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Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art
Modern theories of meaning usually culminate in a critique of science. This book presents a study of human intelligence beginning with a semantic theory and leading into a critique of music.
By implication it sets up a theory of all the arts; the transference of its basic concepts to other arts than music is not developed, but it is sketched, mainly in the chapter on artistic import. Thoughtful readers of the original edition discovered these far-reaching ideas quickly enough as the career of the book shows: it is as applicable to literature, art and music as to the field of philosophy itself.
The topics it deals with are many: language, sacrament, myth, music, abstraction, fact, knowledge--to name only the main ones. But through them all goes the principal theme, symbolic transformation as the essential activity of human minds. This central idea, emphasizing as it does the notion of symbolism, brings Mrs. Langer's book into line with the prevailing interest in semantics. All profound issues of our age seem to center around the basic concepts of symbolism and meaning. The formative, creative, articulating power of symbols is the tonic chord which thinkers of all schools and many diverse fields are unmistakably striking; the surprising, far-reaching implications of this new fundamental conception constitute what Mrs. Langer has called "philosophy in a new key."
Mrs. Langer's book brings the discussion of symbolism into a wider general use than criticism of word meaning. Her volume is vigorous, effective, and well written and will appeal to everyone interested in the contemporary problems of philosophy.
313 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1942
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About the author
Susanne K. Langer
62 books67 followersSusanne Katherina Langer (née Knauth) (December 20, 1895 – July 17, 1985) was an American philosopher of mind and of art, who was influenced by Ernst Cassirer and Alfred North Whitehead. She was one of the first women to achieve an academic career in philosophy and the first woman to be popularly and professionally recognized as an American philosopher. Langer is best known for her 1942 book entitled, Philosophy in a New Key. (wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
July 30, 2008
It's taking me a while to get through this one, and I find myself re-reading parts of it before going on. I'm taken with Langer's claim that what sets humans apart from animals is not our ability to perceive, remember, associate, and think, but our ability to symbolize. I like her distinction between signs and symbols. For instance, animals recognize the word "treat" as signaling that they will soon be fed a treat. An animal does not know that "treat" represents something which can be used in a sentence to refer to a treat in the past or the far future.
Langer wrote this book long ago, and some of it may be undercut by the latest language research with dolphins and apes, but it is still fascinating. I like how she says that humans will perform the same fruitless religious rituals for thousands of years, even though they don't reliably work (e.g. rain dancing, human sacrifices, etc.) which a cat or a rat would never persist in. She comments on the claim that symbolizing has a practical genetic advantage. She says the claim is undercut by the crazy symbolizing we do in dreams, when, if it were only practical, we wouldn't do it when we're trying to rest. So she sees our symbolizing as compulsion and not as intention. Again, arguable, since solutions to practical problems have come in dreams (e.g. the concept of the double helix for DNA.)
About a hundred pages into the book, and so far she's concentrated on the difference between signs and sumbols, and the difference between discursive and presentational forms. She takes issue with those who judge intuition as a form of irrational mysticism. She lays claim that intuition is based on the form-making abilities of our senses, so that it is a form of presentational thinking, thought before discursive thinking. And how can thought not be discursive? Because symbols are not the result of thought, but the very substance of thought. And symbols can be presentational (non-verbal, non-sequential, but taken in as one Gestalt.)
She quotes Wittgenstein-- "Everything that can be said can be said clearly." I wish more poets would think along those lines. It gets tedious with some poets always having to play the "what did they really mean?" game. Sometimes, to me, it seems that mediocrity hides behind a pseudo-sophisticated obscurity. Not that I'm not guilty of it sometimes myself.
222 pages into the book. I'm enjoying the chapter On Significance in Music more than any other so far, as it covers what makes an expression artistic (e.g. why is a Greek vase art and a water bucket just craft?) Langer supports the idea that the distinction is Significant Form. She italicizes this sentence: Sheer self-expression requires no artistic form. And she claims that art does not express so much as it represents. So, when music evokes an emotion, it may not be because the composer wanted to express an emotion felt at the time it was composed, but to represent in a universal way an emotion the composer was familiar with at some time, maybe years before.
Langer wrote this book long ago, and some of it may be undercut by the latest language research with dolphins and apes, but it is still fascinating. I like how she says that humans will perform the same fruitless religious rituals for thousands of years, even though they don't reliably work (e.g. rain dancing, human sacrifices, etc.) which a cat or a rat would never persist in. She comments on the claim that symbolizing has a practical genetic advantage. She says the claim is undercut by the crazy symbolizing we do in dreams, when, if it were only practical, we wouldn't do it when we're trying to rest. So she sees our symbolizing as compulsion and not as intention. Again, arguable, since solutions to practical problems have come in dreams (e.g. the concept of the double helix for DNA.)
About a hundred pages into the book, and so far she's concentrated on the difference between signs and sumbols, and the difference between discursive and presentational forms. She takes issue with those who judge intuition as a form of irrational mysticism. She lays claim that intuition is based on the form-making abilities of our senses, so that it is a form of presentational thinking, thought before discursive thinking. And how can thought not be discursive? Because symbols are not the result of thought, but the very substance of thought. And symbols can be presentational (non-verbal, non-sequential, but taken in as one Gestalt.)
She quotes Wittgenstein-- "Everything that can be said can be said clearly." I wish more poets would think along those lines. It gets tedious with some poets always having to play the "what did they really mean?" game. Sometimes, to me, it seems that mediocrity hides behind a pseudo-sophisticated obscurity. Not that I'm not guilty of it sometimes myself.
222 pages into the book. I'm enjoying the chapter On Significance in Music more than any other so far, as it covers what makes an expression artistic (e.g. why is a Greek vase art and a water bucket just craft?) Langer supports the idea that the distinction is Significant Form. She italicizes this sentence: Sheer self-expression requires no artistic form. And she claims that art does not express so much as it represents. So, when music evokes an emotion, it may not be because the composer wanted to express an emotion felt at the time it was composed, but to represent in a universal way an emotion the composer was familiar with at some time, maybe years before.
January 7, 2016
This is one of the few books about aesthetics by a philosopher I found readable. It's amazing that it was written by a logician, an analytic philosopher. Written in 1941, it has some language that is outmoded and offensive today, but please, let it go and read for her main ideas. Langer, rather than dismissing art, ritual and myth as either childish relics of humanity's 'primitive' mind or bizarre and useless delusions, sees them as expressions of fundamental human cognition, which is by way of symbols. Much of the work in this book was covered subsequently, but it was groundbreaking in 1941 and even today stands in stark contrast to thinkers like Daniel Dennet, or postmodernist critical theory. the book is distinguished not just by its insights into human existence, but by its brilliant style: complex, poetic, and totally clear., I never struggled with the language, only with the ideas. She was a student of Whitehead's, so i would expect no less, but it is still refreshing after wading through obscure, horrifically written books about art. She went on to write the much longer Feeling and Form, which develoips, refines and extends the ideas in Philosophy in a New Key, and then, a three volume work (I don't remember the title) that expands even further. I will certainly read Feeling and Form, but the 3 volume work will have to wait behind Proust, Boswell, Musil and Gibbon. Well, it's good company she will keep!
April 10, 2018
“Error is the price we pay for progress.” This is a quote from Alfred North Whitehead that humbly concludes this book, which has Whitehead as its dedicatee.
This work is in two, broad parts. The first, greater part distinguishes between signal/sign and symbol. My cat knows its name as a sign for attention from its owner. I can now "Albert Einstein" as a symbol for someone I have never even met or seen and all that that entails.
Hinted at by some music notation examples, the second part courageously attempts to define art and settles on music as the case to build on. Art is expression: the transport a symbol makes but without untethered to a language.
This work will appeal to students of philosophy, philologists, and aestheticians.
This work is in two, broad parts. The first, greater part distinguishes between signal/sign and symbol. My cat knows its name as a sign for attention from its owner. I can now "Albert Einstein" as a symbol for someone I have never even met or seen and all that that entails.
