Abstract

Holding that "our intelligence is keen but precarious," Susanne Langer constructed a rational framework for cognition and the life of feeling by inventing apt units through a Gestalt spadework that fused science and philosophy. Langer saw herself as a modernist, and built on the discoveries of Ernst Cassirer, Henry Sheffer, and the logical empiricists. Grasp of her originality has been impeded by partial views based on humanist or analytic bias, and hindered by gender stereotyping and her idiosyncratic style. This dissertation is based on all her writings and on her newly available papers. Her early work exploits the logic of Sheffer, and employs his heterodox view of logical form to describe the internal relations of cultural symbols. In her middle period she takes seriously the knowledge claims of the arts, especially music, and elaborates Schiller's idea of Schein so as to show the generic differences in the primary illusions of the arts. Though resolving some problems of symbolism, Langer finds that the making of artistic semblance requires the guiding quality of livingness and necessarily taps in to the logic of organic processes. Her later years are devoted to Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. Mentality is compounded of animal, physiological, and biological strata as well as symbolic; it rests on primitive sentience and the act-form which permeates nature. Langer suspects that mind originated with the evolution of an over-capacious and over-stimulated brain, leading to an unburdening or Entlastung in which free-floating emotion first articulated cognitive abstractions. Langer ends by being the musical metaphysician, the naturalistic Waldhexe who blends in rational unity the two modes which Rudolf Carnap wanted to keep separate