I’m experiencing my re-reading of Langer as a rediscovery; this post builds on one from last month, “Making the aesthetic realm a little less mysterious (to me): what I got from Susanne Langer (1895-1985).” That is, I’m feeling both more enlightened and retrospectively more stupid in the light of her patient empirical enquiries guided by a promising insight via her master concept of feeling. My study is self-referentially illuminating: what she did in Mind and what I’m doing by re-reading it are illustrations and examples of, not exceptions to, the rule her insights suggest.
I’m a biblicist; she decidedly was not. Yet I in my way and two orthodox Jesuit philosophers (Lonergan and a student of his, i.e., classical theists) in theirs found her work not only compatible with theirs, but a source of fruitful development.[1] My transcendental critique of philosophy does not give her conceptual framework a pass but, my goodness, how I envision the articulation of the former to benefit from the latter! Langer’s philosophy can and must be translated into theistic “creationese,” if you will, to rescue it from the ultimate unintelligibility to which her “agnostic” posture dooms it, without forcing her insights into alien, dogmatic categories. I would aim for to be a mutually beneficial cross-pollination. Maybe that’s something I can do, Deo volente.
For now, however, no systematic development from me is forthcoming, only suggestive notes. Citations are from Gary Van Den Heuvel’s abridgement of Langer’s trilogy, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.[2] Italics mine.
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Langer’s thesis in nuce: “. . . the entire psychological field . . . is a vast and branching development of feeling.” 9
Langer’s “most important distinction within the realm of feeling” is between what is felt as impact and what is felt as autogenic action. 9 This flows from the “nature of vitality itself.” The pattern of stimulus and response . . . is a simplified schema derived from that natural division.” 9
The organism’s environment is not a system in the same sense as the organism is. There is an asymmetry between it and the surrounding world. 10.
“An organism is a continuous dynamism, a pattern of activity, basically electrochemical, but capable also of large, concerted forms if action with further principles of organization.” 10
Langer’s naturalistic presupposition on display: “There must have been several such turning points in the evolution of our world . . . the very first genuinely symbolic utterances, speech, which marked the advent of man.” 13
Feeling is the starting-point of her philosophy of mind. “The same concept that raises problems of natural science takes one just as surely into humanistic ones . . . .” 14
Autogenic action and sense of impact correspond to emotivity and sensibility, the subjective and the objective. 13
“By ‘subjective’ I mean whatever is felt as action, and by ‘objective’ whatever is felt as impact.” Those words denote functional properties, not classes of things. They are “two possible modes of feeling, i.e., of psychical phases of activity.” 13
To be continued
Notes
[1] “Insight in musical composition is described by S. K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York 1953), pp. 121 ff”.” Lonergan, Insight, 1956, 184n; “Not only are words themselves sensible but also their initial meaning commonly is sensible.” Lonergan, Insight, 544; “An accurate statement on initial meanings would be much more complex.” See S. K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York 1953), pp. 237 ff.” Lonergan, Insight, 544n.
[2] To repeat a note from the previous post on her: 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 [speculative] metaphysical questions [before the hard empirical work] is done 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.”