Invoking
her own artistic studies, she comes to the conclusion
regarding feeling:
the fact that expressive form is always
organic or “living” form made the biological
foundation of feeling probable.16
For the work of art is the objective realization of
a mental image; and images reflect the biological
sources from which they spring. Psychologists,
therefore, must go to artists to learn about feeling,
because art is a final symbolic form making
revelations of truths and facts about feeling,
precisely the truths and facts that literal scientific
statement distorts. Once the artist has created the
work of art, the image of feelings, we may talk about
them scientifically; “but only artistic perception can
find them and judge them real in the first place.”17
In my doctoral dissertation on Langer’s
philosophy of art and an extended review of the first
volume of Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling I
analyzed Langer’s deeply held assumptions
concerning the nature of human knowing.18
Basically, in her view knowing is a bipolar activity in
which the “concepts” of scientific or philosophical
thinking are the subjective pole, “matter” is the
objective pole, and some type of vision or “looking”
is the mediating activity.
Thus we “see” forms of feeling in works of art;
and in metaphorical activity we “see one thing in
another,” life in the candle flame, death in sleep, etc.
This, she asserts, is the basis of all “higher”
differentiated activity. But she never analyzes
“higher” differentiated activity to verify whether it is
indeed a fact that human knowing consists
essentially in “seeing.” Every example of mind
Langer uses is of undifferentiated consciousness,
that is, mythical, metaphorical and symbolic
understanding. In these activities feeling and
imagination obviously blend into the
pronouncements of intelligence.
The power of seeing one thing in another,
which begets our metaphors and conceptual
models (the oldest of which are myths of
nature and human life), leads also to a
characteristically human thought process
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 known as abstraction. By logical intuition we
see not only what is “the same” in two widely
different things, as for instance a burning
candle consumed by its flame and a living
body consumed by its life, but also what
makes them different. As soon as the
differences are dearly recognized, the
common element stands out against them and
can be conceived alone as that which both of
those different things exhibit. In this way the
concept, e.g. “matter being consumed by its
own activity,” is abstracted.19
It is on the basis of her assumptions regarding
scientific knowing, therefore, that Langer arrives at
the hypothesis that feeling, globally including all
subjective, conscious, mental activity, is merely a
heightened form of biological activity, itself a
complexus reducible to electro-chemical events.
Feeling is matter at its most complex.20 It is not
another “thing,” “entity” or separate “substance,”
but rather a phase of biological process which
passes above a certain limen of intensity so that the
living tissue “feels” its own activity.21 To clarify the
assertion that feeling is not a “thing,” she notes that
it is similar to the reflection of a tree in a pool of
water; just as the reflection is not another “thing,”
but the tree’s appearance, so feeling is merely the
appearance which organic functions have for the
organism in which they occur.22
By defining “feeling” as “appearance,” she
apparently believes that she has “solved” the
problem of consciousness. My own conviction is that
rather than solving the “problem” of consciousness,
she has merely (by a bit of conceptual legerdemain)
“defined” it away!
As Langer reaches the end of her three-volume
work, she seems to be aware that she has left
something out—a dimension that because of age and
failing eyesight she is not able to treat.
This study of mind should culminate, of
course, in a well constructed epistemological
and possibly even metaphysical theory, at
least as firmly founded on other people’s
knowledge and hypotheses as any earlier
parts of this essay which have been written in
preparation for such a reflective conclusion.
But the hindrances of age—especially
increasing blindness—make it necessary to
curtail the work at what should be its height .
. . .23
The final short section that does complete her
work continues what she has been emphasizing
throughout her work: her effort to show the origins
of differentiated thought in undifferentiated activity.
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 That is, our human awareness of “number,” the
origins of mathematics, originates in dance as the
“number sense” is transferred from feet to hands by
the beat of the drum. These types of analyses are, I
would say, symptomatic of her whole work; that is,
it is an effort to explain all human “higher level”
activities—mathematics, science, morality, religion—
by a single-minded focusing on the biological
conditions that prefigured the emergence of those
higher level activities.

