American philosopher and educatior, whose most widely read and discussed book is Philosophy in a New Key (1942), a systematic theory of art. This Harvard bestseller became a standard text in numerous undergraduate philosophy classes. Susanne Langer work is not easy to summarize, but one of her major ideas was that works of art are expressive forms, or "iconic symbols" of emotions. The concept of "symbolic transformation" of experience was the "new key" in her philosophy, in which the limits of language do not define the limits of our symbol-producing and understanding. "Symbolization is the essential act of mind." 

"In the fundamental notion of symbolization—mystical, practical, or mathematical, it makes no difference—we have the keynote of all humanistic problems. In it lies a new conception of "mentality," that may illumine questions of life and consciousness, instead of obscuring them as traditional "scientific methods" have done. If it is indeed a generative idea, it will beget tangible methods of its own, to free the deadlock paradoxes of mind and body, reason and impulse, autonomy and law, and will overcome the checkmated arguments of an earlier age by discarding their very idiom and shaping their equivalents in more significant phrase." (from Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art by Susanne K. Langer, New York: Mentor Book, 1954, p. 19

Susanne Katherina Knauth Langer was born in New York City, one of five children of of Antonio Knauth (1855-1915), a succesful lawyer, and Else Margarethe (Uhlich) Knauth (1868-1958). Her parents had immigrated to the U.S. from Germany and settled eventually in Manhattan's Upper West Side. At home they spoke German and Langer herself never lost her German accent. As a result of cocaine poisoning she suffered in infancy, she had chronic health problems.

Langer was educated at a private school. At home she learned to play the piano and cello quite well. Later music had also a central role in her philosophical system. Already at an early age, she had  also cultivated a passionate interest in philosophy.

After receiving her B.A. in 1920 from Radcliffe College, Langer went to Europe. She studied in 1921-22 at the University of Vienna and met the psychologist and theoretician of language Karl Bühler, whose interdisciplinary studies she adopted as a model for her own work. She then returned to Radcliffe, where she earned a Ph.D. in 1926 with her dissertation dealing with logical analysis of meaning. Her first published article, 'Confusion of Symbols and Confusion of  Logical Types' (1925) appeared in the prestigious British journal Mind. In the mid-1930s, she was one of the founder of the Association for Symbolic Logic and served as a consulting editor for its journal until the end of 1939.

In 1921, she married William L. Langer, a professor of history at Harvard; they had had two sons. Their house in Cambridge was situated at 72 Raymond Street. While giving a lecture in 1938, William Langer had a sudden panic attack and was unable to speak. Although speaking in public was an ordeal for him during the next two decades and his chronic stage fright was never resolved, he continued as a teacher and lecturer and had an outstanding career as a America's most distinguished historian of Europe. In the late 1930s, Langer and her husband began to drift apart and eventually they divorced in 1942. William Langer married Rowena Morse Nelson in 1943; she had four children by her first marriage.

At Radcliffe Langer studied under the eminent mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), who wrote the prefatory note to her book The Practice of Philosophy (1930). From 1927 to 1942 Langer was a tutor in Philosophy at Radcliffe. After working as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Delaware, she was a lecturer at Columbia University. Langer was a visiting professor at New York University, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, Ohio State University, Columbus, University of Washington, Seattle, and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 1954 she was appointed professor of philosophy at Connecticut College in New London. She was also a member of the faculty. In 1961 she became professor emerita and reserch scholar in philosophy. Langer was elected in 1960 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She held also honorary degrees from several American colleges and universities. In 1950 she received Radcliffe Alumnae Achievement Medal. Langer had a wood cabin in Ulster County, New York. She spent her summers there, reading, walking, writing and canoeing.

In spite of her fame, Langer remained at the edge of contemporary academic philosophy. The art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto, writer of The End of Art (1984), regarded Langer as his most important teacher. He said that he had learned as a graduate student that she was poison to a career among analytic philosophers. ('Foreword' by Randal E. Auxier, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Susanne K. Langer, edited by Lona Gaikis, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, p. xiii)

Langer's first book was a collection of fairy tales, The Cruise of the Little Dipper (1923). It was illustrated by Helen Sewell, to whom she dedicated one of her later work, Problems in Art (1957), based on her lectures.

By dedicating Philosophy in a New Key to Whitehead, "my great Teacher and Friend," Langer acknowledged his influence on her thought. However,  except some quotations and references to Whitehead's publications she has surprisingly little to say about his work in the text. When  Langer's book was released by Penguin Books in 1948 in paperback form it  became a best-seller and made her a celebrity in the philosophy of art. By 1951 it had sold more than 110,000 copies.

