Susanne Langer Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Susanne Katherina Langer (born Susanne Katherina Knauth) was born on December 20, 1895, in New York City, to German immigrant parents. Raised in a bilingual household, she developed an early love of music and the arts that would shape her philosophical imagination. Because Harvard University did not admit women as regular students at the time, she enrolled at Radcliffe College, Harvard's coordinate institution for women, where she studied philosophy and mathematics. She completed her undergraduate studies in 1920 and continued on to graduate work, earning a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard in 1926. During these years she encountered teachers who profoundly influenced her approach, notably Alfred North Whitehead, whose process philosophy and seminars left a lasting imprint, and the pragmatist logician C. I. Lewis, from whom she absorbed a rigorous approach to symbolic analysis. Her thinking also developed in conversation with the work of Ernst Cassirer, whose philosophy of symbolic forms offered a powerful framework for treating human meaning-making beyond the limits of literal language.

Academic Career
Langer began teaching soon after completing her degree, serving for many years as an instructor and lecturer at Radcliffe College. She also taught at other institutions in the Northeast and became known as a gifted communicator who could bridge technical philosophical issues and the concerns of artists, scientists, and general readers. In mid-career she accepted a professorship at Connecticut College, where she taught through the 1950s and early 1960s. Her classrooms and public lectures drew students from multiple disciplines, including music, literature, psychology, and anthropology, reflecting her conviction that philosophy should illuminate the full range of symbolic activity in human life. Colleagues and students remembered her as incisive but generous, and as a scholar who insisted that logical clarity could coexist with deep attention to feeling, image, and art.

Major Works and Ideas
Langer's early publications established her as a philosopher of logic and meaning. An Introduction to Symbolic Logic (1937) presented formal methods in an accessible way and signaled her long-term interest in signs and symbols. She reached a wide audience with Philosophy in a New Key (1942), which argued that human beings are irreducibly symbolic creatures and that not all symbols are discursive like language. She distinguished discursive symbolism, which unfolds in linear, propositional sequences, from presentational symbolism, which conveys complex, simultaneous relations in ways that cannot be paraphrased without loss. On this view, art is not mere decoration or emotion; it is a mode of cognition that articulates the forms of human feeling.

Feeling and Form (1953) deepened this analysis by exploring how different arts organize experience: music as a temporal articulation of feeling, painting as virtual space, dance as virtual power, and drama as the projection of lived time and action. Langer's accounts drew on her sensitivity to artistic practice while maintaining philosophical rigor, and they opened influential conversations with music theorists, art historians, and educators. She took inspiration from Whitehead's dynamic account of reality and Cassirer's symbolic anthropology, while also engaging the American pragmatist tradition and the semiotic legacy of Charles Sanders Peirce.

Her most ambitious project, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, appeared in three volumes (1967, 1972, 1982). There she attempted a grand synthesis: a naturalistic yet nonreductive account of mind that connects biological rhythms, affect, image, and language to the symbolic capacities that make culture possible. Rejecting simplistic behaviorism and mechanistic models, she argued that feeling is not a private residue but the generative matrix of symbolization. The trilogy traces the emergence of increasingly complex forms of mental life, showing how art and ritual, myth and science, grow from the same root in human symbol-making. The work's scope drew comment from philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, who saw in it an invitation to interdisciplinary research.

Personal Life and Intellectual Milieu
In 1921 she married the historian William L. Langer, a prominent Harvard scholar of European history who would later play significant roles in government service and academic leadership. Their marriage ended in divorce in the early 1940s, but both continued distinguished intellectual careers. Throughout her life Langer remained in dialogue, directly and through her reading, with figures who shaped twentieth-century thought: Whitehead's seminars provided an early model of creative speculation; C. I. Lewis exemplified analytic discipline; Ernst Cassirer demonstrated how a philosophy of symbolic forms could honor science and the arts; and contemporaries such as John Dewey supplied a broader American context for thinking about aesthetic experience. These interlocutors were not always in agreement with Langer, but they formed the horizon within which she forged her distinctive synthesis.

Later Years and Legacy
After leaving full-time teaching, Langer settled in Connecticut, continuing to write and revise the volumes of Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. She lived a quiet, disciplined life centered on scholarship, music, and correspondence with colleagues and readers who sought her advice on aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. She died on July 17, 1985, in Old Lyme, Connecticut.

Langer's legacy is felt across several fields. In philosophy, she helped reopen aesthetics as a central inquiry, arguing that art yields genuine knowledge about the contours of feeling and form. In semiotics and cultural theory, her distinction between discursive and presentational symbolism remains a touchstone for analyzing images, music, and ritual. In music theory, her claim that musical structure articulates the logic of feeling has been influential in debates about expression and meaning. And in cognitive studies, her naturalistic, layered account of symbolization anticipates later efforts to integrate affect, embodiment, and cognition. As one of the most widely read American philosophers of the twentieth century, and as a woman who rose to prominence in an academic culture rarely welcoming to women, Susanne Langer stands as a model of intellectual independence. Her work continues to invite readers to think carefully about how symbols shape not only what we say, but what we are able to feel and know.

Our collection contains 3 quotes who is written by Susanne, under the main topics: Art - Knowledge - Reason & Logic.