Daily Inspiration Quote by Susanne Langer

Langer draws a clean, almost ruthless line between getting our attention and changing our minds. A signal, in her framing, is basically a tap on the shoulder: it points, it alerts, it triggers orientation. It works when it successfully yanks perception toward something in the world. A siren, a knock, a red light. You can "comprehend" it without any inner transformation beyond noticing and reacting.

A symbol is different because it asks for participation. It doesn't merely direct you to an object; it invites you to construct an idea. Understanding, here, is not recognition but conception. The subtext is that meaning is not delivered like a package; it is made, internally, through the mind's capacity to form and manipulate concepts. That distinction matters because it separates humans from systems that operate on cues alone. Animals, machines, and bureaucracies can be brilliantly signal-responsive. Culture requires symbol-use.

Contextually, Langer is working in the mid-20th-century philosophical terrain shaped by Cassirer, Peirce, and the emerging language-and-mind conversation: how art, ritual, and language carry forms of knowledge that aren't reducible to stimulus-response. Her intent is also defensive of the humanities. If art is treated as mere signaling (the painting "means" danger, the song "means" sadness), it gets demoted to emotional traffic control. By insisting on symbols as idea-bearing forms, Langer makes room for ambiguity, layered interpretation, and the kind of understanding that can't be measured by whether you simply looked where you were told.