Philosophy
Langer develops symbolic form beyond discursive language to explain ritual, music, image and the articulation of feeling.
The way a question is posed limits in advance what any answer to it can look like, whether that answer turns out right or wrong. A school of thought is marked more by the problems it frames than by the solutions it offers. New knowledge therefore needs a whole new set of questions, not better answers to the old ones.
A truly new concept has no name yet in ordinary language, so it first appears in metaphor. Literal language is a stiff, conventional medium built for what is already understood. This is why the early stages of any new theory look like fantastic inventions.
A presentational symbol, such as a picture or a piece of music, has no negative form. There is no operation that flips its meaning into its opposite, so it cannot contradict itself the way a statement can. Its kind of truth works differently from the true and false of sentences.
On Langer's account, a work of art is true when its form matches a shape of feeling. These are feelings with no names, yet we recognize them when they appear in sound, color or movement. Art does not state that someone feels something. It gives form to what is there, the way our senses give form to objects and space.
In a work of art, however modest, no part keeps its character once it is cut off from the rest. Each element's quality depends on the whole it sits in. Langer takes this as the way art reflects the nature of life itself.
A change in basic orientation is like a change of key in music. It gives new sense to everything that came before. Past arguments are not thrown away; they are carried over into the new framework and take on aspects they did not have before.
When weighing a line of thought, look less at the positions it openly defends and more at the starting assumptions it takes for granted without noticing. Those unstated premises decide which questions even get asked.
Langer argues that the human mind does not simply take in raw sensation. It turns experience into symbols, out of a basic need to express. On her view, this symbol-making is the common root of mystical, practical and mathematical thought alike, and so the central problem for understanding human life.
Some parts of experience do not fit the step-by-step scheme of grammatical language. That does not make them mystical or unthinkable. It means they must be grasped through a different kind of symbol, one that presents a whole form at once rather than a sequence of statements.
Langer separates discursive symbols, found in science and ordinary speech, which build meaning step by step, from non-discursive symbols, found in art, which present a pattern all at once. Treating both as real ways of making meaning gives art a standing beside science in making sense of experience.