Susanne Langer - Philosophy in a New Key (1941)

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If we would have new knowledge, we must get us a whole world of new questions.

Susanne Langer
The fairytale is irresponsible; it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter.

Susanne Langer
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 Langer
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 Langer
Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?

Susanne Langer
Music is 'significant form,' and its significance is that of a symbol, a highly articulated, sensuous object, which by virtue of its dynamic structure can express the forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey. Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its import.

Susanne Langer
The "technique," or treatment, of a problem begins with its first expression as a question. The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it - right or wrong - may be given.

Susanne Langer
A question is really an ambiguous proposition; the answer is its determination.

Susanne Langer
The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.

Susanne Langer
Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought.

Susanne Langer
Mathematicians are rarely practical people, or good observers of events. They are apt to be cloistered souls, like philosophers and theologians.

Susanne Langer
Our world "divides into facts" because we so divide it.

Susanne Langer
The mind of man is always fertile, ever creating and discarding, like the earth. There is always new life under old decay. Last year's dead leaves hide not merely the seeds, but the full-fledged green plants of this year's spring, ready to bloom almost as soon as they are uncovered.

Susanne Langer
The men in the laboratory have departed so far from the old forms of experimentation - typified by Galileo's weights and Franklin's kite - that they cannot be said to observe the actual objects of their curiosity at all; instead, they are watching index needles, revolving drums, and sensitive plates.

Susanne Langer
Observation has become almost entirely indirect; and readings take the place of genuine witness.

Susanne Langer
The intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.

Susanne Langer
Behind these symbols lie the boldest, purest, coolest abstractions mankind has ever made. No schoolman speculating on essences and attributes ever approached anything like the abstractness of algebra.

Susanne Langer
It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age. Science builds its structure of hypothetical "elements" and laws of their behavior, touching on reality at crucial points.... But the historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.

Susanne Langer
The limits of thought are not so much set from outside, by the fullness or poverty of experiences that meet the mind, as from within, by the power of conception, the wealth of formulative notions with which the mind meets experiences.

Susanne Langer
The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it — right or wrong — may be given.

Susanne Langer
Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.

Susanne Langer
Real thinking is possible only in the light of genuine language, no matter how limited, how primitive.

Susanne Langer
The notion of giving something a name is the vastest generative idea that ever was conceived...

Susanne Langer
Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.

Susanne Langer
The faith of scientists in the power and truth of mathematics is so implicit that their work has gradually become less and less observation, and more and more calculation.... But the facts which are accepted by virtue of these tests are not actually observed at all.

Susanne Langer
All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work.

Susanne Langer
Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

Susanne Langer
It is significant that people who refuse to tell their children fairy tales do not fear that the children will believe in princes and princesses, but that they will believe in witches and bogeys.

Susanne Langer
A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problems than by its solution of them.

Susanne Langer
Ritual is the most primitive reflection of serious thought, a slow deposit, as it were, of people's imaginative insight into life.

Susanne Langer