111 - Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Volume I

Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Volume I
By Susanne K. Langer
487 pp. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1967. $10.00.

This is the first volume, comprising three of six projected parts, of Professor Langer's magnum opus. From the titles of the parts the reader will see the titanic task to which the author has set herself: Problems and Principles, The Import of Art, Natura Naturans, The Great Shift, The Moral Structure, and On Knowledge and Truth. He may also appreciate the struggle this reviewer has had in trying to describe and assess a work of architectonic proportions which is only half finished. Yet from them he will be able to tell that this is a work which attempts to approach the great general questions (which Mrs. Langer does not hesitate to call metaphysical) through the medium of art-a work which grew from a rather modest attempt to study the necessity of the "organic" character of art to its projected scope ". . . because it not only involved the whole theory of artistic creation, symbolic illusion, abstraction and presentation already developed in Feeling and Form, but also required a new, fairly extensive study of actual living form as biologists find it, and of the actual phenomena of feeling, to which we have at present no scientific access."

The reference to Feeling and Form (1953) in which the author developed a theory of art as the projection of human feeling warns us that this work grows out of her previous ones, including also her very significant Philosophy in a New Key (1942) where she set forth her famous distinction between discursive and presentational communication, drawing on ideas originally developed by Ernst Cassirer. Indeed she says that she assumes the reader's familiarity with those works in this one, an act of self-confidence rarely found among contemporary scholars! Nevertheless, my judgment is that the reader can grasp what she has to say in this book whether he has read the previous volumes or not, provided that he has the interest to sustain him. The effort is worth it-for it is possible that we have in this far ranging work the basis of a new naturalism in philosophy-a naturalism which can do justice to both the continuity and the discontinuity of life in all its forms.

There is both a narrow focus and a broader one on the grand questions to which the book is addressed. The narrow one is closely related to what has traditionally been called the "mind-body" problem. "The central problem of the present essay is the nature and origin of the veri-

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table gulf that divides human from animal mentality, in a perfectly continuous course of development of life on earth that has no breaks" (p. xvi). Her position here is clearly physicalistic. "One may hope to describe 'mind' as a phenomenon in terms of the highest physiological processes, especially those which have psychical phases." Mind is not therefore epiphenomenal, though not a metaphysical reality apart from nature.

As the title of the book implies, in the broader focus Mrs. Langer is making the radical proposal of approaching the phenomenon of mind through a new conception of feeling. "Feeling in the broad sense of whatever is felt in any way, as sensory stimulus or inward tension, pain, emotion or intent, is the mark of mentality" (p. 4). This includes emotion and sensation, but also cognition and conation. Thinking is a high form of feeling. She holds that this cuts the Gordian knot of the subject-object dichotomy which bedevils both dynamic and behavioristic psychology. Yet she is ready to agree that "feeling" is a very vague and amorphous entity and eludes the most careful scientific approaches. Hence her proposal appears to be stalled on the runway as have all similar attempts in the past to derive mind from lower physiological phenomena, until she makes it clear in the second section that feeling can be approached fruitfully and decisively through the study of art, which is the projected form of feeling.

She carefully distinguishes her position from those who assert that art is self-expression. Feelings projected in art are not mere emotional outbursts, and may be devoid altogether of emotional content. Further, they are not restricted to the conscious intentions of the artist, since feelings are by no means all conscious. Quoting from Ivy Campbell-Fisher, she develops a conception of art as the communication of the essence of feeling. Not that it makes one feel sadness, for instance, to hear certain passages from Mozart, but that in hearing them one knows what sadness is. Thus it is possible, she holds, to develop a complete psychology by a careful study of art, and by tracing the images and feelings which give rise to artistic form. She acknowledges that this approach is "equivocal" in that a "multiplicity of functions is reflected in any symbolic form that can express the morphology of feeling" (p. 103). However, she sees this as an advantage in that human feeling is actually multifaceted in itself-hence art is "overdetermined," a term appropriated from dynamic psychology. Discursive communication will never be able fully to grasp its complexity because of its linear character.

This reviewer is not equipped to evaluate the theory of art involved in this approach to mind. (It has been highly praised by some knowledgeable reviewers, e.g., Herbert Read in the Saturday Review, July 15,

113 - Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Volume I

1967). But if we accept its outlines as valid, it does provide a new approach to the understanding of human experience.

The final part of this volume, Natura Naturans, is a highly technical biological discussion of the origin and development of organisms. Here the author is actually at her best in my estimation, for she clearly shows how her conception of organic life as "act" is derived from and differs from Darwinian evolutionism. She rejects all teleology in the ordinary sense, though in her insistence upon the power of organisms to improvise, suggests that Omega may be a possibility, even if Alpha is not. The distinctive point of her position is her emphasis upon the importance of conceiving of evolution in functional rather than morphological terms, in which apparently unneeded structures may be randomly developed and retained, only to play a decisive role in the later development of the "stock." We must await the next volume to discover how this discussion is to be integrated into her discussion of art as the projection of feeling (mind).

For the theologian this book is fraught with problems or possibilities or both, depending upon his point of view (provided, of course, that he is willing to allow that a study of man and nature has anything to say to theology). I am inclined to be interested more in the possibilities than in the problems, for it seems to me that we may have here an approach to man which can do justice to both his participation in nature and his distinctiveness without the introduction of constructs which have no clear empirical referent. On the other hand the question of teleology is vexed for those who want to see something like a divine craftsman. She will admit no craftsman, and even points out that many theorists who have given up a divine craftsman outside the process still talk of nature as though it were a craftsman in itself. Yet in her notion of "improvisation" she seems to be unable finally to avoid the implication of an improvisor. Her illustration of the slime mold which apparently miraculously organizes itself from separate molecules is a case in point. The conception of improvisation I find a potentially fruitful one for constructive theology.

There are some features of the book I didn't like. She would have strengthened her case, I think, by discussing her position in relation to the seminal thinkers of the past rather than spending so much space on secondary scholarship. I think particularly of Whitehead and Freud, both of whom are rather summarily dismissed. The position of the former is close to that of Mrs. Langer on so many points (importance of feeling, reality as events or occasions is similar to "acts," as both have a process character of tension building and release), that it is especially surprising that she never engaged in dialogue with him. There are dif-

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ferences, of course. In Whitehead reality is dipolar, in that mind cannot be understood as physical, and the whole of reality is understood as organic, a point on which Mrs. Langer scores Teilhard. She did carry on this kind of dialogue with Darwin, which, as I have said, made that section of her work the most lucid. Her style is labored at points and the section on art is perhaps over illustrated by material which does not develop her argument significantly. She paid too little attention to the social aspects of mind at the human level, though her discussion of individuation and involvement in the animal world was brilliant. A social thinker such as G. H. Mead might have helped her to get this in focus.

Yet when this is said, a work of massive learning and creatively responsible interpretation remains. I look forward to the next volume to discover how her own "supra-act" is brought to consummation.

James N. Lapsley
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey