From
International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1970,
481-84. A review of Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human
Feeling, Vol. I, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1967, xxiii + 487. The
title of this review as posted here is mine. Another critique of
Langer's book is
Peter A. Bertocci,
Susan
K. Langer’s Theory of Feeling and Mind, posted elsewhere on
this site.
Anthony Flood
Posted May 1, 2008
“Biological Thinking”: The Methodological Inadequacy of Susanne K.
Langer’s Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling
Richard M. Liddy
The major thesis of
Susanne Langer’s latest work is that the “organic” character of artistic
expression is the pre-scientific clue to the continuity between human
consciousness, biological feeling, and electro-chemical process. Just
as a great deal of practical mechanics aided the development of modern
physics, so the artistic expression of the forms of feeling can provide
contemporary psychology with a “naive yet expert knowledge” with which
to direct its investigations. The outcome of such investigations is
here anticipated: “Once the image of life is recognized in its artistic
projection, where it is seen to include all mental life, we have some
measure of adequacy for the terms of a conceptual structure which can
support biological thinking of a sort that, in due course, will pose and
resolve psychological issues” (p. 257).
The
emphasis of this first of a projected three-volume work is on
“biological thinking”; the remaining two volumes will deal with the
“shift” to human mental life, social theory, morality, and
epistemological questions. Nevertheless, Langer’s whole methodology is
prefigured in the present volume; and it is with regard to that
methodology that we will structure the remainder of this review.
It would seem that the
vexing psychological questions arising from Langer’s very significant
work on art, particularly Feeling and Form, confronted her with
the following dilemma: how reconcile intelligence, epitomized by logic,
with feeling, somehow the object or import of artistic expression? That
these two realms could be reconciled represented her faith in “the unity
of science” (p. 262), one and the same scientific framework underlying
such diverse areas. A cardinal assumption of the present work is that
that framework is ultimately the one science of physics—to which the
remaining sciences, including the human sciences, are logically
reducible. For “any science,” she notes, “is likely to merge ultimately
with physics as chemistry has done” (p. 52). That chemistry has done
so—as if the terms and relations that constitute the periodic table
could be deduced from the laws of physics—is not even questioned.
What
does Langer mean by physics? In Philosophical Sketches, a series
of exploratory essays prior to the present work, Langer noted that the
physical scientists have not been haunted by the mind-body problem
bequeathed to modern psychology by Descartes’ bifurcation of nature into
res extensa and res cogitans; for “their entire interest
lies in physical phenomena, res extensa.” It seems evident that
for Langer physical science is a purely conceptual structure descriptive
of at least indirectly observable or imaginable objects, variously
termed “matter,” “material substance,” “res extensa.”
The
construction of the abstract scientific terms by which res extensa
can be described is a philosophical task. Consequently, Langer’s aim is
the philosophical reconstruction of biology and psychology; that is, a
search for the basic concepts capable of bringing these sciences within
the same conceptual frame as physics. As physics deals with res
extensa, so also do these sciences, although at a higher degree of
mechanistically determined complexity. In biology, for example,
Langer’s major adversary is the straw-man of vitalism: “the conception
of ‘life’ as a special essence different from ‘matter,’ something that
pervaded ‘living matter’ and set it apart from ‘mere matter’ which
obeyed the laws of physics” (p. 316). In order to attain the logical
coherence of biology with physics, Langer assumes from the latter realm
the basic concept of “natural event”; on this foundation she is able to
construct the basic biological notion of “act” as a particular sort of
event. This concept has the advantage of not implying the prior notion
of “agent,” and thus allows one to trace the origins of life in the
inorganic world; for “action,” the formal aspect of “act,” is common to
both living and non-living beings (pp. 304–7).
