Whitehead’s Process and Susanne K. Langer’s Symbol

Because Motherwell embraced in the 1940s the thinking of Whitehead’s first philosophy student at Harvard, the celebrated mid-twentieth-century philosopher Susanne K. Langer, I analyze in this chapter the ways her work both critiqued and extended Whitehead’s process philosophy. I look specifically her presentational symbolism (defined as art’s ability to present its own meaning directly as a gestalt), and I consider the role it assumed in Motherwell’s own work. In Philosophy in a New Key Langer defines presentational symbolism as the ability of a work of art to present its own meaning directly as a structure, with each component “involved in a simultaneous integral presentation.”