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Problems of Art
Art history
184 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1957
17 people are currently reading
236 people want to read
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 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 12, 2010
I am a sucker for art philosophy books. This is a good one by Susanne Langer (who I have not heard of before). The book is good when taken at face value, but when thought of in relation to more modern art, and even modern website and user design, it becomes even more interesting.
March 4, 2025
The determined student of philosophy will want to read Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key, which lays out in more detail her concepts and methodology. For the rest of, more interested in understanding the visual and aural arts than wrestling with abstract philosophical quandaries, Langer’s Problems of Art, is slightly more approachable and certainly less tedious. The short chapters, based on lectures, are easy enough to digest in a single sitting. Here is a quote to give you an idea of what to expect from Langer:
An artist expresses feeling, but not in the way a politician blows off steam or a baby laughs and cries. He formulates that elusive aspect of reality that is commonly taken to be amorphous and chaotic; that is, he objectifies the subjective realm. What he expresses is, therefore, not his own actual feelings, but what he knows about human feeling. So a work of art expresses a conception of life, emotion, inward reality. But it is neither a confessional nor a frozen tantrum; it is a developed metaphor.
After developing her three primary arguments (expression, form, creation) Langer summarizes that all art, whether rendered successfully or not (and not just according to the artist’s intent), triggers the same responses in humans whether it be primitive cave paintings, African drums, Venus of Milo, Joyce’s Ulysses, or Mozart.
This is all well and good, and I find myself nodding along, saying to myself, “okay, that’s one way of putting it,” but it’s all very wordy and for me philosophically hazy. I’ve read my fair share of philosophy, and at a certain point, as with Heidegger’s Being and Time, the word salad just doesn’t click with me. I think we have to factor in different preferences for processing information. For me, modern neurology explains most of this in a very straight-forward manner: different visual and aural stimuli trigger different responses in the brain (based on a long history of evolution) and yes, the end-result is that African drums, James Joyce, or Wagner all consistently tickle the same neurological responses and therefore formulate an internal narrative that we can reconcile.
I’d say the visual arts fall more readily into Langer’s argument for symbolic metaphor, simply because we are a visually-oriented species and have a vast vocabulary that documents images and body language with their corresponding emotions. This is far trickier with music, and this is where science can take us further down the road of understanding. Consider the study of psychoacoustics which analyzes psychology, neurology, and the physiology of sound with its acoustic interface to determine how the brain interprets sound. A study in Austria asked concert listeners what makes music spiritual, and not surprisingly didn’t get any definitive answers. When volunteers in a controlled group listened to the same music (Bruckner Sym. 7) recorded in a dry studio environment versus one recorded in a spacious cathedral the respondents choice of descriptions changed from “magnanimous” to “elation” or from “restful” to “transcendent” with a fairly statistical commonality among listeners. This is because the long-arced melody remains outside of the relatable scale of human singing, combined with the hushed tremolos giving an overlay of “heavenly” luminosity, or in some listeners a sense of weightless floating. With Langer’s approach you’d never arrive at such specific understanding of how music actually works.
I’m not saying that philosophers from Kant onward (who like to play with mysticism) have lived wasted lives, but the fact is scientific probity does yield more straight-forward results. Readers who prefer roundabout philosophical pondering over neurological science may enjoy Langer’s approach more than I did.
An artist expresses feeling, but not in the way a politician blows off steam or a baby laughs and cries. He formulates that elusive aspect of reality that is commonly taken to be amorphous and chaotic; that is, he objectifies the subjective realm. What he expresses is, therefore, not his own actual feelings, but what he knows about human feeling. So a work of art expresses a conception of life, emotion, inward reality. But it is neither a confessional nor a frozen tantrum; it is a developed metaphor.
After developing her three primary arguments (expression, form, creation) Langer summarizes that all art, whether rendered successfully or not (and not just according to the artist’s intent), triggers the same responses in humans whether it be primitive cave paintings, African drums, Venus of Milo, Joyce’s Ulysses, or Mozart.
This is all well and good, and I find myself nodding along, saying to myself, “okay, that’s one way of putting it,” but it’s all very wordy and for me philosophically hazy. I’ve read my fair share of philosophy, and at a certain point, as with Heidegger’s Being and Time, the word salad just doesn’t click with me. I think we have to factor in different preferences for processing information. For me, modern neurology explains most of this in a very straight-forward manner: different visual and aural stimuli trigger different responses in the brain (based on a long history of evolution) and yes, the end-result is that African drums, James Joyce, or Wagner all consistently tickle the same neurological responses and therefore formulate an internal narrative that we can reconcile.
I’d say the visual arts fall more readily into Langer’s argument for symbolic metaphor, simply because we are a visually-oriented species and have a vast vocabulary that documents images and body language with their corresponding emotions. This is far trickier with music, and this is where science can take us further down the road of understanding. Consider the study of psychoacoustics which analyzes psychology, neurology, and the physiology of sound with its acoustic interface to determine how the brain interprets sound. A study in Austria asked concert listeners what makes music spiritual, and not surprisingly didn’t get any definitive answers. When volunteers in a controlled group listened to the same music (Bruckner Sym. 7) recorded in a dry studio environment versus one recorded in a spacious cathedral the respondents choice of descriptions changed from “magnanimous” to “elation” or from “restful” to “transcendent” with a fairly statistical commonality among listeners. This is because the long-arced melody remains outside of the relatable scale of human singing, combined with the hushed tremolos giving an overlay of “heavenly” luminosity, or in some listeners a sense of weightless floating. With Langer’s approach you’d never arrive at such specific understanding of how music actually works.
I’m not saying that philosophers from Kant onward (who like to play with mysticism) have lived wasted lives, but the fact is scientific probity does yield more straight-forward results. Readers who prefer roundabout philosophical pondering over neurological science may enjoy Langer’s approach more than I did.
February 20, 2024
Langer presented these lectures in recognition of her brilliant work in her other two important books, which were Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art and her book Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art.
These brief essays give you a glimpse into her depth and brilliance. She guides the reader/listener into her philosophic system. The essays are carefully constructed to entice and instruct. You can learn much from the essays, but if you crave or need more depth, you should read her other works. The essays here do stand on their own once you realize that they are summations of lectures she gave to an audience, and thus, you must not expect her to delve deeply into each topic. The title is a tease in that each lecture is a 'problem' due to the lack of a working philosophic system on the Arts, which was the case prior to her efforts. You can read this book without reading her other works, but you must realize the limits of an hour-long lecture to the general public and can't expect more than this venue can provide in each essay. The beginnings of a system are presented in these lectures. Great food for thought.
These brief essays give you a glimpse into her depth and brilliance. She guides the reader/listener into her philosophic system. The essays are carefully constructed to entice and instruct. You can learn much from the essays, but if you crave or need more depth, you should read her other works. The essays here do stand on their own once you realize that they are summations of lectures she gave to an audience, and thus, you must not expect her to delve deeply into each topic. The title is a tease in that each lecture is a 'problem' due to the lack of a working philosophic system on the Arts, which was the case prior to her efforts. You can read this book without reading her other works, but you must realize the limits of an hour-long lecture to the general public and can't expect more than this venue can provide in each essay. The beginnings of a system are presented in these lectures. Great food for thought.
June 19, 2024
These series of lectures are an excellent follow-up to Philosophy in a New Key and Feeling and Form. These lectures not only encapsulate the comprehensive theories presented in these two seminal works but also provide a standalone synthesis so there is no need to read her previous works in order to grok what she is explicating here.
A particularly compelling section is Langer's exploration of how music, through its unique capacity to create a virtual temporal space, affords us the only true representation of rest. I find this idea fascinating.
Langer states:
"Also, in clearest demonstration of the difference between materials and elements, we hear something in music that does not exist outside of it at all: sustained rest. If a figure ascends to a resting tone, the actual motion of the air is faster on that resting tone than anywhere else in the passage; but what we hear is changeless continuity in time, sustained rest."
A particularly compelling section is Langer's exploration of how music, through its unique capacity to create a virtual temporal space, affords us the only true representation of rest. I find this idea fascinating.
Langer states:
"Also, in clearest demonstration of the difference between materials and elements, we hear something in music that does not exist outside of it at all: sustained rest. If a figure ascends to a resting tone, the actual motion of the air is faster on that resting tone than anywhere else in the passage; but what we hear is changeless continuity in time, sustained rest."
December 20, 2019
This was okay in terms of ideas and I definitely appreciated the accessible definitions of art/the aims of art; however, it was pretty dense despite the length and I didn't find it very useful for my research in ABER in composition, though it was cited in another text I've been using.
October 3, 2016
I need to swear off reading non-fiction in the form of compiled lectures given by experts. It never seems very rewarding. Dedicated to synoptic premises and limited length, they gloss over the details that make non-fiction worthwhile. This is true of Problems Of Art. The effect is magnified by the fact that this is a philosophic work and generalities and scarcity of examples are crucial handicaps in the arguments that Langer tries to set forth. Furthermore, philosophy works best when it deals at the very cusp of what we understand scientifically. Langer often makes the mistake of philosophizing to closely to the boundaries of scientific knowledge (particularly when discussing the development of speech) and seems to elide scientific facts in a way that undermines her authority. That said, this book gives very engaging overviews of the subjects such as form and symbolism in art, and I have to imagine that reading a proper book written by Langer would be very worthwhile. This is evidenced by Problems Of Art's strong ending in the form of an appendixed essay she wrote on the different uses of abstraction in the fields of science and art. This concise essay has the focus and detail that is missed in most of the speeches in the book. This book is a thought-provoking read, but like my tired resort to cliche, it leaves on wanting more.
June 24, 2015
Very good, and well thought-out. Quite thought-provoking. She makes it all sound very poetic. If you haven't read Langer's essay "The Cultural Importance of the Arts," I would highly suggest it as well. Written in 1966, I believe.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews