Frances to Michael... 1. The published paper entitled "Abstraction and Empathy" by Wilhelm Worringer has reportedly endured several revised editions in 1908, 1909, 1910, and then last in 1948 but has been reprinted in 1967 at least. As a small book it is usually classified under the philosophy of art, yet it is also subtitled by its author as being a contribution to the psychology of style. This labeling may be due in part to psychology being held as a branch of philosophy in his day. For purposes of comparison the later writings on abstraction in both art and nonart by other authors may also be useful in appreciating this discourse. On the issue of ordering abstract forms in art, and his theory after all tends toward Prussian precision, the writings of George Birkhoff and Max Bense as well as Harold Osborne and Monroe Beardsley come to mind offhand. 2. For purposes of his text, the arena of art is divided by him as a dyad into traditional naturalistic art and modern abstract art. For me it might be better had he called the poles by such names as formal abstract possibility and causal concrete actuality, to avoid the further pitfalls found when using such polemic terms as nonrepresentational and representational or nonfigurative and figurative, as is often done by experts in the art world. Naturalistic art for him is deemed an "empathetic" feeling on the part of persons that the forms found in "representational or figurative" art are faithful to the external world as sensed, so that the good forms of art are deemed to reflect or mirror the well feelings of mind. Abstract art for him is deemed an "apathetic" feeling on the part of persons whereby such art is held to expose or reveal the unstable complexity experienced as anxiety and confusion in the world, so that the person attempts to escape the perceived disorder of the world by seeking some underlying deeper order within the complex forms of abstract art, whether those forms are biomorphic or geometric. If an object posited to be art hence fails to evoke an appropriate feeling either of empathy and nearness or of apathy and distance, then the object would presumably fail as a work of art; but this kind of attempt at classing art according to some subjective mental criteria seems to have little validity and even less sympathetic acceptance. 3. The trend toward an abstract form in art is held by him to be mainly of a modern tradition, but is also implied to show some aspect of "style" in the traditional manner. The style of individual persons and even of communal peoples in any event he claims is to be the result mainly of will, and not mainly of ability. The volition of a person is for him the root source of and gives rise to their own unique style as posited and evidenced in any work presented by them, to include any abstract work. It seems to me that his stance on style in art may be more successful at identifying objects as works of art than his stance on feeling in art, because many ordinary objects of say "unart" or "nonart" can evoke such feelings as he would have exclusively assigned to extraordinary works of art, and may often evoke them as well or even better. There does however appear to be some saving grace and seeming value in his theory of abstraction, but it is difficult for me to track it and state it. The causal source of sound abstraction in art surely cannot be the mere feelings of artists. The causal purpose of sound abstraction in art however may be as he sees it in its being a good way to get law into chaos, and order with its simplicity into disorder with its complexity, and to control the conformity of abstraction to concretization, and to predict the indeterminate. The ability of the percipient to achieve these interpretive tasks when confronting an abstract work of art may be where the actual worth of abstraction and his theory lays. 4. Any abstraction found in artworks may of course be syntactic or semantic or perhaps even pragmatic. The modes of abstraction will therefore extend well beyond only that of formal abstraction, as he seems to suggest. The ordinary percipient of an artistic work should furthermore be properly distanced and disinterested and apathetic when engaged with the art for its own sake, in order for a pure aesthetic experience to emerge. It is likely however that some "collateral" experience relevant to the art would be required of the percipient, if a full envelopment with the work is to occur. The idea that any feelings are iconically like or similar to the findings of form and fact and force in art and nonart is also intriguing, but may not be fully supported by current research in the psychical sciences.
Michael partly wrote in effect... Worringer's essay "Abstraction and Empathy" says that the familiar art in the tradition of naturalistic accuracy and fidelity was an art of "empathy" where the viewer felt connected to the people and scenes depicted, in contrast to other cultural traditions that produced flat, often geometric abstract images. The latter he writes were inspired by a fear of the natural world, and the geometricizing and abstracting of the shapes represented a way for people to hold the fear-inspiring world at a distance and subordinate it. Some parts of his thesis is infused in my own assertion that "art moralizes nature, and nature demoralizes art". Anyone interested in going a few rounds with Worringer?