Hinted at by some music notation examples, the second part courageously attempts to define art and settles on music as the case to build on. Art is expression: the transport a symbol makes but without untethered to a language.
This work will appeal to students of philosophy, philologists, and aestheticians.
December 25, 2024
December 2024
In this re-reading of Langer’s work, I was interested in the parallel paths that she and Charles Taylor (Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, 1989) traversed to arrive at fundamentally the same conclusion: modern humankind is foundering under a positivistic worldview, unable to find a common, unifying bedrock of belief that fully satisfies a glimmering sense of an unutterable/“illogical” immanence.
March 2021
One of the things that frustrated me in this very sage book was Susanne Langer’s equanimity. The composition of this book was conducted in the years leading up to America’s entry in the second World War; as a scholar with numerous ties to Europe and, in particular, Germany, Langer was aware of the populist uprising in Germany and the invocation of its leader to a powerful new myth of its race’s superiority and destiny of triumph. The underlying provocation for this book is that swelling repudiation of logical/empirical thinking and its replacement with a mythos of swaggering exceptionalism that was already sending Germany’s intellectual elite into crisis and flight. Of course, it’s not Langer’s purpose to become a Cassandra of alarmism, trying to counter irrational populism with a polemic that relies on the affective suasion of rhetoric. Instead, using the tools at hand, she raises an alarm about a world-wide crisis—one that may alter Western history and culture—with an appeal to consider how Western philosophy has run into a rational dead end and that it has too long cut itself off from its roots, ie, the irrational. At an ironic remove, it’s like a 1930s New York society lady hosting an afternoon tea party for her friends to consider the difficulties in Europe—well-meaning, thoughtful, and largely impotent to alter anything.
While Langer is trying to raise the alarm about a world crisis that seemingly has nothing to do with philosophy, she has her counterparts in the likes of Cassirer and Heidegger in Germany. As an admirer and acolyte of Cassirer’s thinking on the importance of symbol-making in intellection, she observes how Cassirer is one of those German academics who’d been condemned by the new regime. Further, she knows that Cassirer has tried to engage with other philosophers and academics to challenge the new anti-intellectualism; in particular, he has challenged the acquiescent Heidegger to acknowledge the intellectual impiety of endorsing the myth and the practices of the Third Reich. There’s a whole world outside Philosophy in a New Key that is only subtly alluded to, and Langer maintains a largely dispassionate and academic stance towards her thesis. That was my chief frustration: in a book that advocated the re-invigoration of philosophy by incorporation of the irrational into the domain of epistemology, the irrational (symbol, ritual, art) was handled at a clinical remove, dispassionately.
The popularity of existentialism didn’t arise until after the war, and its consideration of the irrational was precisely what Langer was seeking. The existentialists, however, did not tread as softly or reverently in the groves of academe as had Langer. It’s to her credit that she understood the moment so well, even if she lacked the same messy approach to philosophy as Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, all authors of unsettling fictions. The post-WWII movement towards new western philosophical ideals introduced such countercultural phenomena as the beatniks, alternative (Eastern) philosophies/religion (eg, Buddhism), and a new in-the-moment hedonism (can you dig it?). Music reflected this shifting from old standards, and jazz, in particular, was the siren call to ways of being/thinking that repudiated the staid intellectualism of classical and conventional musical idioms. I cite music because Langer herself looked to music as the one form of “knowledge” that was by philosophical/epistemological terms uniquely incomprehensible.
Langer’s book sums up all of Western philosophy and notes how it dead-ends with the linguistic analysis of the metaphysical, ie, that which cannot be expressed rationally/discursively. But the arrival at a positivist/empirical way of thinking, while it seems to have led to a dead-end, means only that humanity’s original capacity to use symbol, sign, and ritual has been refined in one particular way, not that the symbol-making wellspring has been forever shut off. In fact, she asserts, it cannot be, and mind and soul can still be sustained and inspired by the “errors” of our symbol making. Ultimately, life, language, and philosophy are heuristic, ie, they simply proceed by trial and error to become whatever they become. It doesn’t sound like much of a rallying cry, but it’s realistic, dispassionate, and most likely true.