"The philosophical study of symbols is not a technique borrowed from other disciplines, not even from mathematics; it has arisen in the fields that the great advance of learning has left fallow. Perhaps it holds the seed of a new intellectual harvest, to be reaped in the next season of human understanding." (Philosophy in a New Key, pp. 19-20) Like Whitehead and his student and friend Bertrand Russell, Langer was a system builder in the old style: all of her works were interconnected. ('Susanne K. Langer, 1895-1985' by Richard E. Hart, in The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy, edited by Armen T. Marsoobian and John Ryder, 2004, p. 241) Philosophy in a New Key was also much influenced by Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), whose Sprache und Mythos from 1925 Langer translated into English, but during her career she never dealt with myth as widely as Cassirer did in his writings. Langer's earlier absorption into symbolic logic is seen in her attempt to create a rational basis for aesthetics. 

Feeling and Form (1953), dedicated to Cassirer, was written on a Rockefeller Foundation grant. It developed further her ideas on symbolic forms (which include among others language, scientific knowledge, ritual, myth, music – many possible symbolic forms were left unmentioned), and expanded her system of aesthetics from music to the other fields of arts, painting, poetry, dance, etc.

In the essay 'A Note On The Film,' which appeared in Feeling and Form, Langer developed her theory of film, in which she argued that cinema is "like" dream: it creates a virtual present, in which the dreamer in at the center of it, the camera is in the place of the dreamer. "But the camera isnot a dreamer. We are usually agents in a dream. The camera (and its complemets, the sound track) is not itself in the picture. It is the mind's eye and nothing more. Neither is the picture (if it is art) likely to be dreamlike in its structure. It is a poetic combination, coherent, organic, governed by a definitely conceived feeling, and directed by actual emotional pressures." (Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art, New York: Charles Scrubner's Sons, 1953, p. 413) Admitting that the analogy of film to dream has been remarked by several people, Langer refers to The Dramatic Imagination: Reflections and Speculations on the Art of the Theatre (1941) by  Robert Edmond Jones, in which he says that the motion pictures "have the rhythm of the thought-stream and the same uncanny ability to move forward or backward in space or time. . . . They project pure thought, pure dream, pure inner life." (Feeling and Form, p. 415) Langer's theory received little attention from film scholars and theorists at the time when it was written and later it was ignored by the new wave of directors who all had their own ideas about the film. Feeling and Form was dedicated "To the happy memory of Ernst Cassirer". 

Adhering to Cassirer's notion of man as the "symbol-using animal," Lagner argued that symbolic thought is the keynote to questions of life and consciousness, all humanistic problems. "Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling," she defined. Philosophy differed from science in that it was not concerned with the discovery of facts but the analysis of meanings, which are "embodied in forms" and have their own distinctive kind of structure and history. She distinguishes between the open "presentational" symbols of art and "discursive" symbols of language, which cannot reflect directly the subjective aspect of experience. The meaning of presentational forms emerge from fusion of sense and perceptible form, thus the presentational symbols are "not general descriptions but patterns of feelings, with the latter not directly expressing the experienced emotions but  being an aesthetic eloboration of the nature of our emotions." (Semiotics and Art Theory: Between Autonomism and Contextualism by Madeleine Schechter, 2008, p. 16)

Langer's way of extending abstract logical concepts into the study of art and mind distanced her from analytical philosophers, who were concerned, in a much narrower sense, about concepts and propositions, or "scientific sentences". However, at Radcliffe the Harvard logicial Henry M. Sheffer had introduced her to the field of formal logic. Her view of language is not far from Ludwig Wittgenstein's logical theory developed in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), but when Wittgenstein stopped on the threshold of the unsayable, Langer argued that "music articulates forms which language cannot set forth" – it shows what cannot be said.

What becomes of the theory of art as expression of emotion, Langer clarifies her stance by stating in Problems of Art, that 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, a non-discursive symbol that articulates what is verbally ineffable – the logic of consciousnes itself." (Problems of Art: Ten Philosophical Lectures, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957, p. 26) The concept of feeling is used in its broadest sense, covering everything from physical sensation and pain to the most complex emotions and intellectual tensions.

Works of art do not directly express the artist's experienced emotions, but rather an "idea" of emotion, or as she writes in Philosophy in a New Key: ". . . music is not self-expression, but formulation and representation of emotions, mood, mental tensions and resolutions—a "logical picture" of sentient, responsive life, a source of insight, not a plea for sympathy. Feelings revealed in music are essentially not "the passion, love or longing of such-and-such an individual," inviting us to put ourselves in that individual's place . . . music can present emotions and moods we have not felt". (Ibid., p. 180) Artists create virtual objects, illusions. Thus music creates an auditory apparation of time, "virtual time," in painting "virtual space" is the primary illusion, poets create appearances of events, persons, emotional reactions, places etc, "poetic semblances." Langer argues music is a "presentational symbol" of psychic process. "The tonal structures we call "music bear a close logical similarity to the forms of human feeling—forms of growth and of attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest, terrific excitement, calm, or subtle activation and dreamy lapses—not joy and sorrow perhaps, but the poignancy of either and both—the greatness and brevity and eternal passing of everything vitally felt. . . . Music is a tonal analogue of emotive life." (Feeling and Form, p. 17) The symbol and the object symbolized have a common logical form.

