Langer begins her Philosophy in a New Key by tracing a brief chronology of past philosophical ages, distinguishing each according to the “generative idea,” or ideas, which ordered its inquiry—the conceptual framework which gave birth to its questions and determined its techniques. The generative idea of a particular age, therefore, is at the very heart of its unique approach to the problem of making sense of the chaos of the world and determining our place within it. According to Langer, the generative idea, or concept, guiding inquiry for our philosophical age is that of the symbol. We experience reality in terms of the conceptual framework—the words, stories, ideas—our culture or tradition has made available to us. According to Langer, we know in and through symbols. Indeed, symbols, both discursive and non-discursive—comprise the media of our knowledge, the materials that make our knowing possible. Fueling the historical evolution of ideas is the fact that, once we have exhausting the conceptual apparatuses of other ages, we require a new generative idea. This is because the explanatory power of the present system has fallen short to account for new orders of experience appearing on the “horizon” which do not fit neatly into our usual categories (6).
In any musical composition, the key is the invisible form behind the notes, which themselves are inked onto the sheet music and bodied forth in performance. The key harmonizes the work—it is the hidden order which allows each note or combination of notes to work together to create a mood or emotional tone, or to present an idea through musical form. A philosophical “key” works in much the same way, ordering our inquiry and giving shape to our experience of the world with an all but invisible hand. It is this key that unlocks a room full of questions which, with the old ideas and ways of thinking, we were unable event to ask. It’s fitting that Langer would use a concept as richly metaphoric as that of a “key” to introduce her systematic philosophy, given its emphasis upon the symbol.
After laying the foundations upon which to build her philosophy of symbolic forms, Langer gives a fuller and more thorough treatment of the nature of human symbols and symbol-use. Central to Langer’s philosophical treatment is the notion that symbols—all symbols—are articulate (93). That is, all symbols, both discursive and non-discursive, are able to order the chaotic experience of reality through the process of abstraction. They are the tools through which we formulate meanings for our experience of the world. I appreciate her careful and systematic deconstruction of one of the most stubborn binaries holding sway over the academic imagination—the strict binary opposition of “reason” and “emotion.” The Academy privileges a certain kind of knowing—a rational, orderly, systematic kind of knowing. As Langer argues so brilliantly, however, the denigration of intuition, emotion, and embodied ways of knowing as essentially “primitive,” “lower order” processes leaves us with a very suffocating set of parameters. Langer makes the argument that the difference between our emotional, or more purely sensory/sensual, experiences of reality and our more cerebral or “intellectual” encounters is a matter of degree, or quality, and not one of substance. Simply because emotional processes differ from the processes of discursive logic doesn’t mean they are therefore primitive, disorderly, meaningless. Non-discursive symbols, too, are articulate, and while they are not recognizable as “rational” according to the narrow standards of discursive logic, they nevertheless operate according to a logic all their own.
Langer’s insistence that we see through the symbols of our tradition reminds me of the Burkean notion of the “terministic screen,” which is another helpful metaphor for understanding the way our motives and meanings are hopelessly colored by our peculiar ideologies. Certainly, while it is Burke who gets the scholarly attention, he owes a tremendous debt to Langer, who laid the groundwork for his theories of human symbolization.
