Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling

by Susanne K. Langer

Book Overview

Volume III complete the publication of Susanne Langer's monumental treatise on the rise and development of mind--an exclusively human phenomenon-- by evolution from animal intelligence to intellectual... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801827566
• ISBN13: 9780801827563
• Release Date: October 1982
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 3 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Uniqueness of the Human Mind and Emotion

From Foreword: "Thinking is our essence as human beings, Descartes famously proposed, but when thought is embodied it acquires modes and dimensions it would never have had in its pure state. Imagination, for example, is a bodily intrusion on thought, and feelings in particular are muddled modes of thinking - muddled by the peremptory and distracting demands of our incessantly needful physiological selves. Susanne Langer's thesis is the exact inverse of this: for her, perhaps because we are never not embodied, feeling is our essence as human beings, and rational thought but one of its more perspicuous modes. The shift of feeling to center stage in our mental life must in her case be explained by the shifting of art to center stage in what she supposed was a philosophy of the human spirit more adequate than her predecessors - with the exception perhaps of Schopenhauer, whom she greatly resembles as a thinker - had though to give." - Arthur C. Danto From Introduction: "The central problem of the present essay is the nature and origin of the veritable gulf that divides human from animal mentality, in a perfectly continuous course of development of life on earth that has no breaks. For animals have mental functions, but only man has a mind, and a mental life. Some animals are intelligent, but only man can be intellectual. The thesis I am about to develop here is that the departure from the normal pattern of animal mentality is a vast and special evolution of feeling in the hominid stock. This deviation from the general balance of functions usually maintained in the complex advances of life is so rich and so intricately detailed that is affects every aspect of our existence, and adds up to the total qualitative difference which sets human nature apart from the rest of the animal kingdom as a mode of being that is typified by language, culture, morality, and consciousness of life and death. " - Suzanne K. Langer

Espresso to the Brain

Langer's thoughts are like a jolt of espresso to the brain - but for me they have to be excavated from the density of her writing. Her thoughts are worth wading through, though. My primary interest so far are her chapters on art -- about the projection of feeling in art and on living form in art and nature "Every work of art has to seem organic and living to be expressive of feeling." Langer writes that it is a "quality of life" that is meant by "livingness" in art....there is in art the vital appearance as in living forms in nature which as the great morphologist D'Arcy Thompson observed - are almost all records of growth, i.e. biological activity --yet the most convincing images of such forms have often resulted in art where no natural model furnished the motif and the shape seems to have sprung directly from the symbolic intuition of the artist irrationality and indefinability are the delight of artists artists see things physiognomically. children also see things physiognomically. to see things physiognomically is to see the inner character or quality revealed outwardly. to see inside. Langer writes how the work of art seems to have its own inward being and this inward being is the body or organism out of which its realized elements seem to arise. that is why a good work of art presents itself as a matrix from which all its sensously given articulations are derived while others which do not appear are nonetheless felt to lie somehow in limbo the work seems unique when it is "alive" such a figure has the living stillness of a plant Gradients of relative clarity, complexity, tempo, intensity of feeling, and interest also permeate most of antimate nature as basic patterns of change and growth ((((((OOOHHHH - she's out there, man....I love it.....she's talking about ALL art, whether painting, music, theatre, writing, dance, sculpture.....)