Susanne Langer

Susanne Langer (Manhattan, 1895 – Old Lyme, Connecticut, 1985) was an American philosopher, writer and educator known for her theories on how art shapes the mind. She was one of the first American women to build a recognized academic career in philosophy. Her thought follows the line of Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms, though she was also influenced by Wittgenstein and Alfred North Whitehead.

Raised on Manhattan's West Side by German immigrant parents, Langer spoke German at home during her childhood and kept a German accent all her life. Music was central to her early years: she learned the cello and the piano, and she wrote poems and stories for her younger siblings. She studied at Radcliffe College and earned her doctorate at Harvard in 1926. After a stay in Vienna with her first husband, William Leonard Langer, she taught philosophy at Radcliffe, Connecticut College for Women, Columbia University and several other institutions. Her divorce in 1942 came the same year as her best-known book, Philosophy in a New Key, which was followed by Feeling and Form (1953).

Langer held that philosophy should start from symbols, since they are what set humans apart from animals. Animal life is governed by feeling and responds to signs, whereas human feeling is shaped by concepts, symbols and language. She distinguished discursive symbols, which combine elements with stable meanings into a new whole, from presentational symbols, whose meaning only emerges within the whole work. She applied this mainly to art, which for her articulates the emotional life of human beings. In her final major project, the three-volume Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967–1982), she tried to ground the study of aesthetic experience in biology, psychology and evolutionary thought.

Her influence can be seen in aesthetics and the philosophy of art and, in a more debated way, in contemporary rhetorical studies, where she is linked to the idea that a community's knowledge is built on shared symbol systems.