Langer speaks!

Delighted to stumble upon the 48-minute audio of “Susanne Langer on Man & Animal: The City & the Hive,” a 1957 lecture on YouTube—I had never heard her before—I scrambled to see whether there was a transcript of it anywhere.

UPDATE: Dr. Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin of The Langer Circle and author of The Philosophy of Susanne Langer: Embodied Meaning in Logic, Art and Feeling, a masterpiece of biography and research, sent me a better site on which the audio resides, namely, that of Cooper Union in Manhattan, where presidential candidate Lincoln delivered a key campaign speech in 1860 and where Langer delivered her lecture on October 28, 1957, and which was introduced by Jonathan E. Fairchild. There is also a link to the booklet for the 1957-1958 season’s events—a wonderful literary artifact— that attendees received, but here it is. Langer’s lecture is listed on page 4.

Well, there it was, right under my nose: I had forgotten not only that it was published the following year in The Antioch Review [TAR], but also that 17 years ago, that is, back in 2008, I had published its text on my old site by scanning the print version I had of that article and then correcting the scan.  Here is TAR’s prefatory paragraph:

Susanne K. Langer, professor of philosophy at Connecticut College [New London, CT], is well known as the author of Philosophy in a New Key, Feeling and Form, and Problems of Art.  This paper, read at the Cooper Union in New York as part of the centenary celebration of the Great Hall, offers a sketch of philosophical work in progress under a research grant received by Connecticut College from the Edgar J. Kaufmann Foundation [which underwrote her Mind trilogy].

So, you may read as you listen.

Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985) was raised in Manhattan, but her mother tongue was German, and it shows. Her command of literary English, however, which she began speaking at age four, was perfect and she deployed it gracefully to light up nearly everything human: science, art, logic, culture in many articles and books. Here’s a taste from that article:

Animals interpret signs, too, but only as pointers to actual things and events: cues to action or expectation, threats and promises, landmarks and earmarks in the world. Human beings use such signs, too; but above all they use symbols—especially words—to think and talk about things that are neither present nor expected. The words convey ideas, that may or may not have counterparts in actuality. This power of thinking about things expresses itself in language, imagination, and speculation—the chief products of human mentality that animals do not share.

Language, the most versatile and indispensable of all symbolisms, has put its stamp on all our mental functions, so that I think they always differ from even their closest analogues in animal life. Language has invaded our feeling and dreaming and action, as well as our reasoning, which is really a product of it. The greatest change wrought by language is the increased scope of awareness in speech-gifted beings. An animal’s awareness is always of things in its own place and life. In human awareness, the present, actual situation is often the least part. We have not only memories and expectations; we have a past in which we locate our memories, and a future that vastly over-reaches our own anticipations. Our past is a story, our future a piece of imagination. Likewise our ambient is a place in a wider, symbolically conceived place, the universe. We live in a world.

As I said, nearly everything. She was a deep-dyed, unabashed secularist whose focus on feeling (not emotion!) and how we variously and promiscuously symbolize it is, with a few important modifications, compatible with the biblical theism I favor. The fellow creatures in my worldview are in hers man’s biological “relatives.” Man is part of the “animal kingdom,” not subject to God’s. She proudly took her stand with the evolutionary hypothesis as the best explanation of the origin of species (not just variation within species).

I myself stand entirely in the scientific camp. I do not argue against any religious or even vitalistic doctrines; such things are not arguable. I speak not for, but from, a naturalist’s point of view, and anyone who does not share it can make his own reservations in judging what I say.

And I have, although not explicitly about her in my Philosophy after Christ. The foolishness of the latter gambit, including the conceit that it’s “not arguable”—would that be a case of “punching down”?—is what her stance commits her to. The brain that distinguishes man from the ape is, for her, an accident of a process that has no regard for her projects. We’re going to die, and the poignancy of her expression of that awareness does not bevel its sharp edges:

Probably the profoundest difference between human and animal needs is made by one piece of human awareness, one fact that is not present to animals, because it is never learned in any direct experience: that is our foreknowledge of Death.  The fact that we ourselves must die is not a simple and isolated fact.  It is built on a wide survey of facts, that discloses the structure of history as a succession of overlapping brief lives, the patterns of youth and age, growth and decline; and above all that, it is built on the logical insight that one’s own life is a case in point.  Only a creature that can think symbolically about life can conceive of its own death.  Our knowledge of death is part of our knowledge of life.

About ultimate origins, however, we know nothing and therefore should be silent. It’s not a good use of time to speculate about such things when there are so many empirical studies to be conducted! (Nobody ultimately knows anything, except we all “know” that biblical theism is nonsense.) She cannot but repair to an agnosticism that threatens the very foundations of her enterprise—but that’s a story for another day. Until then, enjoy the lecture. If you’re up to reading more by her, start with Philosophy in a New Key. Or visit my Langer portal on my old site.

Earlier posts on Susanne K. Langer