ギアツのつぶやき……

"Philosophy in a New Key, a survey symbolism, became a best-seller. Langer's earlier absorption into symbolic logic is seen in her attempt to create a rational basis for aesthetics. The work was much influenced by Ernst Cassirer, whose Sprache und Mythos from 1925 Langer translated into English. Feeling and Form (1953) was written on a Rockefeller Foundation grant. It developed further the ideas of Philosophy in a New Key, and expanded her system of aesthetics from music to the other fields of arts, painting, poetry, dance, etc./ Like Cassirer, Langer argued that man is essentially a symbol-using animal. Symbolic thought is deeply rooted in the human nature - it is the keynote to questions of life and consciousness, all humanistic problems. "Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling," Langer defined. She distinguishes between the open "presentational" symbols of art and "discursive" symbols of language, which cannot reflect directly the subjective aspect of experience. Langer's view of language is not far from Ludwig Wittgenstein's logical theory developed in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), but when Wittgenstein stopped on the threshold of the unsayable, Langer argued that "music articulates forms which language cannot set forth" - it shows what cannot be said,"(sourece:Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985)).
「卓越性や重要性だけでは、いくらそれが真性のものであっても、それだけで名声や影響を約束することはできない。いったいどれだけの人がスザンヌ・ランガー『感情と形式』に注意を払ったというのか」（ギアツ『現代社会を照らす光』p.204）。