In this re-reading of Langer’s work, I was interested in the parallel paths that she and Charles Taylor (Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, 1989) traversed to arrive at fundamentally the same conclusion: modern humankind is foundering under a positivistic worldview, unable to find a common, unifying bedrock of belief that fully satisfies a glimmering sense of an unutterable/“illogical” immanence.
March 2021
One of the things that frustrated me in this very sage book was Susanne Langer’s equanimity. The composition of this book was conducted in the years leading up to America’s entry in the second World War; as a scholar with numerous ties to Europe and, in particular, Germany, Langer was aware of the populist uprising in Germany and the invocation of its leader to a powerful new myth of its race’s superiority and destiny of triumph. The underlying provocation for this book is that swelling repudiation of logical/empirical thinking and its replacement with a mythos of swaggering exceptionalism that was already sending Germany’s intellectual elite into crisis and flight. Of course, it’s not Langer’s purpose to become a Cassandra of alarmism, trying to counter irrational populism with a polemic that relies on the affective suasion of rhetoric. Instead, using the tools at hand, she raises an alarm about a world-wide crisis—one that may alter Western history and culture—with an appeal to consider how Western philosophy has run into a rational dead end and that it has too long cut itself off from its roots, ie, the irrational. At an ironic remove, it’s like a 1930s New York society lady hosting an afternoon tea party for her friends to consider the difficulties in Europe—well-meaning, thoughtful, and largely impotent to alter anything.
While Langer is trying to raise the alarm about a world crisis that seemingly has nothing to do with philosophy, she has her counterparts in the likes of Cassirer and Heidegger in Germany. As an admirer and acolyte of Cassirer’s thinking on the importance of symbol-making in intellection, she observes how Cassirer is one of those German academics who’d been condemned by the new regime. Further, she knows that Cassirer has tried to engage with other philosophers and academics to challenge the new anti-intellectualism; in particular, he has challenged the acquiescent Heidegger to acknowledge the intellectual impiety of endorsing the myth and the practices of the Third Reich. There’s a whole world outside Philosophy in a New Key that is only subtly alluded to, and Langer maintains a largely dispassionate and academic stance towards her thesis. That was my chief frustration: in a book that advocated the re-invigoration of philosophy by incorporation of the irrational into the domain of epistemology, the irrational (symbol, ritual, art) was handled at a clinical remove, dispassionately.
The popularity of existentialism didn’t arise until after the war, and its consideration of the irrational was precisely what Langer was seeking. The existentialists, however, did not tread as softly or reverently in the groves of academe as had Langer. It’s to her credit that she understood the moment so well, even if she lacked the same messy approach to philosophy as Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, all authors of unsettling fictions. The post-WWII movement towards new western philosophical ideals introduced such countercultural phenomena as the beatniks, alternative (Eastern) philosophies/religion (eg, Buddhism), and a new in-the-moment hedonism (can you dig it?). Music reflected this shifting from old standards, and jazz, in particular, was the siren call to ways of being/thinking that repudiated the staid intellectualism of classical and conventional musical idioms. I cite music because Langer herself looked to music as the one form of “knowledge” that was by philosophical/epistemological terms uniquely incomprehensible.
Langer’s book sums up all of Western philosophy and notes how it dead-ends with the linguistic analysis of the metaphysical, ie, that which cannot be expressed rationally/discursively. But the arrival at a positivist/empirical way of thinking, while it seems to have led to a dead-end, means only that humanity’s original capacity to use symbol, sign, and ritual has been refined in one particular way, not that the symbol-making wellspring has been forever shut off. In fact, she asserts, it cannot be, and mind and soul can still be sustained and inspired by the “errors” of our symbol making. Ultimately, life, language, and philosophy are heuristic, ie, they simply proceed by trial and error to become whatever they become. It doesn’t sound like much of a rallying cry, but it’s realistic, dispassionate, and most likely true.
