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Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling [Abridged Edition]

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'Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling' is the crowning achievement of one of the most seminal, refreshing, and influential philosophers of our time. It treats the origin and evolution of mind, tracing the roots of science and art to a common ground in the special realm of human feeling.

Langer's masterwork was published in three volumes between 1967 and 1982.

It is republished now in a superb one-volume abridgment, it's 1,200 pages reduced by nearly two-thirds. The abridged version skillfully preserves the range, complexity, style, and coherence of the original 'Essay.'

Langer's thesis is the inverse of Descartes who suggested that imagination is a byproduct of the intrusion of the body on thought, and feelings in particular are muddled modes of thinking. Rather, Langer shifts 'feeling' to center stage as the essence of being, rather than 'thought.'

This shift of feeling to center stage in our mental life must in her case be explained by the shifting of art to center stage in what she supposed was a philosophy of the human spirit.

Langer's thoughts are like a jolt of espresso to the brain - but for me they have to be excavated from the density of her writing. Her thoughts are worth wading through, though. My primary interest so far are her chapters on art -- about the projection of feeling in art and on living form in art and nature "Every work of art has to seem organic and living to be expressive of feeling." Langer writes that it is a "quality of life" that is meant by "livingness" in art....there is in art the vital appearance as in living forms in nature which as the great morphologist D'Arcy Thompson observed - are almost all

records of growth, i.e. biological activity --yet the most convincing images of such forms have often resulted in art

where no natural model furnished the motif and the shape seems to have sprung directly from the symbolic intuition of the artist

irrationality and indefinability are the delight of artists

artists see things physiognomically. children also see things

physiognomically. to see things physiognomically is to see the inner character or quality revealed outwardly. to see inside.

Langer writes how the work of art seems to have its own inward being and this inward being is the body or organism out of which its realized elements seem to arise. that is why a good work of art presents itself as a matrix from which all its sensously given articulations are derived while others which do not

appear are nonetheless felt to lie somehow in limbo

the work seems unique when it is "alive"

such a figure has the living stillness of a plant Gradients of relative clarity, complexity, tempo, intensity of feeling, and

interest also permeate most of antimate nature as basic patterns of change and growth

((((((OOOHHHH - she's out there, man....I love it.....she's talking about

ALL art, whether painting, music, theatre, writing, dance, sculpture.....)