This dissertation presents the first attempt in Ukrainian literary criticism to explore the creative literary-critical work of S.Langer (1895-1985) - one of the distinguished scholars of the twentieth century, who was interested in the "unlogicized" areas of mental life and in the relationships between the complicated symbols of mathematical logics and, on the other hand, other areas of human symbolization, such as ordinary and literary language, myth, ritual and art. The conventional positivist wisdom of the day tended to relegate all these areas to the non-scientific and therefore non-intellectual, "emotional", dimension of the human person. S. Langer, in her very popular Philosophy in a New Key, vindicated the properly intellectual character of the non-discoursive "presentational" symbols of myth, ritual and art. Under the influence of the neo-Kantian, Ernest Cassirer, Langer pointed to the highly "formal" character of these non-scientific expressions. Art, for example, is not just the symptomatic expression of the artist's immediate emotion aimed at the stimulation of immediate emotion in the percipient; it involves a stylized "formal" quality, an element of "psychic distance" that constitutes it as properly human. Cassirer had emphasized this formal, symbolic, quality in art and other "symbolic forms". Such forms are distinguished from merely "passive images" in that they are not just given, but are created by the human mind itself. Hence, a historic and analytic study of these diversified symbolic forms - language, myth, religion, art - can provide a "phenomenology of human culture", the human person's ongoing discovery of himself. Langer calls these non-scientific symbols "presentational" ones because their materials are the ordinary presentations of eye and ear, of sense and imagination. They are the sensitive or imaginative forms, the Gestalten, of art, the gestures of ritual and the imaginative picture-stories of fairytale and myth. These include not just the elements of sense and visual imagination, but materials of aural, kinaesthetic and literary imagination as well. To these sensitive or imaginative elements meaning or import accrues. Although Langer never successfully determined the essence of meaning, nevertheless she was insistent on the human and "meaningful" character of these presentational symbols. For unlike mere signals which are rooted in biological reflexes and are symptomatic of immediate emotional conditions, symbols are, as she puts it, vehicles of conception. They are highly "charged" with human formulated significance. In Philosophy in a New Key Langer analyzes art, especially music, as symbolizing the complexity of human feeling, ritual as symbolizing the human person's permanent attitude or orientation among the terrifying forces of nature and society, and myth as the serious envisioning of the fundamental concepts of life.