3. Evaluation of Langer on Mind

The Canadian philosopher, Bernard Lonergan,
was once asked about “the biological basis of
thought.” He replied:
The biological basis of thought, I should say,
is like the rubber-tire basis of the motor car.
It conditions and sets limits to functioning,
but under the conditions and within the limits
the driver directs operations.24
Lonergan’s own work, especially his Insight: A
Study of Human Understanding, is a generalized
empirical method that explores not just the data of
sense, as is Langer’s exclusive emphasis, but also
the data of human consciousness, especially the data
of scientific consciousness. By beginning with the
analysis of scientific method, you are in the best
position for framing the question of what in fact you
are talking about when you speak of “mind.” By
highlighting the structure of scientific consciousness
right from the beginning Langer might have been in
a better position to highlight what she had
emphasized in her early work, the intellectual and
creative activity of human consciousness.
If Langer had followed this path, she might have
clarified right from the start the fact that the
sciences are not linked purely logically, but rather
methodologically: they involve operations that go
beyond logic. Scientific method includes more than
the logical operations of describing, formulating and
deducing concepts; it moves beyond this group to
include the activities of inquiry, observation,
discovery, experiment, synthesis, verification. A
careful analysis of this set of human operations
illustrates the fact that modern science derives its
distinctive character from the grouping together of
logical and no logical operations. The logical tend to
consolidate what has been achieved. The non-
logical keep all achievement open to further
advance. The conjunction of the two results in an
open, ongoing, progressive and cumulative
process.25
I am not saying that Langer herself was not a
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 very intelligent woman. Nor am I denying that in
Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling she has made
some contribution to analyzing the biological
systems and activities that provide some of the
conditions for the emergence of “mind” from
underlying levels. I would leave it to the biologists
to determine her contribution. But as Arthur Danto
noted in the Foreword to the abridged edition of
Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Langer’s
commitment to survey all the relevant science,
. . . resulted in an unwieldy book and one,
moreover, in hostage to its empirical
materials, which in the nature of scientific
advance went out of date . . . .26
Nevertheless, although much of what Langer
relates of empirical science might in fact go out of
date or be set within a new context, still “there is no
revising the reviser.” That is, there is a structure to
scientific method according to which some positions
will be judged inadequate and other new ones will
be judged more on the mark. Underlying scientific
advance there is the invariant yet dynamic structure
of scientific consciousness.27
In other words, one cannot feel one has
“explained” the human mind when one has
elucidated the underlying biological conditions for
the emergence of mind. “Mind” is a level of
functioning and reality in its own right and one
should analyze that functioning before assuming
that it can be “logically” assimilated to “feeling” and
the levels of biological research.
In a response to the first draft of this paper I was
asked if all naturalisms, including Langer’s, are
necessarily reductive. I would reply that a
naturalism (that is, a philosophy that takes empirical
science seriously) need not be reductive if it asks all
the relevant questions and does not declare certain
questions out of bounds: the nature of human
intelligence, consciousness, etc. After focusing on
artistic consciousness in her early writings, I find
that the method Langer employed in Mind: An Essay
on Human Feeling prevented her from focusing on
human conscious activity in its most differentiated
exercise. When one is treating of human
consciousness, one cannot feel that one has
“explained” human questioning, insight, freedom,
conscience, culture, politics, religion, etc., when one
has identified some of the conditions for the
emergence of these realities. In fact, these realities,
as any higher level realities are not “logically”
reducible to the conditions for their emergence.
Although Langer is opposed to the crass
reductionism of nineteenth century determinism,
hers is a less crass but still reductionistic procedure:
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 1. define “mind” as undifferentiated
artistic, mythical or metaphorical
consciousness where visual imagination,
feeling and “seeing” are prominent;

2. offer as an “explanation” of mind the

highlighting of the biological conditions
for the emergence of mind.

I believe that it is for these chiefly

methodological flaws that Langer’s later work
received a significantly less enthusiastic response
than her earlier fine work on art.

Notes
1 I am told that Philosophy in a New Key has been
the largest selling paperback in the history of the
Harvard University Press. And in twenty-two
volumes of The Collected Works of Bernard
Lonergan, now being published by the University of
Toronto Press, Langer’s Feeling and Form holds a
prominent role for its analysis of aesthetic and
artistic consciousness. Cf. especially Volume 10,
Topics in Education where the ninth chapter (pages
108-232) is dedicated to interpreting Langer’s
philosophy of art.
2 Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling III (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) 206.
3 Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, [1942] third ed 1957) 44. Cf.
Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner’s, 1953) 129.
4 Feeling and Form, 48, 50. This is an interesting
illustration of Aristotle’s dictum in the De Anima that
knowledge is rooted in identity: “sense in act is the
sensible in act; intellect in act is the intelligible in
act.” (De Anima III, 431b). In aesthetic experience
there is an identity of subject and object. Feeling
and Form emphasized a type of knowing that takes
place, not primarily through confrontation, but
through identity.
5 Ibid., 389.

6 Philosophical Sketches (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

Press, 1962) 80; Problems of Art (New York:
Scribner’s, 1957) 24-25; 68; 94-95.
7 Feeling and Form, 84.

8 Ibid., 52.

9 Problems of Art, 92; cf. Philosophy in a New Key,

188.
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 10 Feeling and Form, 22.

11 Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling I (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins) 262.
12 Ibid., 52.

13 Cf. Michael H. McCarthy, The Crisis of Philosophy

(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990)
on the history of analytical philosophy.
14 Perhaps a clue to this change in Langer’s own
understanding of mind can be gathered from two
quotes from her writings, some thirty years apart. In
a very early work of 1930 she makes the statement
that modern physics, Einstein’s reinterpretation of
nature, has made the traditional mind-body problem
seem somewhat naive; it has dissolved the Cartesian
division of reality into res extensa and res cogitans,
since “it does not operate with res extensa.” The
Practice of Philosophy (NY: Henry Holt, 1930) 198.
Some thirty years later, however, she has changed
her mind on the Cartesian equation: “The
metaphysical status of “feeling,” “contents of
consciousness,” “subjectivity,” or of the private
aspects of experience generally, has been an asses’
bridge to philosophers ever since Descartes treated
res extensa and res cogitans as irreducible and
incommensurable substances. The physical
scientists have not encountered this dilemma
because their entire interest lies in physical
phenomena, res extensa.” Philosophical Sketches
(New York: New American Library, 1964) 11.
15 Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling I, 316.

16 Ibid., 19.

17 Ibid., 81.

18 Cf. Richard M. Liddy, Art and Feeling: An Analysis

and Critique of the Philosophy of Art of Susanne K.
Langer (Rome: 1970; listed in Dissertation Abstracts,
Ann Arbor, MI, 1971); also review of Susanne K.
Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol I, in
International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 10, n. 3
(1970) 481-484.
19 Philosophical Sketches, 133.

20 Ibid., 67.

21 Ibid., 27-29.

22 Ibid., 15; 30.

23 Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling III, 201.

24 Bernard Lonergan, A Second Collection

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 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972) 35.
25 Cf. Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990) 6.
26 Arthur C. Danto, “Foreword,” Susanne K. Langer,
Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, abridged edition
by G. Van den Heuvel (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1988) vi.
27 Cf. Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human
Understanding (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1992) Chapter 11, “The Self-Affirmation of
the Knower,” 343-371. In this work Lonergan
analyzes the structures of classical and statistical
scientific questioning, outlines a world-view of
“emergent probability” that flows from the
combination of those structures in the various areas
of scientific research and roots all methods of
questioning in the consciousness of the human
subject.

Richard M. Liddy page

Susanne K. Langer page
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