It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age.

Susanne Katherina Langer

Categorized in : Mind Real Historical

The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.

Susanne Katherina Langer

beholder function art

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

Susanne Katherina Langer

cities civilization culture

The power of magic has no known limits. A person knows, in a fair way, his own physical capacities, the weight of the blows he can deal, the furthest range of his arrows, the strength of his voice, the speed and endurance of his running; but the reaches of his mind are indefinite and, to his feeling, infinite.

Susanne Katherina Langer

voice blow running

Music is 'significant form,' and its significance is that of a symbol, a highly articulated, sensuous object, which by virtue of its dynamic structure can express the forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey. Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its import.

Susanne Katherina Langer

music emotion feelings

Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.

Susanne Katherina Langer

philosophical order science

Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there. A new idea is a light that illuminates presences which simply had no form before the light fell on them.

Susanne Katherina Langer

illumination discovery ideas

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.

Susanne Katherina Langer

discrepancies-between intuition feelings

One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive.

Susanne Katherina Langer

able bears

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

Susanne Katherina Langer

nature feelings art

To trace the development of mind from earliest times ... requires ... not a categorical concept, but a functional one.... The most promising operational principle for this purpose is the principle of individuation.

Susanne Katherina Langer

purpose principles mind

Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.

Susanne Katherina Langer

new-discoveries discovery

The fairytale is irresponsible; it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter.

Susanne Katherina Langer

purpose wish dream

The high intellectual value of images, however, lies in the fact that they usually, and perhaps always, fit more than one actual experience.

Susanne Katherina Langer

intellectual lying facts

The secret of 'fusion' is the fact that the artist's eye sees in nature... an inexhaustible wealth of tension, rhythms, continuities, and contrasts which can be rendered in line and color.

Susanne Katherina Langer

color eye artist

The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling.

Susanne Katherina Langer

giving reality art

We have no physical model of this endless rhythm of individuation and involvement, we do have its image in the world of art, most purely in dance.

Susanne Katherina Langer

endless world art

If a work of art is a projection of feeling, its kinship with organic nature will emerge, no matter through how many transformations, logically and inevitably.

Susanne Katherina Langer

nature feelings art

Pioneering is the work of individuals.

Susanne Katherina Langer

pioneering pioneers individual

The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.

Susanne Katherina Langer

irreparable memories past

... the image of feeling created by artists, in every kind of art -- plastic, musical, poetic, balletic -- serves to hold the reality itself for our labile and volatile memory, as a touchstone to test the scope of our intellectual constructions.

Susanne Katherina Langer

memories reality art