It seems that the beginning of 20TH century gave us many original thinkers and Worringer is one of them. Do you hear Chris? Art brings happiness (including when it makes us cry), and happiness is part of adaptation. Boris Shoshensky
---------- Original Message ---------- From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: Worringer: Abstraction and Empathy Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2009 19:26:32 -0400 I couldn't find this text online, so I type some of it here. Let's start with selected excerpts of Worringer's text. "Abstraction and Empathy" (1908, 12th ed. 1921), trans. by Bernard Freyd and Melvin Rader; in Melvin Rader, "A Modern Book of Esthetics," 4th ed., 1973 (1935), pp. 361-368. "The aim of the following discussion is to disprove the assumption that the process of empathy has been at all times and places the basis of artistic creation. . . . For the understanding of the vast complex of works of art which were produced outside the narrow limits of Greco- Roman and modern occidental art, [the theory of empathy] offers us no clue. Here we are forced to discern a quite different psychological process, which explains the peculiar quality of that style which is only negatively appreciated by us." [361] ". . . Before we go further, let us clarify the relation of the imitation of nature to esthetics. It is necessary to agree on this, that the instinct of imitation, this elementary need of man, stands outside of esthetics in the proper sense and that its satisfaction has in principle nothing to do with art. "But at this point it is well to distinguish between the instinct of imitation and naturalism as a type of art . . . . [sic] They are by no means identical and must be sharply distinguished, however difficult this may seem. Every confusion of ideas is in this regard of the most crucial importance. . . . [sic]" [362] "The worth of an art-work, which we may call its beauty, lies generally speaking in its values as a means to happiness. These values stand naturally in a causal relation to the psychological needs which they satisfy. The 'absolute purpose of art' is thus the index of the quality of those psychological needs." [363] "Every style represents for mankind, who created it out of its psychological needs, the highest happiness. This must become the prime article of belief for all objective consideration of the history of art. What from our standpoint appears as the grossest distortion must have been for its producer the highest beauty and the fulfillment of his artistic purpose. Thus from our standpoint, that of our modern esthetics, which gives its judgments exclusively in the sense of Greco- Roman antiquity or of the Renaissance, all valuations from a higher standpoint are inanities and platitudes. "After this necessary digression we return to the starting point, namely, to the thesis of the limited applicability of the theory of empathy. "The need of empathy may be regarded as the presupposition of the artistic purpose only where this purpose inclines to the truth of organic life, that is, to naturalism in the higher sense. The feeling of happiness, which is revived in us by the expression of organic vitality, what modern man calls beauty, is a satisfaction of that inner need of self-exercise, in which _____ Lipps sees the presupposition of the process of empathy. we enjoy ourselves in the forms of a work of art. Esthetic enjoyment is objectified self- enjoyment. The value of a line, of a form, consists for us in the value of the life which it contains for us. It keeps its beauty only through our vital feeling, which we obscurely project into it." [363] "Now what are the psychological presuppositions of the tendency to abstraction? We have to seek them in the world-feeling of those peoples, in their psychological relation to the cosmos. While the tendency of empathy has as its condition a happy pantheistic relation of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world, the tendency to abstraction is the result of a great inner conflict between man and his surroundings, and corresponds in religion to a strongly transcendental coloring of all ideas. This state we might call a prodigious mental fear of space. Tibullus says: 'First in the world God made Fear'; this same feeling of anxiety can be considered the root of artistic creation." [364] "With the psychological fear of space before the vast, incoherent, bewildering world of phenomena, the case is similar. The rationalistic development of mankind repressed that instinctive anxiety which results from the lost state of man within the world-whole. Only the civilized Oriental peoples, whose deeper world-instinct opposed such a rationalistic development and who always saw in the phenomenal world only the glistening veil of Maya, remained conscious of the inextricable confusion of all the phenomena of life and thus were not under the illusion of any intellectual external domination over the cosmos. . . . [sic] "Vexed by the confused connection and interplay of external phenomena, such peoples [ancient, pre-Greek humans and societies] were dominated by a great need of rest. The possibility of happiness, which they sought in art, did not consist of immersing themselves in the things of the external world, to enjoy themselves in them, but in freeing the particular thing in the outer world from its arbitrariness and apparent contingency, immortalizing it by approximation to abstract forms, and in this way finding a resting place in the flight of phenomena. Their strongest impulse was, as it were, to tear the external object out of the context of nature, out of the endless inter play of existence, to purify it of all dependence on life, all arbitrariness, to make it necessary and stable, to make it approximate to its absolute value. Where they attained this, they felt that happiness and satisfaction which the beauty of the form full of organic vitality imparts to us; indeed, they knew only one kind of beauty and thus we must call it their beauty. "... We are faced with this fact: the style which is most perfect in its regularity, the style of the highest abstraction, the strictest exclusion of life, is peculiar to peoples at their most primitive stage of culture. Thus there must be a causal connection between primitive culture and the highest, most purely regular form of art. And we may further set up the principle that the less the human race, by virtue of its spiritual perception, is on friendly and trustful terms with the external object, the more powerful is the dynamic force from which that highest abstract beauty sprints." [364-65] "These abstract regular forms are thus the only and the highest forms in which man can rest in face of the immense confusion of the cosmos." [366] "Men were impelled toward flat representation because three- dimensionality is the greatest obstacle to a grasp of the object in its self-enclosed material individuality. Its perception as three- dimensional requires a sequence of connected moments of perception in which the separate individuality of the object dissolves." [366] "Now if we repeat the formula which we found as the basis of empathic experience: 'Esthetic enjoyment is objectified self-enjoyment,' we are at once aware of the polar opposition between these two forms of esthetic enjoyment [that is, abstraction and empathy]. On the one hand, the I as a disturbing force, an obstacle to the happiness that might be found in the work of art; on the other hand, the inmost connection between the I and the work of art, which takes all its life from the I alone." [367] "In the tendency to abstraction, the intensity of the impulse of self- privation is much greater and more consistent. Here it is characterized, not as in the case of the need for empathy as a tendency to part with one's separate individuality, but as a tendency, in the contemplation of something necessary and immutable, to escape from the accidental in human existence in general, from the apparent arbitrariness of organic existence. Life as such is felt as the disturber of esthetic enjoyment." [367] | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [email protected] http://considerthepreposition.blogspot.com/ ____________________________________________________________ Become a Psychologist, Therapist, or Counselor. Click here to earn a Psychology Degree. http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2241/fc/BLSrjpYbtOZjOrLB9kRDg4apLdlMK3 ba5HuMXj459PHRhyrefZ8ylHlqZA8/
