During my freshman year at New York University in 1971, I had as my first professor of philosophy Bob Gurland (b. 1933), voted many times Teacher of the Year (by many of his 25 thousand students). One fascinating thing I had learned about him was that he played trumpet in several big bands in the Fifties. (Charlie Barnet’s was one, as I recall.) One day after class, I chatted with him on Waverly Place, half a block east of Washington Square North, about jazz music, which we both love, and I remember interjecting, “That’s not something I want to theorize about.” Neither did he. He added a few words that underscored his head-nodding agreement.[1] I went about my philosophical education knowing both that there was such a thing as aesthetics and that I wasn’t much interested in it.
But as that lack of interest didn’t sit well with me, I was delighted when my reading led me to Susanne K. Langer, who lifted the veil a bit for me. On this site five years ago, I shared my discovery of her writings, which came into my world by way of my long and deep interest in Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984).
Lonergan [I wrote] was impressed with Susanne K. Langer’s Feeling and Form enough to cite it a couple of times in Insight. That’s how I learned of her work, and around 2008 I finally got around to marking up her Philosophy in a New Key: a Study in the Symbolism of Reason Rite and Art. For the first time, the arts were for me not just enjoyable, but also intelligible. First published in 1942, a mass market paperback edition hit the stands in 1949.
What could Langer, a materialist (or naturalist) in all but name, offer Lonergan a Transcendental Thomist? Monsignor Richard M. Liddy, who wrote his dissertation on Langer after studying under Lonergan in Rome, supplied an answer in “What Bernard Lonergan Learned from Susanne K. Langer.”[2]
Now, just how did she make intelligible to my prosaic mind the arts that express, enrich, and delight us as souls, that is, as beings capable of enjoyment and suffering?[3] Well, she had an insight into the different “primary illusions” that inform the “great orders of art.” These illusions are “semblances of experienced events,” with music (where she, a trained cellist, started) creating the illusion of time; painting, space; ballet, forces; literature, a virtual past; drama, a virtual present. The primary illusion of film, I reread the other day, is the dream.
I cannot compress her insights into a blogpost without doing violence to their nuance—I know . . . too late—but several key essays (which Langer scholars have told me they’ve found useful in this form) may be read on my old site. But let me give you a taste of how she understands the unity of the diversity of arts.
All art is the creation of forms expressive of human feeling, from the primitive sense of vitality that goes with breathing and moving one’s limbs, or even suddenly resting, to the poignant emotions of love and grief and ecstasy. The essential unity of the arts is vouched for by this large and single purpose, and really requires no other explanation.
What is difficult to understand is the selective character of artistic talent. Few creative artists are equally gifted in even two realms of art. Leonardo, for all his versatility, was above all a painter; his poetry, from any other pen than the great painter’s, would hardly have stood the test of five hundred years. Wagner would certainly not have impressed his generation as poet or dramatist without his musical fame. William Blake, equally great as poet and painter, always comes to mind in this connection just because he is a notable exception to the rule. Talent is normally restricted to one artistic domain.
No matter how positively we proclaim the identity of all arts, in practice we do not turn to Picasso for musical education, nor expect to learn painting from Kreisler, nor study ballet under T. S. Eliot. And that is not because the techniques are too specialized for one man to master; painting is technically as different from sculpture as it is from piano playing; but it is near to sculpture and far from piano playing, because the primary illusion it creates is virtual space, and what music creates is something else. Music is of a different order of imagination, and even if it were made with hammer and chisel on a stone that emitted sounds, it would be music, not sculpture.
Her example from music is instructive:
Music . . . is theoretically misunderstood because an obvious approach to it presents itself at once, and blocks our view of what a musician really creates. The wrong premises here are . . . . in brief, that the elements of music are tones, whose essential characters are pitch, duration, loudness, and timbre (tone-color depending on overtones); that these tones are combined by the composer to yield patterns of sound, characterized as melody, harmony, and rhythm. Complex patterns, exemplifying all these characters, are works of music, which act upon our sensibilities, and stimulate our emotions. To “understand” a piece of music is to recognize its factors . . . .
What, then, is created in music? Apparently nothing; tones are produced, but tones are actual phenomena, and their somatic effects are actual, like the effects of contact with warm or cold objects, the smell of perfume, etc. According to this view, musical composition should be a science rather than an art. . . .
Yet music is the most enthralling, i.e., illusionistic, phenomenon in the world. What we hear in listening to sounds “musically” is not their specific pitch and loudness, duration and timbre. . . . We hear movement and rest, swift movement or slow, stop, attack, direction, parallel and contrary motion, melody rising or soaring or sinking, harmonies crowding or resolving or clashing; moving forms in continuous flux.
But in all this progressive motion there is actually nothing that moves. Here a word may be in order to forestall a popular fallacy: namely, that the motion is actual because strings or air-columns and the air around them move. But such motion is not what we perceive. Vibration is minute, very fast, and without direction—or rather, its direction is back and forth, in an infinitesimal space. The motion of tonal forms, however, is large and directed toward some point of relative rest. In a simple passage like the following [For some reason, I could not insert the simple image of three notes on a treble clef; see it on my old site.—A.G.F.]: the three eighth notes progress up to the tonic C. But in actuality, there is no thing that moves up. The C is their point of rest; yet physically, there is faster motion during the time we hear the C than there was while we heard the three tones going up to it. The motion of sounding forms, like the forms themselves—everything, in fact, but the sounding—is sheer appearance, illusion. The forms are virtual, their motion is virtual, and the whole composition is a semblance.[4]
And so she goes, in great depth and detail, through all the “great orders of art.” Go with her for a few more pages and then tell me you haven’t been enlightened about things that were so close to your heart you never wanted to bother your head about them. I’m glad she bothered hers about them.
I cannot leave this subject without sharing passages from “A Note on the Film,” which first appeared in her 1953 Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art and was republished this year.[5]
Here is a new art. For a few decades, it seemed like nothing more than a new technical device in the sphere of drama, a new way of preserving and retailing dramatic performances. But today its development has already belied this assumption. The screen is not a stage, and what is created in the conception and realization of a film is not a play. . . . [E]ven in its present pristine state it exhibits—quite beyond any doubt, I think—not only a new technique, but a new poetic mode.
. . . the structure of a motion picture is not that of drama, and indeed lies closer to narrative than to drama; . . . its artistic potentialities became evident only when the moving camera was introduced.
The moving camera divorced the screen from the stage. The straightforward photographing of stage action, formerly viewed as the only artistic possibility of the film, henceforth appeared as a special technique. The screen actor is not governed by the stage, nor by the conventions of the theater; he has his own realm and conventions . . . .
. . . One of the most striking characteristics of this new art is that it seems to be omnivorous, able to assimilate the most diverse materials and turn them into elements of its own. . . . It swallows everything: dancing, skating, drama, panorama, cartooning, music (it almost always requires music).
. . . [The film] makes the primary illusion—virtual history—in its own mode.
This is, essentially, the dream mode. I do not mean that it copies dream, or puts one into a daydream. Not at all; no more than literature invokes memory, or makes us believe that we are remembering. An art mode is a mode of appearance. Fiction is “like” memory in that it is projected to compose a finished experiential form, a “past”—not the reader’s past, nor the writer’s . . . .
Drama is “like” action in being causal, creating a total imminent experience, a personal “future” or Destiny. Cinema is “like” dream in the mode of its presentation: it creates a virtual present, an order of direct apparition. That is the mode of dream.
The most noteworthy formal characteristic of dream is that the dreamer is always at the center of it. Places shift, persons act and speak, or change or fade. . . . [but] the dreamer is always “there,” his relation is, so to speak, equidistant from all events. Things may occur around him or unroll before his eyes; he may act or want to act, or suffer or contemplate; but the immediacy of everything in a dream is the same for him.
This aesthetic peculiarity . . . characterizes the dream mode: it is this that the moving picture takes over, and whereby it creates a virtual present . . . .
The “dreamed reality” on the screen can move forward and backward because it is really an eternal and ubiquitous virtual present. The action of drama goes inexorably forward because it creates a future, a Destiny; the dream mode is an endless Now.
Leaving aside whether she was more than a “deep thinker,” that is, a lover of wisdom—she was a thoroughgoing secularist[6]—I unstintingly grant that she made sense of art and so much else. Her “biologism,” however, made it impossible for her to make sense of her sense-making, and I invite any master of Mind, her magnum opus, to confute me on this point.[7] Hers is an intriguing theory, but don’t ask about the conditions the world must meet to bring forth so penetrating a mind as that of Susanne Langer. (I do that at length in Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him.)
Notes
[1] I just learned that Bronx Socrates, a documentary on Gurland’s 
remarkable life, premiered tonight 16 miles east of my Queens, New York abode at the Long Beach International Film Festival in Molloy University’s Madison Theatre, 1000 Hempstead Avenue, Rockville Centre, NY. Unfortunately, I can’t make it.
[2] “1949: What were my influencers doing?,” AnthonyGFlood.com, November 17, 2020.
[3] “Summing up Sellers on the Soul—Part XIII,” AnthonyGFlood.com, April 1, 2022. “A living soul is that which the man made of the soil became when God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (Genesis 2:7). A dead soul is that which the man becomes when God withdraws the breath of life. In resurrection, man becomes a living soul again.” Otis Q. Sellers, What Is the Soul, 1939.
[4] Susanne K. Langer, “The Primary Illusions and the Great Orders of Art,” The Hudson Review, Vol. III, No. 2, Summer 1950, 219-233. Emphasis mine.—A.G.F. The essay’s text may be read on my old site, where I recommend and make available her earlier “The Principles of Creation in Art.”
[5] Susanne K. Langer, “A Note on the Film,” History of Media Studies 5 (2025). On the title page, one may find a link to a PDF of this essay.
[6] I surmised as much from her “First Cause”: A Nonsensical Notion,” the title I gave to a footnote of hers that spanned several pages of The Practice of Philosophy, Henry Holt and Company, 1930, 62-65. It is her answer to “Why, then, should we be necessarily debarred from knowledge of the first cause of the world? The answer is, that the notion of ‘first cause’ is self-defeating, i.e., nonsensical.” James Sadowsky, however, argued, persuasively in my opinion, that an infinite regress of causes is logically impossible. See his “Can There Be an Endless Regress of Causes? on my old site.
[7] Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Johns Hopkins University Press, three volumes (1967, 1972, 1982). She believed that our intelligence and everything we do with it is biology-based, but metaphysical questions like “What grounds biology?” were not her cup of tea. A one-volume abridgement by Gary van den Heuvel (1948-2012) came out in 1988; when he contacted me in 2009 about my site’s “Langer portal,” we began a correspondence that lasted until a year before his death. The Langer Circle plans to publish this correspondence online later this year. Stay tuned.