ion, interpretation, symbolic transformation: this is the trajectory human mentation takes. 11 PLACING LANGER’S PHILOSOPHICAL PROJECT It is this paradoxical non-foundational search for a “base” that binds Langer, Peirce, Dewey, and, totally outside the American pragmatist tradition, Cassirer together. All four thinkers, in different but complementary ways, undermine any temptation to remain committed to epistemology “as we have known it,” with its abstract dialectic of knower and known, subject and object. Dewey went as far asdialectic of knower and known, subject and object. Dewey went as far as to call the theory of knowledge “that confi rmed species of intellectual lockjaw.” Langer wants to put our jaws in motion and give us something substantial to chew on. The iconic, the presentational, the qualitative, the physiognomic, and the expressive—these are all terms for characterizing the same primary “stratum” of consciousness. To use a spatial metaphor for something non-spatial, this stratum is marked by the least “distance” between the organism and its ambient and its sign-system. Other strata—proceeding from natural representational systems such as language to the totally abstract systems of symbolic logic and mathematical physics—interpose greater “distances.” The great merit of Langer’s work here is to fuse the hierarchical and even teleologically oriented schema of sense-functions that informs Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (expression, representation, pure signifi cation) with refl ections on empirical insights and discoveries. It is, as I have been emphasizing, not “things” and “objects” that fi rst confront us or arise in consciousness but value-laden centers of signifi cance. These centers are not merely perceived or noticed or “mirrored,” but responded into, in a circuit of action and interpretation, or interpretative action. This is a fusion of action and meaning-making, a deeply pragmatist insight and thesis. James and Dewey foreground this actional aspect perhaps a bit more than Langer does, at least from the more explicitly psychological, as opposed to the biological, side. At the same time, Langer gives empirical support, in fact if not in explicit intention, to Whitehead’s distinction between causal effi cacy and presentational immediacy and to Whitehead’s notion that “affective tones” mark our fi rst encounter with the continuum of experience and effect its primary segmentation. The general aesthetic aspects of these shared concerns and positions merit especially close attention. Langer asserts vigorously and straightforwardly in Feeling and Form that “in art, it is the impact of the whole, the immediate revelation of vital import, that acts as the psychological lure to long contemplation” (1953, 397). This is the “musical moment” that Dewey notes, whether it occurs with a piece of music, a painting, a landscape, or a cathedral. It is a “fi rst or analytic phase” that is marked by “the musical quality” of any art, which, as Dewey puts it in Art and Experience, is the “impression directly made by an harmonious ensemble” (1934, 150). Dewey notes that in our primary encounter with an art work “there is an impact that precedes all defi nite recognition of what it is about” and then adds that being seized by an art work’s “magical accord” is an “effect particularly conspicuous for most persons in music” (150), certainly a comment that provokes much thought in light of Langer’s love for and practice of music her whole life. The “lure to long contemplation” is what gives rise to a consummatory experience, in