A short life of the author
Susanne Katherina Langer (20 December 1895 – 17 July 1985) was an American philosopher whose Philosophy in a New Key (1942) — an investigation of symbolism, myth, ritual, music, and the nature of mind — was one of the most widely read philosophy books of the twentieth century, selling over half a million copies. Her work developed a comprehensive theory of art and consciousness that placed aesthetic experience — the creation and apprehension of expressive forms — at the centre of human cognition, and she was the first woman to achieve major recognition as an American academic philosopher.
Life
Langer was born in New York City to German immigrant parents. She was educated at Radcliffe College, where she studied philosophy under Alfred North Whitehead, whose influence — particularly his philosophy of organism and his insistence on the importance of feeling in cognition — shaped her entire career. She received her PhD from Radcliffe in 1926.
She taught at Radcliffe, Columbia, and Connecticut College, where she held a chair in philosophy. She was one of the very few women in academic philosophy in her era, and she achieved her reputation despite the institutional barriers that excluded women from major research universities.
Philosophy in a New Key (1942)
Langer’s breakthrough work argues that the central problem of modern philosophy is not the nature of knowledge (epistemology) or the nature of being (ontology) but the nature of symbolism — how human beings create and use symbols to make sense of experience. She draws on Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms, on Whitehead, and on the work of musicologists and anthropologists to argue that all human thought — not just logical and linguistic thought — is symbolic.
The book’s most influential argument concerns music. Langer rejects the view that music is merely pleasant sound or emotional expression. Instead, she argues that music is a “presentational symbol” — it presents the forms of human feeling (tension, resolution, movement, rest, conflict, harmony) in a non-discursive way that language cannot replicate. Music does not express specific emotions; it presents the morphology of feeling — the shapes and patterns of emotional life — in abstract form.
This theory — that art is not self-expression but the creation of forms analogous to the forms of feeling — became the foundation of her subsequent work.
Feeling and Form (1953)
Langer’s second major work extends the theory of Philosophy in a New Key to all the arts — painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, literature, drama, film. Each art, she argues, creates a “virtual” world — virtual space (painting), virtual time (music), virtual power (dance) — that presents the forms of human feeling in a medium-specific way. The theory is systematic and ambitious, and it provides a unified aesthetic that accounts for all the arts without reducing them to a single principle.
Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967–1982)
Langer’s most ambitious work — three volumes published over fifteen years — attempts to ground her aesthetic theory in a comprehensive account of biological and psychological processes. She argues that feeling (broadly construed — not just emotion but the entire qualitative character of experience) is a fundamental biological phenomenon, present in all living organisms, and that the evolution of feeling — from the irritability of single-celled organisms to the symbolic consciousness of human beings — is the central story of life.
The work is incomplete (a planned fourth volume was never written) and uneven, but its ambition — to build a bridge between biology, psychology, and aesthetics — is extraordinary.
Critical Standing
Langer was immensely popular in mid-century America: Philosophy in a New Key was a bestseller, and her ideas influenced art education, music criticism, and aesthetic theory. Her reputation declined in the 1970s and 1980s as analytic philosophy — which she opposed — dominated American departments. She has been rediscovered by scholars interested in embodied cognition, the philosophy of music, and the relationship between feeling and thought.
Collecting Langer
Philosophy in a New Key (1942, Harvard University Press) in first edition brings $30–$80. Feeling and Form (1953, Scribner’s) brings $20–$50. Her books were published in large academic editions and are available at modest prices.