Susanne K. Langer > Quotes

“Most new discoveries are suddenly seen things that were always there.”
― Susanne K. Langer

“The assignment of meanings [in music] is a shifting, kaleidoscopic play, probably below the threshold of consciousness, certainly outside the pale of discursive thinking. The imagination that responds to music is personal and associative and logical, tinged with affect, tinged with bodily rhythm, tinged with dream, but concerned with a wealth of formulations for its wealth of wordless knowledge, its whole knowledge of emotional and organic experience, of vital impulse, balance, conflict, the ways of living and dying and feeling.”
― Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art

“Nature, as man has always known it, he knows no more.
Since he has learned to esteem signs above symbols, to suppress his emotional reactions in favor of practical ones and make use of nature instead of holding so much of it sacred, he has altered the face, if not the heart, of reality.”
― Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art: Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art

“To trace the development of mind from earliest times...requires...not a categorical concept, but a functional one.... The most promising operational principle for this purpose is the principle of individuation.[p. 310]" "[yet she also says:]...we have no physical model of this endless rhythm of individuation and involvement, we do have its image in the world of art, most purely in dance;...this dialectic of vital continuity...[p. 355]”
― Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling [Abridged Edition]

“Real thinking is possible only in the light of genuine language, no matter how limited, how primitive;”
― Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art: Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art

“The world of physics is essentially the real world construed by mathematical abstractions, and the world of sense is the real world construed by the abstractions which the sense-organs immediately furnish. To suppose that the "material mode" is a primitive and groping attempt at physical conception is a fatal error in epistemology.”
― Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art

“The reaction on the part of the apes, limited as it was to about one subject in every three or four, has just that character of being common, yet individual, that belongs to aesthetic experiences. Some are sensitive to the sight, and the rest are not; to some of them it seems to convey something -- to others it is just a thing, a toadstool or what you will.”
― Susanne K. Langer