Susanne Langer – Art in Human Cognition

I extend this woman a formal invitation to my imaginary dinner party of Fascinating People I Want to Talk to. Here is Susanne Langer, and she is one of the most famous women philosophers in modern American history.

I know: it’s a small club. But that shouldn’t detract from Langer’s accomplishments. Born in New York to German immigrant parents in 1895, Langer’s education was unusual. She was both homeschooled (she never lost a German accent) and attended a private academy. She grew up playing the cello and piano, and her musical background influenced her philosophical theories about the role of art in human cognition. Although her father wasn’t a fan of having his daughter receive advanced degrees, her mother was. And so, Langer enrolled in Radcliff, and went on to earn a PhD in philosophy.

Susanne Langer’s ideas about the place of symbolism on human thought are extremely important. Going from the now widely accepted notion that we humans seek to invest our world with meanings, she developed a distinction between discursive symbolization (usually meaning verbal language) and presentation symbolization (often artistic expressions).

“Art can express what words cannot,” she wrote, “because the meanings of language are restrictive to the discursive arrangement of the words. For new ideas we use symbols in artistic expressiveness . . . There is an unexplored possibility of genuine semantic beyond the limits of discursive language”. This synopsis of Langer’s thoughts is reductionist, but at least gives an impression of her interests.

Langer was also very interested in the solitude provided in the woods of New York state. Later after a life of writing and teaching at various universities, she moved to a cottage without electricity, where she hiked, played music, and collected lizards and frogs. She died in 1985 at the age of 89.