The Philosophy of Susanne Langer

Embodied Meaning in Logic, Art and Feeling

Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350030589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

This book is a comprehensive study of one of the most insightful and fertile but also most neglected philosophers of the twentieth century, Susanne Langer. Failure to recognise Langer's seminal philosophical sources has led to frequent misinterpretations and misunderstandings of her unique philosophical thought. Beginning with an overview of Langer's life and education, this study provides a much-needed explanation of how Langer's thinking was shaped by four seminal sources: her mentors Henry Sheffer and Alfred North Whitehead and the European philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Langer's ability to unite seemingly disparate fields such logic, art, and embodied cognition around the notion of symbolic form, places aesthetics not at the margins of philosophy but at its very centre. By locating Langer's work in the broader context of major developments in twentieth-century European and American philosophy, Dengerink Chaplin shows how she was often ahead of her time. Shedding new light on Langer as an American philosopher whose innovative thought crosses the customary boundaries between analytic and continental philosophy, this book confirms why she continues to have relevance today.

Part One

Context

1

Life and work

Public and private

Unlike many twentieth-century philosophers, Langer never wrote her memoirs. She was a private person who, especially in her later years, withdrew from public and social life. What we know about her comes from a small number of letters, interviews and recollections from family, close friends and a few journalists, including music journalist Winthrop Sargeant, who wrote a lengthy profile article on her for the New Yorker in 1960, and art critic James Lord, who published an extensive interview with her in the New York Times Book Review in 1968.¹ Philosopher Donald Dryden published a comprehensive intellectual biography in 2003 that was subsequently annotated with more details.² And Wesley Wehr, a young painter and composer turned palaeontologist, recorded his personal recollections of Langer as a friend, thereby providing a few valuable glimpses into her character and personality.³ What emerges from these various writings is a portrait of a highly original and independent thinker who combined a fierce logical intellect with an intensely creative and imaginative mind. She was known to impress scholars from diverse disciplines to shed light on seemingly intractable problems in their fields and her formidable skills in logic made her a daunting discussion partner and teacher.⁴ Winthrop Sargeant describes her as ‘a woman of iron will, impatient of laziness and self-indulgence’ while an obituary in the New York Times refers to her as ‘a maverick’.⁵

Following the successes of Philosophy in a New Key and Feeling and Form Langer had become an acclaimed author with a high public profile.⁶ Yet, she often eschewed public attention and sought peace and solitude in remote places. Matter of fact about her own achievements, she often would play down the originality of her ideas by pointing to the sources that had influenced and inspired her.

Early life and student years

Susanne K. Langer was born in New York in 1895 as the second of five children to Antonio Knauth, a successful corporate lawyer, and his wife Else M. Uhlich Knauth. Having emigrated from Germany to the United States in the 1880s, Langer’s parents settled in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York’s old German émigré ‘colony’. Langer grew up in an intellectually and artistically rich milieu with music at its centre. Her maternal grandmother had been a professional pianist who had been close friends with Johannes Brahms, while Langer’s father, like Susanne herself later, was an accomplished amateur cellist. She was a gifted child who wrote complex family plays at an early age and read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason when she was in her early teens.⁷ Long summers were spent at the family’s large second home on Lake George where she was free to roam and develop her love for nature. Raised multilingually, Langer spoke German at home and then learned French at a private primary day school. She did not learn English until she was 10 and retained a German accent throughout her life.

After several years of home instruction, Langer enrolled at Radcliffe College in 1916. Radcliffe was a women’s college that offered equivalent courses to Harvard University at a time that Harvard did not accept female students. As I will explain in more detail in Chapter 3, although Radcliffe students sat the same Harvard exams as their male counterparts, they did not receive the same Harvard degrees.⁸ Langer stayed connected with Radcliffe College until 1942, having become a tutor there in 1926. Langer’s undergraduate supervisor was the logician Henry Sheffer who introduced her to the new developments in formal and symbolic logic. Langer recalls having been pleased to discover that this ‘traditionally stiff and scholastic pursuit [had] as much scope for originality as … metaphysics’.⁹ She had been inspired by Sheffer’s ability ‘to see logic as a field for invention’ and describes ‘the growing sense of mental power that came with following his expositions, expecting to understand, even before the end of a discourse, a whole intricate conceptual structure with the same clarity as its simplest initial statements’.¹⁰ Sheffer, in turn, had been clearly impressed with Langer’s aptitude for philosophy and logic. As he wrote in a letter of recommendation on her BA graduation in 1920, she had ‘a firmer grasp of philosophy problems than many a Harvard Ph.D.’¹¹

In September 1921 she married Harvard student William Leonard Langer (1896–1977), who, like Susanne herself, was a second child of a German immigrant family. They spoke German at home. William had just finished his master’s degree in modern European history at Harvard and was to become a distinguished scholar in that field. He had been awarded a fellowship at the University of Vienna to study the alliances that had led up to the First World War and they spent their first year of marriage abroad.

During her time in Vienna, Langer attended lectures at the university with, among others, philosopher Karl Bühler. Bühler (1879–1963) was a leading philosopher of language and a Gestalt psychologist, who had just been appointed at the philosophy faculty. Bühler’s pioneering work on language formation was to prove highly relevant to Langer’s thought. He was one of the first to explore how meaning and reference in signs and symbols did not originate in the isolated individual but in the social context of its animal and human ambience.

After returning to Cambridge, William began writing his doctoral dissertation and Susanne commenced her Master’s degree at Radcliffe College. On 30 August 1922 their first son, Leonard Charles Rudolph, was born.¹² The birth prompted a return to her childhood love of writing fairy tales and other stories – possibly also inspired by a rekindling of her German roots during her recent visit to Europe – resulting in the publication The Cruise of Little Dipper and Other Fairy Tales. It was illustrated by her childhood friend and later professional illustrator Helen Sewell.¹³

After gaining his doctorate in 1923, William was offered a position at the history department at Clark University and the family moved to Worcester. For Langer, this meant a weekly 40-mile train journey from Worcester to Cambridge to continue attending her seminars and lectures. Even so, she completed her Master’s degree in 1924 with a thesis entitled ‘Eduard von Hartmann’s Notion of Unconscious Mind and Its Metaphysical Implications’.

In 1924 Langer started her doctoral studies with British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead who had just arrived in the United States that same year. She completed those studies in two years with a doctoral thesis on Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, entitled ‘A Logical Analysis of Meaning’. In May of the same year she gave birth to a second son, Bertrand Walter.

Langer had desired to work with Whitehead because of his co-authorship of the Principia Mathematica and his reputation as a philosopher of science. Whitehead’s own thinking, however, had moved on to different concerns and topics that were to form the basis of his seminal work Process and Reality. Although Whitehead’s supervision of her thesis was minimal, his ideas and teaching were to have a major influence on her own thinking. When Langer wrote her first book, The Practice of Philosophy, in 1930, Whitehead wrote a short preface for it, commending the book as ‘an admirable exposition of the aims, methods, and actual achievements of philosophy’.

From 1924 onwards, Langer had started contributing regular reviews to The Journal of Philosophy. Versatile in English, German, French and Italian, she became the journal’s main reviewer of foreign publications. This exposed her to insights into the latest developments in philosophy in Europe. In 1926, with Whitehead’s recommendation, she published her first article, ‘Confusion of Symbols and Confusion of Logical Types’ in the British journal Mind, then under the editorship of G. E. Moore. The article consisted of a detailed critique of the theory of types as developed by Bertrand Russell in the second edition of Principia Mathematica published the year before (1925). Her regular discussions with Whitehead as the co-author of the first edition of Principia Mathematica (1910–13) had provided her with valuable insight into the thinking behind this work. Other articles on logic to follow included: ‘Form and Content: A Study in Paradox’ (1926), ‘A Logical Study of Verbs’ (1927), ‘The Treadmill of Systematic Doubt’ (1929) and ‘Facts: The Logical Perspectives of the World’ (1933), all of which were published in the Journal of Philosophy.¹⁴

Home

When, in 1927, William Langer was offered a tenured position in modern history at Harvard, the family moved back to Cambridge. William Langer’s Harvard career included seminal publications such as The Diplomacy of Imperialism 1890–1902 (1935), on European international relations, and the editorship of An Encyclopedia of World History (1940) and the twenty-volume series The Rise of Modern Europe (1963). His academic career was interspersed with periods in government service in the areas of international relations and foreign intelligence, including a year as assistant director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1950s. He received honorary degrees from both Harvard and Yale.¹⁵ His autobiography In and Out of the Ivory Tower was completed just before his death in 1977.¹⁶ Dorothy Ross opens her review of it as follows:

William L. Langer intended this autobiography as an exemplary tale of how a poor boy from an immigrant family made good in America. Distressed by the iconoclasm of the sixties, he offered his life as a testament to the American dream and as a defense of the establishment – its openness to merit, its hard-working patriotism, and its contribution to the American defense since World War II. It is a tribute to Langer’s basic good temper and immense intellectual curiosity that the book generally escapes the narrow defensiveness of that purpose.¹⁷

In his book, William Langer depicts what appears to have been a traditional marriage with little domestic involvement on his part, as can be gleaned from his comment that even the arrival of a second son in 1925 ‘did not greatly affect the regimen of their lives’. We are told that his ‘wife enrolled as a graduate student in philosophy at Radcliffe and usually went to Cambridge by train to attend lectures in modern logica by Henry Sheffer and a seminar by Alfred North Whitehead’ and we know from another source that on evening seminars at his home, ‘Mrs. Langer [would appear] in the doorway at ten, with beer and coffee’.¹⁸ Yet at no point does he mention that she became an important philosopher and well-known author in her own right.

Teaching and travelling

For Langer, the move back to Cambridge marked the beginning of a long series of part-time tutorships for Langer at her alma mater Radcliffe College. Since Radcliffe did not have its own tenured faculty, employment was on a sessional, hourly paid, basis. It was not until 1954, at the age of 59, that Langer secured her first tenured position. Despite her low academic status, however, Langer was highly productive in terms of research and publications. In addition to numerous articles and reviews, she wrote nine books, edited two, and translated one. Her first book, The Practice of Philosophy (1930), was well received abroad, attracting praise from leaders of the Vienna Circle.

In 1933 the Langer family had embarked on a European tour which included a visit to the then 74-year-old Edmund Husserl. Langer had discussed Husserl’s ideas in her 1926 PhD thesis and she had been keen to meet him. The visit took place at Husserl’s home in Schluchsee, Germany, in August 1933, jus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Also available from Bloomsbury
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Cover Artist
• Introduction
• Part One Context
• Part Two Sources
• Part Three Contributions
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page