Susanne K. Langer was an American philosopher, writer, and educator known for her theories on the influences of art on the mind. She was one of the first women in American history to achieve an academic career in philosophy and the first woman to be professionally recognized as an American philosopher.
A sequel to “Philosophy in a New Key,” her book "Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art” was written during her time at Columbia University and showed her more developed philosophical theory of art applied to painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, music, dance, film, and more.
Codex owns a first edition of “Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art” which was published in 1953 and has a raised, embossed stamp of the former owner, William S. Beck.
An excerpt from Chapter One of Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art
" …Yet the arts themselves exhibit a striking unity and logic, and seem to present a fair field for systematic thought. Why the confusion? Why the disconnected theories, the constantly alleged danger of losing touch with reality, the many philosophical beginnings that still fail to grow into organic intellectual structures? A truly enlightening theory of art should rise upon important artistic insights and evolve naturally from phase to phase, as the great edifices of thought—mathematics, logic, the sciences, theology, law, history—grow from perennial roots to further and further reaches of their own implications. Why is there no systematic theory of art?
The reason is, I think, that the central issues of the appreciation and understanding of art, however clear they may be in practice, have not been philosophically sifted and recognized for what they are. A systematic discipline becomes organized only as its key problems are formulated; and often those problems, the solution of which would require and beget a powerful terminology and a principle of operation, are obscured by the incursion of obvious questions, immediately proposed by common sense, and regarded as ‘basic’ because of their obviousness. Such questions are: What are the materials of art? Which is more important: form or content? What is Beauty? What are the canons of composition? How does a great work of art affect the beholder? Many of them have been mooted for hundreds of years, but when we make up our minds about the answers, theory goes no further. We have taken a stand, and we stand there.
All of these questions are legitimate enough, and the purpose of a philosophy of art is to answer them. But as starting points of theory they are baneful because they are products of ‘common sense,’ and consequently foist the vocabulary and the whole conceptual framework of common sense on our thinking. And with that instrument we cannot think of beyond the commonplace.”