March 21, 2024
A really fascinating intersection of theories of language, art, meaning, and human mind that makes a really affecting eulogy for the loss of common symbols and beliefs in the modern age (this was written in 1942!!!). Lots I agree and disagree with and lots to think about.
"Most people have no home that is a symbol of their childhood, not even a definite memory of one place to serve that purpose. Many no longer know the language that was their mother-tongue. All old symbols are gone, and thousands of average lives offer no new materials to a creative imagination...technical progress is putting man's freedom of mind in jeopardy."
Damn.
"Most people have no home that is a symbol of their childhood, not even a definite memory of one place to serve that purpose. Many no longer know the language that was their mother-tongue. All old symbols are gone, and thousands of average lives offer no new materials to a creative imagination...technical progress is putting man's freedom of mind in jeopardy."
Damn.
June 2, 2023
Ceci n'est pas un livre
June 24, 2022
In this prophetic book Susanne Langer diagnoses one of the most important issues that goes underrecognized to this day. With the "Meaning Crisis" now in full bore through out Western Culture and most of the "modernized" world, the questions raised by Langer in these essays are as relevant now as when they were initially written.
Langer argues that the only way out of the flat perception that has been adopted from the so-called Enlightenment, is through a reevaluation of the very quality of "reason." This reevaluation should cause us to look at the human capacity for meaning making with fresh eyes. Lange argues that the human being is endowed with a very keen symbolic apprehension which precedes any rational language. Thes reframing of reason reveals that many of the "primitive" ways of thinking that are usually discarded as mere imaginative fancy, are actually just as reasonable as the most abstracted scientific principles arrived at through modern technical means.
A must read for any artist or for anyone beginning their journey into the study of symbology, semiotics, philology, psychology, or philosophy.
Langer argues that the only way out of the flat perception that has been adopted from the so-called Enlightenment, is through a reevaluation of the very quality of "reason." This reevaluation should cause us to look at the human capacity for meaning making with fresh eyes. Lange argues that the human being is endowed with a very keen symbolic apprehension which precedes any rational language. Thes reframing of reason reveals that many of the "primitive" ways of thinking that are usually discarded as mere imaginative fancy, are actually just as reasonable as the most abstracted scientific principles arrived at through modern technical means.
A must read for any artist or for anyone beginning their journey into the study of symbology, semiotics, philology, psychology, or philosophy.
September 20, 2014
I agree that it's a "must read." Of course, I have a long time interest in philosophy. Langer is a good answer to people who think that women don't do philosophy, of course they do, and she did. It's helpful as a compendium of the thoughts in philosophy in the middle of the Twentieth Century. That's an important period for Anglo/American philosophy and Langer is a good source to understand some of that. It's also good just for brilliant thinking and insightful looks at about everything she considers. Highly recommended.
July 29, 2016
A brilliant book about the philosophy of art. It is a study of symbolism, but primarily non-discursive (or nonverbal) symbolism in art, music, ritual, myth, etc. She presented material from many sources either forgotten or inaccessible because of the language barrier (Langer was bilingual, a German-American). I found it a good read and several good quotes that I suspect can shed light on some Soviet semiotics of art.
October 16, 2019
Susanne Langer pursues a creative philosophy that emphasizes artistic observation that we can only hope to emulate.
"The secret of fusion is the fact that the artist's eye sees in nature... an inexhaustible wealth of tension, rhythms, continuities, and contrasts which can be rendered in line and color." Susanne Langer
Here is my full review: https://bookoblivion.com/2019/10/14/s...
"The secret of fusion is the fact that the artist's eye sees in nature... an inexhaustible wealth of tension, rhythms, continuities, and contrasts which can be rendered in line and color." Susanne Langer
Here is my full review: https://bookoblivion.com/2019/10/14/s...
February 27, 2010
An absolute "must read" for anyone interested in the nature of language, and non-linguistic forms (symbols) for communicating meaning. . .
July 27, 2018
Some provocative earl semiotics ideas although some examples haven't aged well.
