Abstract

The present volume contains Part Four, "The Great Shift," of Susanne Langer’s projected six-part magnum opus entitled, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. The first volume dealt with three parts: "Problems and Principles," "The Import of Art," and "Natura Naturans;" Volume II rests squarely on these three foundational parts. The balance of the work will be concerned with "The Moral Structure," and with "Knowledge and Truth." In this reviewer’s opinion, Professor Langer’s essay is easily the most significant theory of mind yet developed in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. The central task of her essay is to establish the total qualitative difference that divides human from animal mentality by showing that the nature and origin of that difference is explicable in terms of a continuous course of biological development. "The great shift" to human being as a mode of life typified by all that we understand as culture is accomplished, according to the conceptual framework extended throughout Volume II of the work, without recourse to metaphysical assumptions of nonzoological factors. By carefully locating a vast amount of exact psychobiological information in a conceptual structure that extends scientific definitions by modification, she makes the biological concept of human mentality adequate to the extraordinary reality it is intended to make comprehensible. Through the incorporation of highly sophisticated detail, she investigates repertoire and instinct; animal acts and ambients; animal values; interpretation of animal acts; the specialization of man; symbols and the evaluation of mind; and, finally, symbols and the human world. It is difficult to imagine that a reader could find fault with Susanne Langer’s method, because she never expands her conceptual structure by metaphorical extension, but only by modifying definitions in scientific terms so as to comprehend domains wider than those conventionally assigned to the sciences themselves. Her study, however, is not only eminently adequate methodologically, it is immensely satisfying in helping us understand that the uniqueness of human being can be fully articulated and intellectually sustained without resorting to a vitalistic discontinuity of any order. If, as Susanne Langer herself contends, the value of a philosophical outlook rests ultimately on its "serviceability," then this masterwork will serve all manner of investigators for a long time to come.—C.F.B.