Langer also distinguishes art as symbol – the work of art as an indivisible whole – from symbols in art, which are elements of the work and often have a literal meaning. Langer's unconventional use of the term "symbol" has been criticized by a number of philosophers, George Dickie included, but Monroe C. Beardley has noted in his book Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present (1966), that Langer's general concept of art as symbol and its development "is carried through with great sensitivity and concreteness."

After receiving a research grant from the Edgar Kaufmann Charitable Trust, Langer wrote the three-volume Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967-1982), her last book, dealing with "actual living form as biologist find it... and the actual phenomena of feeling." Part of the year Langer lived in an old New England farmhouse in Old Lyme, Connecticut, where she could work in peace and quietness. By the publication of the third volume, Langer was 87. Although she considered this work her magnum opus, it did not attract much professional attention in philosophical circles. The conclusion of the essay was abrogated due to her poor eyesight. Langer died in Old Lyme, Connecticut, on July 17, 1985. Her ashes were scattered near her cabin in the Catskills, where she had written much of her work. Langer's unpublished manuscripts are held in The Houghtob Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

For further reading: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Susanne K. Langer: Embodied Meaning in Logic, Art and Feeling, edited by Lona Gaikis (2024); Bild - Präsenz - Symbol: Susanne Langers Philosophie des Bildes by Nico Brömsser; mit einem Geleitwort von Prof. Dr. Lambert Wiesing (2019); 'Susanne Langer and the Woeful World of Facts' by Giulia Felappi, in Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy,  Volume 5, Number 2 (2017); Vie, symbole, mouvement: Susanne K., Langer et la danse, edited by Anne Boissière and Mathieu Duplay (2012); Susanne Langer in Focus: the Symbolic Mind by Robert E. Innis (2009); 'Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985)' by Donald Dryden, in Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century, edited by Chris Murray (2003); Cassirer and Langer on Myth: An Introduction by William Schultz (2000); 'Langer, Susanne Katherina (Knauth),' in World Authors 1900-1950, Vol. 2, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aestehtic Theory by G.L. Hagberg (1995); Thinkers of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical, Bibliographical and Critical Dictionary, ed. by E. Devine (1983); Aesthetric Theory and Art: A Study in Susanne K. Langer by R.K. Ghosh (1979); Susanne Langer's Theory of Music as Symbol of Feeling: A Critique by Rita LaPlante Raffman (1978); Harmony Through Resolution by Richard Jackson Bremer (1975); Aesthetics: An Introduction by George Dickie (1971); Famous American Women by H. Stoddard (1970); Music and Human Feeling in Susanne Langer's Aesthetic Theory by Beverly Wayne Shirbroun (1964); Susanne Langer's Music Aesthetics by Fred Blum (1954); 'Symbolism and Art' by Morris Weitz, in Review of Metaphysics, VII (1954); 'Philosophy in a New Key' by Ernst Nagel, in Journal of Philosophy, 40 (1943).

Selected works:

• The Cruise of the Little Dipper, and Other Fairy Tales, 1923 (illus. by Helen Sewall)
• The Practice of Philosophy, 1930
• An Introduction to Symbolic Logic, 1937
• Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art, 1942
• Language and Myth / Ernst Cassirer, 1946 (translator)
• Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art, 1953
  - Fühlen und Form: eine Theorie der Kunst (aus dem Amerikanischen übersetzt von Christiana Goldmann und Christian Grüny; mit einer Einleitung, Literaturverzeichnis und Registern herausgegeben von Christian Grüny, 2018)
  
• Problems of Art: Ten Philosophical Lectures, 1957
• Reflections on Art, 1958 (editor)
  
• Philosophical Sketches, 1962
• Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, 1967-1982 (3 vols.)
• Mind, 1988 (abridged edition; abridged by Gary van den Heuvel, foreword by Arthur C. Danto)
  
• Fühlen und Form: eine Theorie der Kunst, 2018 (original title: Feelinng and Form, 1953; aus dem Amerikanischen übersetzt von Christiana Goldmann und Christian Grüny  mit einer Einleitung, Literaturverzeichnis und Registern herausgegeben von Christian Grüny)