Tag: Gary van den Heuvel

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

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)”