The Philosopher as Prophet and Visionary: Susanne Langer's Essay on Human Feeling in the Light of Subsequent Developments in the Sciences

Abstract

There are at least five major areas in which Susanne Langer's work?taken as a whole, with the three-volume Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling as its defining achievement?anticipated significant developments in the biological and psycho logical sciences that have taken place since the publication of the first volume of Mind in 1967. The first is her belief that consciousness, or subjectivity, is the defining subject matter of psychology. The second is her attempt to develop a conceptual framework for grounding a theory of mind and consciousness in the biological sciences. The third is her proposal that a phenomenology of conscious experience (which she believed could be found in the arts) can serve as a unique source of insights into the phenomena of life and mind that we are seeking to understand in terms of the sciences. The fourth is her thesis that a perfectly con tinuous evolutionary history has given rise to a difference between human and animal mentality that is almost as great as the division between animals and plants (1962, 113). And the fifth is her theory of imagination, which provides a bridge from the biological sciences to the study of human culture and the symbolic resources that support it.