Philosophy – Page 2 – Anthony G. Flood

Susanne K. Langer: The Flood-Van Den Heuvel Correspondence, 2009-2011, now online

Gary Van Den Heuvel, circa 1984. Photo courtesy of Kell Julliard

Tony Flood, circa 2004, Weill Cornell Medicine. A Three Musketeers bar rises from his shirt pocket.

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.

Susanne Langer, 1895-1985. Harvard University, Radcliffe College Archives

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!

Gary Van Den Heuvel, my friend and correspondent, circa 2011.

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

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

Susanne Langer’s thesis: stray notes from a new reading of “Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling”

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.

* * *

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.”

Making the aesthetic realm a little less mysterious (to me): what I got from Susanne Langer (1895-1985)

Susanne Katherina Knauth Langer, 1895-1985

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. Continue reading “Making the aesthetic realm a little less mysterious (to me): what I got from Susanne Langer (1895-1985)”

When Aptheker dissed James, revisited. (No April Fool’s joke.)

On the tenth anniversary of my old (but extant) site anthonyflood.com (NB: no middle initial), I celebrated the publication of my Aptheker-James article in the C. L. R. James Journal. (It forms chapter 2 of my 2019 book, Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, a second, expanded edition of which I’m trying to finance.) Those familiar with this story may skip this “old news,” although I believe its historical “feel” sets it apart from accounts posted elsewhere on this site, as does my digression into metaphilosophy. (A search for <James Aptheker> will return all of them.) There are, of course, always those who are hearing about this for the first time. I’d be happy to hear from either class of visitors.

Marking a Decade (January 17, 2014)

On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of this site, I am pleased to report the publication of my article “C. L. R. James: Herbert Aptheker’s Invisible Man,” in the Fall 2013 issue of the CLR James Journal. It arrived in the mail two days ago, and I purchased access to the online version of my essay this morning (sort of an anniversary present to myself). Hazily aware for four decades of C. L. R. James (1901-1989), author of The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, the umpteenth sighting of his name in my reading material (this time it was in a piece by Dwight Macdonald) over the course of a few months in 2012 triggered an odd reverie and query. (In the late thirties and early forties Macdonald and James’s circles partly overlapped.)

Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), once one of the leading intellectuals in the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), was a ground-breaking Marxist historian of American slave revolts. So why hadn’t James’s work figured into his writings (virtually all of which I had read before I was twenty)? Why hadn’t James’s name ever crossed Aptheker’s lips during our many conversations about the early years while I served as one of his research assistants in the early seventies? After some research, I concluded that Aptheker’s neglect of James was deliberate. Continue reading “When Aptheker dissed James, revisited. (No April Fool’s joke.)”

Clarity is not enough.

“Not enough for what?” To philosophize aright. I swiped this post’s title from a collection of essays by critics of the philosophical school of linguistic analysis that dominated 20th-century academic philosophy.[1] Standard encyclopedia definitions, however, have a different emphasis. Wikipedia’s article on “philosophy,” for example, reads in part:

Philosophy is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, value, mind, and language. It is a rational and critical inquiry that reflects on its methods and assumptions.

But is philosophy simply a systematic study? Etymologically, philosophy is the love (philia) of wisdom (sophia). How far may a self-identifying philosopher responsibly stray from that root? As Brand Blanshard, a contributor to the above-referenced anthology, wrote in his entry for the 1967 The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, wisdom

may be accompanied by a broad range of knowledge, by intellectual acuteness, and by speculative depth, but it is not to be identified with any of these and may appear in their absence. It involves intellectual grasp or insight, but it is concerned not so much with the ascertainment of fact or the elaboration of theories as with the means and ends of practical life.[2]

Continue reading “Clarity is not enough.”

The preeminence of Christ over all things requires distinguishing Philosophy AFTER Christ from Philosophy BEFORE Christ

How is philosophy after Christ (κατὰ Χριστόν, kata Christon) related to philosophy after some other principle? (See Colossians 2:8.) Say, how does it related to philosophy before Christ?

In Philosophy after Christ[1], I explain that by “after,” I don’t mean “later than” (i.e., chronologically after). I mean “in the manner of,” as an artist might paint “after Picasso.” The preposition “after” translates κατὰ (kata).

Likewise, when Yahweh—whose incarnation Yeshua HaMashiach (Jesus Christ) is—used the Hebrew equivalent of “before” in expressing the First Commandment, He said that no one who calls Him Lord shall put anything before Him in priority or reverence, thereby risking idolatry: “You shall have no other gods before (עַל, al) me” (Exodus 20:3). Continue reading “The preeminence of Christ over all things requires distinguishing Philosophy AFTER Christ from Philosophy BEFORE Christ”

How to defeat the transcendental argument for the existence of God (TAG), if that’s what you wish to do

You can defeat the TAG[1] if you can show that there is a way to account for intelligible predication without presupposing the Christian worldview. Otherwise, the latter’s claim to account for it stands.

Go ahead. Make my day.

If Christ is πρό πάντων (pro pantōn), that is, before (“prior to”) all things (Colossians 1:17), then He is πρό φιλοσοφία (see Colossians 2:8), that is, before philosophy.

If awareness of Christ is the foreword or prologue to sound philosophizing (wisdom-seeking), if such cognizance is the beginning (תְּחִלַּ֣ת, tehillat) of wisdom (חָ֭כְמָה, hakmah); Proverbs 9:10), then believing that God exists (ὅτι ἔστιν, Hebrews 11:6) is not an afterthought, an inference from something created (e.g., a “theistic proof”).

If Christ is the ground of inference, then you cannot philosophize (analyze, synthesize) profitably without acknowledging the priority that πρό implies, that is, without acknowledging who Christ is. You’re just beating the air. Continue reading “How to defeat the transcendental argument for the existence of God (TAG), if that’s what you wish to do”

On dogma and dogmatism

Bill Vallicella, a friend and philosophical sparring partner of two decades, recently discussed another thinker’s argument from design to God.[1] Since my interest lies in biblical rather than “classical” theism, I will not engage with the argument itself or his discussion of it. Instead, I want to examine the presuppositions of philosophical theology general and a thesis of Bill’s in particular.

The presupposition of philosophical theology is that it is licit for a human being to suspend his knowledge of יהוה (Yahweh)—the God of the Bible—in order to explore the limits of philosophical inquiry with respect to God’s existence. From time to time, Bill revisits his thesis that there are no rationally compelling (“knock-down”) arguments for or against any metaphysical position. He did so again in his recent post, providing an opportunity for me to restate my position.

I was reminded of an essay I reposted in 2023, which first appeared on my old site twenty years earlier. In it, I critique “Dogmatic Uncertainty” by the British libertarian classicist and novelist Sean Gabb.[2] Both Gabb and Bill implicitly rely on the contrast between δόξα (doxa) and ἐπιστήμη (epistēmē)—that is, between “mere” opinion and certain knowledge. I presume that Bill, an expert in argumentation, has not ruled out the possibility that we are within our rights to claim ἐπιστήμη about God without supporting argumentation. But if I make that claim, am I being necessarily “dogmatic” in the pejorative sense? Continue reading “On dogma and dogmatism”

“I’m doing philosophy; you’re doing apologetics!”

“No, I’m philosophizing Christianly.[1] Together, let’s uncover the What is Cultural Apologetics? worldview you’re defending (wittingly or otherwise).”

When an epistemologically self-conscious Christian makes a point that discomfits someone who’s not epistemologically self-conscious, it’s not long before the latter questions the former’s motive. “You’re not interested in the truth of the matter; you’re trying to sign me up for something, you special pleader you!” Since the Christian’s motive is not neutral, they suggest, it’s not pure. It’s suspect.

Christians who engage in apologetics are philosophizing—they’re pursuing wisdom at the highest level of generality—but they do so in dialogue with unbelievers (or inconsistent believers). The apologist may, if it’s called for, employ the analytical tools on display in articles published in peer-reviewed journals labeled “philosophical.”

Qua apologist, however, he is not necessarily trying to negotiate the conceptual terrain at the highest level of analytical exactitude. That is partly because the latter is not necessary for the apologist’s task, which is to present the excellent message or “news” (εὐαγγέλιον, evangelion) of Jesus Christ and demolish the objections to it, if any, that his auditor may throw back at him.

There’s a time and place for analytical depth and scholarly excellence, but the motive of apologetic theoria is to be found in polemical give-and-take of apologetic praxis. The Christian “lover of wisdom” (for whom Christ is the Wisdom of God) does not do apologetics “for its own sake” or to impress his fellows in the common room. He’s trying to get the other guy to recognize his need for peace with God and hopes God will use his (the apologist’s) effort to remove obstacles to that recognition. God has, of course, already ordained the outcome; it’s a discovery process for both parties. Continue reading ““I’m doing philosophy; you’re doing apologetics!””