But Langer’s chief
interest is psychology, and here again she seeks a basic concept which
will allow the integration of “our observations of mental phenomena”
into the whole scientific framework. Just as “act,” the basic concept of
biology, shows the continuity and even the ultimate equivalence of this
science with physics, so with regard to human mentality Langer arrives
at the philosophically constructed term, “feeling,” which allows her to
bring the whole realm of the psychological within the orbit of
electro-chemical events. She defines feeling as “anything that can be
felt” and under this rubric she includes both sensibility, “felt as
impact” and establishing the objective realm; and emotivity, “felt as
action” and accounting for the subjective world. The latter world
includes intelligence, “felt as thought,” and even “the very interesting
‘sense of rightness’ that closes a finished thought process, as it
guarantees any distinct intuition” (p. 147). Although this seems the
very opposite of emotion, nevertheless, “the wide discrepancy between
reason and feeling may be unreal; it is not improbable that intellect is
a high form of feeling—a specialized intensive feeling about intuitions”
(p. 149).
Thus,
on the basis of her assumptions regarding science, Langer arrives at the
hypothesis that feeling, globally including all subjective, conscious,
mental activity, is merely a heightened form of biological activity,
itself a complexus reducible to electro-chemical events. Feeling,
therefore, is matter at its most complex (p. 67). It is not an added
“thing,” “entity” or separate “substance,” but rather a phase of
biological process which passes above a certain limen of intensity so
that the living tissue “feels” its own activity (pp. 27–29). To clarify
for us the assertion that feeling is not a “thing,” etc., she notes that
it is similar to the reflection of a tree in a pool of water; just as
the reflection is not another “thing,” but the tree’s appearance, so
feeling is merely the appearance which organic functions have for the
organism in which they occur (pp. 15 & 30).
Yet, quod gratis
asseritur, gratis negatur. If Langer’s basic argument for the
reduction of biology to physics is the a priori conviction that
this must form one conceptual framework around the one object, res
extensa, she feels called upon to profer particular evidence for the
biological status of feeling, including, as we noted, intelligence and
rationality. Conveniently, she finds this evidence in art. Invoking
the conclusions of her own artistic studies, she comes to the conclusion
regarding feeling: “the fact that expressive form is always organic or
‘living’ form made the biological foundation of feeling probable” (p.
XIX). For the work of art is the objective realization of a mental
image; and images reflect the biological sources from which they spring.
Psychologists, therefore, must go to artists to learn about feeling,
because art is a final symbolic form making revelations of truths and
facts about feeling, precisely the truths and facts that literal
scientific statement distorts. Once the artist has created the work of
art, the image of feelings, we may talk about them scientifically; “but
only artistic perception can find them and judge them real in the first
place” (p. 81).
If we would fault Langer
for the inadequacy of her conclusions, chiefly, the reduction of “mind”
to feeling and electro-chemical events, we would also point out the root
of that inadequacy in her methodology. Thus, although her ultimate
explicit court of appeal is “science,” she never analyzes differentiated
scientific activity. She assumes that it is a merely imaginative
enterprise; for human mentality is at most a fusion of images under the
pressures of underlying processes. The only introspective evidence she
supplies for such a reduction is her analysis of undifferentiated
artistic and mythic consciousness in terms of vision and visual
imagination: thus, we “see” forms of feeling in works of art; and in
metaphorical activity we “see one thing in another,” life in the candle
flame, death in sleep, etc. This, she notes, is the basis of all
“higher” differentiated symbolic activity.
I would suggest,
however, that a more sophisticated introspective technique, beginning
with an analysis of the exigent processes of scientific consciousness,
would show the impossibility of reducing such consciousness to elements,
such as vision, imagination and feeling, easily identifiable in
undifferentiated consciousness. It would seem that only a maieutic
tool—such as is found in the first five chapters of Bernard Lonergan’s
Insight—could assist in such
a philosophical conversion needed to conceive “mind,” not visually or
imaginatively, but in terms of its own (one’s own) intellectual and
rational processes. Such a construction would succeed where Mind: An
Essay on Human Feeling fails: it would provide an adequate
philosophical ground for Langer’s previous fine work on art.