June 21, 2017
A good book about the importance of symbolizing for human thinking. There are passages that (hopefully) would be left out if the book were to be published today - for instance how she constantly exemplifies mysticism and savageness with colonized natives. Personally, I skipped most of those parts, since they often also clearly are wrong and not even helpful to understand the 'philosophy in a new key' which is Langer's main concept. That set aside, this is a work that continues to be important in our day for overlapping aesthetics and theoretical philosophy. This is a sound start to start questioning some of the concepts in philosophy that we take for granted or already de-mystified.
March 24, 2019
I think one would appreciate this book more if he or she is a philosophy student. Or as was my case because it deals with art and knowledge, a key topic in my PHD research.
What I liked the most is Langer's ability to find everyday examples as evidence for her theories.
The writting style is however very much hard to follow compared to other academic tests. The amount of terms and references is overwhelming for someone not specially literate in philosophy theories.
What I liked the most is Langer's ability to find everyday examples as evidence for her theories.
The writting style is however very much hard to follow compared to other academic tests. The amount of terms and references is overwhelming for someone not specially literate in philosophy theories.
August 16, 2020
While the arguments and supporting literature are a little dated, Langer's thesis on the role of symbolic transformation in ritual and art is by far one of the most accessible and cogent texts in the field. I strongly recommend consulting Philosophy in a New Key together with Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, for a comprehensive foundation on structuralism and aesthetic theory.
October 19, 2021
gut, wichtig.
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August 5, 2022I read this back in the 70's. I will need to re-read it, now 50 years later, so see how I understand it.
May 29, 2024
I have a huge back tattoo based on one single line in this book and that’s just one the many special little things that are so deeply wrong with me :)
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December 20, 2025Toch niet zo'n fan (het is me wat anthropocentrisch): alleen mensen zouden symbolisch denken, dat wil zeggen, hebben het over symbolen zélf in plaats van tekens als aanwijsstokken gebruiken.
June 11, 2025
Langer’s ideas on art seem to more readily apply to the visual arts and literature than to the aural arts. If your interest is primarily in music, Leonard Bernstein’s Harvard Talks takes into account intervallic hermeneutics and contextual narrative which makes a lot more sense for the average listener. Langer focuses on very abstract concepts of non-linguistic communication that won’t even register for most people. Additionally, there is the problem of the writing style, which sounds an awful lot like Jordan Peterson’s logorrhea eruditus. This sober mindset fit right in with the post-war fashionable cynicism that dominated the NYC intellectual scene at that time.
The takeaway of all this is that the very origins of art were communal rituals such as dance and drums that reaffirmed sense of belonging to the community. It was only many thousands of years later that individual expressions of a contemplative nature began to emerge during the long lonely winter sojourns in caves. It took thousands of years more before artistic representational took on wistful and fanciful notions, much later still mysticism and tragedy. But the underlying thesis will not help you sit through Wagner’s operas if that’s what you were hoping for.
The takeaway of all this is that the very origins of art were communal rituals such as dance and drums that reaffirmed sense of belonging to the community. It was only many thousands of years later that individual expressions of a contemplative nature began to emerge during the long lonely winter sojourns in caves. It took thousands of years more before artistic representational took on wistful and fanciful notions, much later still mysticism and tragedy. But the underlying thesis will not help you sit through Wagner’s operas if that’s what you were hoping for.
Read
May 18, 2014Langer's writing is engaging and her use of semiotic as a glass through which to view the development of human culture is thought-provoking. The impoverishment she describes in the final chapter has the most resonance for me, although certainly my own world-view invested it with more significance than Langer intended. Most significant is the impact she had on Walker Percy.
November 12, 2016
I read her "The Lord of Creation" collected in the Borzoi College Reader, an excellent essay on language, symbols, as force of cultural creation and destruction in human society. So I am making a note to look out for books by her in the future.
October 9, 2007
It is a little bit boring, but when points are made they are pretty damn insightful/eye-opening.
July 21, 2014
skimmede den kun. kunstkapitlet er gammeldags på den måde, at det ikke kan tænke tanken, at kunst er mode. det er vel en oplagt teori i dag?
December 17, 2024
really only fully read the music and arts chapters and mostly because i didn't understand the rest.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews