In 2009, Gary Van Den Heuvel (1948-2012), the independent scholar who abridged Susanne K. Langer’s Mind trilogy in 1988, wrote me about the Langer materials I was curating on my old site, and we corresponded about her and Langer-adjacent topics during the last two years of his life. The Netherlands-based Langer Circle recently reproduced my “Langer Portal” on their site, and only this week uploaded our correspondence. Here is their notice of both events.
You might spot a typo or two, but overall, it’s in very good shape, considering we composed it without a thought of publicizing it. Its first two pages are representative; I hope you’ll look them over to see if they don’t whet your appetite for more.
I was pleased to re-read after so many years a paragraph in my first reply to Gary that asks why a Bible-believing Christian like me would be attracted to thought of an avowedly secular thinker like Langer, who grounded human symbol-making in biology. Here it is.
My interest in Langer arose from my study of [Catholic philosopher Bernard] Lonergan , who once raved about her aesthetic theory. When about five years ago [2004?] I finally got around to absorbing every page of my old Mentor paperback copy of Philosophy in a New Key, a world of meaning opened up. That she had been one of [Alfred North] Whitehead’s first American students and an early admirer (and interpreter and translator) of [Ernst] Cassirer (neither of them influenced Lonergan) fascinated me. For help I turned to the writings of Richard Liddy, SJ (several of which I’ve posted), who had studied under Lonergan and chose Langer’s aesthetics as his dissertation topic. I have not read his dissertation (I certainly won’t do that before reading Mind), but I was struck by his ultimate rejection of Langer as a materialist—not surprising, perhaps, given his vocation, but unfair, I think. The evaluation of the effort to root man’s artistic drive in biology depends on one’s view of biology! (March 9, 2009; my italics)
Mine is that it part of the created order (Genesis 1:20-28), not the by-product of a mindless explosion and equally undirected evolution, which backdrop would open a trapdoor under every line she ever wrote. See that Langer Portal for links to some of the writings of the thinkers named in passing above, and my post, Langer Speaks!, from last week.
Thank you, Langer Circle, for giving the results of my hod-carrying from decades ago a more permanent home. The Circle’s chairperson, Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin, has written a masterly introduction of her life and thought that occupies much of my spare time these days, The Philosophy of Susanne Langer: Embodied Meaning in Logic, Art and Feeling. I wish I had this twenty years ago. (Dr. Chaplin tells me she feels the same way. (:^D).)
Happy Birthday to me!
P.S.: Gary co-authored a scholarly yet accessible introduction to Langer’s thought with Kell Julliard, who provided both photos of Gary: Susanne K. Langer and the Foundations of Art Therapy. Art Therapy, 1999, 16(3), 112–120. https://doi.org/10.1080/07421656.1999.10129656. I’m grateful to Kell for the PDF and the pix.—Tony Flood