Susanne Langer Quotes
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The dancer, or dancers, must transform the stage for the audience as well as for themselves into an autonomous, complete, virtual realm, and all motions into a play of visible forces in unbroken, virtual time...Both space and time, as perceptible factors, disappear almost entirely in the dance illusion.
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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.
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Nature, as man has always known it, he knows no more. Since he has learned to esteem signs above symbols, to suppress his emotional reactions in favor of practical ones and make use of nature instead of holding so much of it sacred, he has altered the face, if not the heart, of reality.
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A signal is comprehended if it serves to make us notice the object or situation it bespeaks. A symbol is understood when we conceive the idea it presents.
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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.
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Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought.
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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.
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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.
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One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive.
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The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it-right or wrong-may be given.
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The intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.
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The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.
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Magic, then, is not a method, but a language; it is part and parcel of that greater phenomenon, ritual, which is the language of religion. Ritual is a symbolic transformation of experiences that no other medium can adequately express.
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Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.
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If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.
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The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.
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Art is just as comprehensible as science, but in its own terms.
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A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.
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It is significant that people who refuse to tell their children fairytales do not fear that the children will believe in princes and princesses, but that they will believe in witches and bogeys.
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Cinema is like dream.
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Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.
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Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling.
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Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.
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What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding.