Notes
To Introduction
- Jutta Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2005).
To Main Article
- André Leroi-Gourhan, Hand und Wort. Die Evolution von Technik, Sprache und Kunst, trans. M. Bischoff (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988) [Gesture and Speech, trans. A.B. Berger (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993)].
- Robert Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefühl. Ein Beitrag zur Aesthetik (Leipzig: Credner, 1873) [”On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics,” in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, ed. and trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 89–123].
- This becomes particularly clear where Vischer calls empathy “the natural mother of religious personification” and goes on to speak of how it “functions symbolically to animate a plant and to anthropomorphize an animal,” acting as “a doubling of self… toward other human beings.” He cites the “spontaneous resuscitation of a corpse” as one of his examples. Ibid., 22 [106].
- Ibid., 28 [109].
- For an early work on this subject see Wilhelm Perpeet, “Historisches und Systematisches zur Einfühlungsästhetik” [Historical and systematic considerations on the aesthetics of empathy], in Zeitschrift für Asthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 11, no 2 (1966): 193–216, esp. 210f.; Jutta Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung. Zur Denkfigur der Projektion in Psychophysiologie, Kulturtheorie, Asthetik und Literatur der frühen Moderne [Abstraction as empathy: On projection as a mental trope in the psychophysiology, cultural theory, aesthetics, and literature of early modernism] (Freiburg: Rombach, 2005), 214–16.
- Heinrich Wölfflin, “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur” [1886], in idem, Kleine Schriften (1886–1933), ed. Joseph Gantner (Basel: Schwabe, 1946), 13–47 [”Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture,” in Empathy, Form, and Space, ed. and trans. Mallgrave and Ikonomou, 149–90].
- Rudolf Arnheim, Die Dynamik der architektonischen Form. Gestützt auf die 1975 an der Cooper Union in New York gehaltenen “Mary Duke Biddle Lectures,” trans. H. Hermann (Cologne: DuMont, 1980) [The Dynamics of Architectural Form: Based on the 1975 Mary Duke Biddle Lectures at the Cooper Union (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1977)].
- Wolfgang Meisenheimer, Das Denken des Leibes und der architektonische Raum [Bodily thinking and architectonic space] (Cologne: Walther König, 2004).
- Kent C. Bloomer and Charles W. Moore, Architektur für den “Einprägsamen Ort,” trans. G.R. Blomeyer and B. Tietze (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980) [Kent C. Bloomer and Charles W. Moore, Body, Memory and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)].
- Georg Braungart, Leibhafter Sinn. Der andere Diskurs der Moderne [The corporeal sense: Modernity's other discourse] (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1995), 1–3.
- Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space.
- Researchers had long been looking for the roots of empathy aesthetics in Romanticism, subjective philosophy, and psychological aesthetics before Jonathan Crary's epoch-making study, Techniken des Betrachters. Sehen und Moderne im 19. Jahrhundert, trans. A. Vonderstein (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1996) [Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990)] shifted the view toward physiology and physiological psychology as the essential foundations of empathy aesthetics. Müller-Tamm's postdoctoral dissertation, Abstraktion als Einfühlung, was pioneering in this respect.
- Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1. Werkausgabe, vol. 3, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), A24, B38, 72 [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, in “The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant“ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A24, B38, 157–8].
- Ibid., A26f., B42f., 75 [A26, B42, 159–60].
- Kant's engagement with the problem of space, as characterized by Carl Stumpf, Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung [1873] [On the psychological origins of the representation of space] (Amsterdam: Bonset, 1965), 13.
- For this shift in the problem of space, see also Gary Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).
- George Berkeley in particular.
- For summaries of Bain see Stumpf, Ursprung der Raumvorstellung, 36–8; and Alexander Gosztonyi, Der Raum. Geschichte seiner Probleme in Philosophie und Wissenschaften [Space: A history of its problems in philosophy and the sciences], vol. 2 (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1976), 728–30.
- Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect [1855] (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1868), 59: “movement precedes sensation, and is at the outset independent of any stimulus from without; and… action is a more intimate and inseparable property of our constitution than any of our sensations, and in fact enters as a component part into every one of the senses, giving them the character of compounds while itself [sic] is a simple and elementary property.”
- Bain, The Senses, 230–2. So according to Bain, spatial perception—the perception of extensive, adjacent bodies—can also be grasped through the duration of a sensation of movement, whereby he provides an early definition of space in terms of time.
- On this see Crary, Techniken des Betrachters.
- For Theodor Lipps see the following section of the present article, “The Symbolic Animation of Spatial Forms.”
- Hermann von Helmholtz, “Über den Ursprung und die Bedeutung der geometrischen Axiome” [On the origins and significance of geometric axioms], in idem, Abhandlungen zur Philosophie und Geometrie, ed. Sabine S. Gehlhaar (Cuxhaven: Traude Junghans, 1987), 113–32.
- Hermann von Helmholtz, “Über das Sehen des Menschen” [1855] [On human vision], in Abhandlungen zur Philosophie und Geometrie, ed. Gehlhaar, 13–34, esp. 21.
- Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung, 32.
- Crary, Techniken des Betrachters.
- Ibid., 82 [74].
- Hermann von Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1867), 442 [Helmholtz's Treatise on Physiological Optics, ed. James P.C. Southall, 3 vols (Ithaca, NY: Optical Society of America, 1924–5), vol. 3: 18].
- Helmholtz compared and contrasted this subconscious inference to conscious analogical inferences in the natural sciences. Ibid., 430 [vol. 3: 4].
- Ibid., 431 [vol. 3: 5].
- See also Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative, 176.
- For a more detailed discussion of this, see Hermann von Helmholtz, “Die neueren Fortschritte in der Theorie des Sehens” [1868] [Recent advances in the theory of vision], in idem, Abhandlungen zur Philosophie und Geometrie, ed. Gehlhaar, esp. 83–5 and 99.
- Wilhelm Wundt, Die Lehre von der Muskelbewegung, nach eigenen Untersuchungen bearbeitet [Treatise on muscular movement, prepared after the author's own experiments] (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1858).
- Wilhelm Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie [Principles of physiological psychology], vol. 2 (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1880), 174.
- For Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 176, the problem with the empirical approach was that “perception, as the basis of experience, cannot itself rest on experience.”
- On this see the lengthy entry on “Muskelsinn” [Muscular sensation] in Meyers Konversationslexikon, 4th ed., vol. 19, annual supplement for 1891–2 (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1892), 653–6; and the remarks on Wundt's notion of innervation in Edward B. Titchener, “The Innervationsempfindung in Wundt's Psychology,” Mind 2, no 5 (January 1893): 143f.
- Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 3.
- The “even distribution of local signals” across the sense organs and the “regulatory sources of motor innervation” in the “facilities of the central organs” are among the systemic conditions of organic sensory perception. They are present in each individual as a “fully developed capacity for the immediate spatial organization of light sensations.” Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 177, 164.
- Ibid., 162.
- Ibid., 161.
- Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung, 219.
- On this see Philipp Sarasin and Jakob Tanner, eds, Physiologie und industrielle Gesellschaft. Studien zur Verwissenschaftlichung des Körpers im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert [Physiology and industrial society: Studies on the scientification of the body in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998).
- Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefühl. For Vischer's notion of empathy and effect cf. Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, 17–19.
- Friedrich Theodor Vischer had already noted that his son was differentiating the concept of empathy with regard to the “physiological difference between sensory and kinesthetic neural stimuli.” Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Das Symbol” [1887] [The symbol], in Kritische Gänge, ed. Robert Vischer (Munich: Meyer & Jessen, 1922), vol. 4: 420–56, esp. 439.
- Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefühl, viii [93].
- Ibid., iv [90].
- Ibid., vii [92].
- And as with physiological psychology, for Vischer the perception of space is the result of a combination of tactile, visual, and kinesthetic sensations.
- Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefühl, 24–6 [107–8].
- Ibid., 27–8 [108–9].
- Ibid., 28 [109].
- According to Perpeet, “Romanticism is intrinsically animated with being, being animate it also has a soul, having a soul is also expressive of a life mood. Friedrich Theodor Vischer's conception of nature in 1842 was already radically scientific and positivistic. For him, nature was a toponym for that ‘mute’ realm of necessity that knows nothing of the emotions of subjective life. For him, nature could never be the self-revelation of some ingenious world soul that pervades the innermost depths of man, leaving him native and at home there. The thesis of empathy aesthetics is conceived in astonishment, not at man's conciliation with nature, but at his estrangement from it.” Perpeet, “Einfühlungsästhetik,” 203f.; cf. also Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung, 217f.
- For an overview, cf. Götz Pochat, Der Symbolbegriff in der Asthetik und Kunstwissenschaft [The concept of the symbol in aesthetics and art history] (Cologne: DuMont, 1983), 32–4.
- Friedrich Theodor Vischer cited in Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefühl, iii [90].
- The terms symbol and empathy were used virtually synonymously by Friedrich Theodor Vischer and Johannes Volkelt and were introduced into aesthetics as its core concepts. For the aesthetic theory of the symbol see also Johannes Volkelt, Der Symbol-Begriff in der neuesten Aesthetik [The concept of the symbol in recent aesthetics] (Jena: Hermann Dufft, 1876).
- Cf. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Kritik meiner Asthetik” [1866/1873] [Critique of my aesthetics], in idem, Kritische Gänge, 222–419; Vischer, “Das Symbol.”
- Vischer, “Das Symbol,” 431f.
- Ibid., 434.
- Ibid., 437.
- “Even though we have long since outgrown it, the conferral of soul is still an inevitable characteristic of man, only now it has what we have called reservation. Hence the ego is no longer deified even when it is interpolated into impersonal nature. This is precisely why it is no longer versified or mythologized. There may be something similar, but it is of no relevance in the current context; it only becomes relevant in the case of ingenuous, lucid symbolism.” Ibid., 435.
- Ibid., 435.
- Ibid., 437.
- Ibid., 432.
- Ibid., 453.
- Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefühl, 8 [97].
- Ibid., 9 [98]. Related explanatory models had already been proposed by Wundt. Robert Vischer draws on them explicitly here, as noted in Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung, 233. Cf. also Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 182–7.
- Fritz Neumeyer says much the same thing: “A deeper understanding of this evidently indelible aspect of human behavior (making oneself the measure of perfection in all things, K.W.) was first procured by the ‘empathy theory’ of the nineteenth century when it epistemologically acknowledged this supposed defect as a necessary psychological process involving the projection of internal forms of perception onto given external reality and saw all human artistic activity as a manifestation of self-objectification. The classical, metaphysical concept of proportion was thus reinterpreted as a scientific, psychological concept of projection.” Fritz Neumeyer, “Nachdenken über Architektur. Eine kurze Geschichte ihrer Theorie” [Reflections on architecture: A brief history of its theory], in Quellentexte zur Architekturtheorie. Nachdenken über Architektur, ed. Fritz Neumeyer (Munich: Prestel, 2002), 9–79, esp. 17.
- Johannes Volkelt, “Zur Psychologie der ästhetischen Beseelung” [On the psychology of aesthetic animation], Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 113 (1898): 161–79, esp. 169.
- Here we should also refer to Friedrich Theodor Vischer's treatment of architecture, which, on the one hand, follows Hegel and Karl Bötticher's conception of architecture as a “symbolic artform” and, on the other, anticipates aspects of empathy theory where Vischer speaks of moving masses and lines in flight, of a “gaze that tracks the lines” and appears to be crossed by the lines themselves. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Aesthetik oder Wissenschaft vom Schönen [Aesthetics; or, the science of the beautiful], part 3: “Die Kunstlehre,” section 2: “Die Künste,” no 1: “Die Baukunst” (Stuttgart: Carl Mäcken, 1852): § 557. The consideration of architecture in Hermann Lotze, Mikrokosmos. Ideen zur Naturgeschichte und Geschichte der Menschheit. Versuch einer Anthropologie [Microcosmos: Ideas on the history and natural history of mankind; An attempt at an anthropology], 3 vols (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1856–64), and idem, Geschichte der Aesthetik in Deutschland [History of aesthetics in Germany] (Munich: J.G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung, 1868), was also pioneering for empathy aesthetics.
- This being the basis of the artistic gaze.
- The evident links between Vischer's forms of seeing and Wölfflin's later concepts of the linear and the painterly have been pointed out by Frank Büttner, “Das Paradigma ‘Einfühlung’ bei Robert Vischer, Heinrich Wölfflin und Wilhelm Worringer. Die problematische Karriere einer kunsttheoretischen Fragestellung” [The paradigm of ‘empathy’ in Robert Vischer, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Wilhelm Worringer: The problematic career of a question in art theory], in 200 Jahre Kunstgeschichte in München. Positionen – Perspektiven – Polemik, 1780–1980, ed. Christian Drude (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2003), 82–93.
- Cf. Gustav Jahoda, “Theodor Lipps and the Shift from ‘Sympathy’ to 'Empathy,'” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 41, no 2 (2005): 151–63.
- The close links to sensory physiology go unnoticed even in the relatively recent study by Maria Rosaria de Rosa, Theodor Lipps. Estetica e critica delle arti [Theodor Lipps: Aesthetics and art criticism] (Naples: Guida, 1990). They are first indicated, in the context of empathy aesthetics in general, by Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung.
- Theodor Lipps, Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens [Fundamentals of the life of the soul] (Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1883), 496–8.
- Cf. also Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 85–7, 166.
- This was Lipps's summary of the opposing positions of Wundt and Helmholtz. Theodor Lipps, “Ästhetische Faktoren der Raumanschauung” [Aesthetic factors in the perception of space], in Beiträge zur Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane. Hermann von Helmholtz als Festgruss zu seinem siebzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Arthur König (Hamburg: Leopold Voss, 1891), 219–307, esp. 219.
- Lipps, Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, 531.
- Of these experiments Lipps says the following: “In my free time I drew and cut out all manner of figures, made or had models made, and imposed upon countless relatives and acquaintances, children and adults, experts and laymen, by asking them to judge this or that dimension, direction, or form in comparison to others.” Theodor Lipps, “Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen” [Spatial aesthetics and geometric optical illusions], Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 18, no 5–6 (November 1898): 405–41, esp. 409.
- Lipps, “Ästhetische Faktoren der Raumanschauung”; Lipps, “Die geometrisch-optischen Täuschungen” [Geometric optical illusions], Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 12, no 1 (July 1896): 39–59; Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrischoptische Täuschungen [Spatial aesthetics and geometric optical illusions], (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1897); Lipps, “Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen” (1898).
- Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen (1897), 38f.
- Ibid., 51–3.
- Ibid., 51.
- Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung, arrives at the same result.
- “In order to advance the project of establishing a psychology of spatial form, Lipps introduces a further theoretical shift: the approximation of mechanical procedures to empathy, and the transformation of the movement of the object into an objectified movement of the subject. Along these lines, the main assertion of the study is that mechanics animates its objects by movement and therefore aligns itself with the ends and aims of empathy in aesthetic perception.” De Rosa, Theodor Lipps, 74.
- Ibid., 76.
- Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen (1897), 61.
- “A spatial form is beautiful when the forces within it operate freely, that is, according to their own laws; when the forms, by virtue of these forces, seem to call themselves into existence and maintain their own existence. A beautiful line is one that freely and perpetually creates itself anew and maintains its form through the forces that are active within it; it is therefore at every moment the analogon of a willing and active being, and in this will and action its inner essence is that of a freely operating personality.” Theodor Lipps, “Zur ‘ästhetischen Mechanik’” [On ‘aesthetic mechanics’], Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 1, no 1 [1906]: 1–29, esp. 1.
- Theodor Lipps, “Einfühlung, innere Nachahmung, und Organempfindung” [Empathy, internal imitation, and organ perception], Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie 1, no 2 (May 1903): 185–204.
- Initially the term “empathy” (Einfühlung) only comes up sporadically in Lipps's early studies on spatial aesthetics, and when it does it is frequently used in conjunction with or as a synonym for the older term, “sympathy” (Sympathie). Cf. Jahoda, “Theodor Lipps.”
- Cf. Robert Zimmermann, Allgemeine Ästhetik als Formwissenschaft [General aesthetics as a science of form] (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller Universitäts-Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1865).
- Vischer, “Das Symbol,” 452.
- On this cf. also Robert Vischer, “Der ästhetische Akt und die reine Form” [1874] [The aesthetic act and the pure form], in idem, Drei Schriften zum ästhetischen Formproblem (Halle/Saale: Max Niemeyer, 1927), 45–54.
- Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen (1897), 21.
- “This (the aesthetic symbolism of form) has no content other than that which lies within or appears to lie within the forms themselves; not for this or that person, but for anyone who has come to know of the forces from which such forms tend to derive; likewise for anyone who has himself arrived at an awareness of the joy there is in the activation of one's own analogous forces. For what lies within the forms themselves is the very manner in which they come into being and will likewise seem inevitable in the light of human action. To contemplate such forms aesthetically is to transform their existence into activity.” Ibid., 20f.
- Ibid., 21.
- Karl Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen [1844–52] [The tectonics of the Hellenes], 2 vols (Berlin: Wilhelm Ernst & Korn, 1862).
- For Bötticher cf. Hartmut Mayer, Die Tektonik der Hellenen. Kontext und Wirkung der Architekturtheorie von Karl Bötticher [The tectonics of the Hellenes: the background and influence of Karl Bötticher's architectural theory] (Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2004).
- As Richard Streiter writes in a dissertation supervised by Theodor Lipps and submitted to the philosophical faculty of the University of Munich, Karl Böttichers Tektonik der Hellenen als ästhetische und kunstgeschichtliche Theorie. Eine Kritik [Karl Bötticher's tectonics of the Hellenes as an aesthetic and art historical theory: A critique] (Hamburg: Leopold Voss, 1896), 33.
- Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen, 43.
- . Ibid., 20.
- . Ibid., 35.
- . “When the idea invented the archetype of active form it simultaneously also furnished it with analogous models of artistic form: these never come after the fact or gradually over the course of implementation. Rather, they are conceived on a par and in unison with the origins of active form.” Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen, 40.
- . Streiter and Lipps were consistent in their criticism of Bötticher's interpretations of the various artistic forms. Both were far more inclined to see the corresponding ornaments as geometric figures that directly expressed mechanical forces without the need for visual similes, organic or otherwise.
- . Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen, 41.
- . Streiter, Karl Böttichers Tektonik, 32f.
- . Ibid., 38.
- . Ibid., 40.
- . “With this we have identified the bearers of aesthetic behavior. It is not the column that raises itself up so much as the spatial formation that presents itself to us from within the column. It is the lines, planes, and corporeal formations that bend and flex, expand and contract—not the masses, which carry the lines, are contained by the planes, and occupy corporeal space. They are also the only things that ‘bear down’ when considered aesthetically. It is not that the roof of a building bears down; the plane of the roof sinks or follows a downward tendency.” Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen (1897), 14f.
- . Cf. especially Arthur Schopenhauer, “Zur Ästhetik der Architektur,” in idem, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II. Sämtliche Werke Bd. II, ed. Wolfgang Frhr. von Löhneysen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 527–37 [”On the Aesthetics of Architecture,” in idem, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne, vol. 2 (New York: Dover, 1966), 411–18].
- . The pioneering influence of Lipps's aesthetics for modern art and architecture has since been recognized. Cf. Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space; de Rosa, Theodor Lipps; Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung.
- . Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen (1897), 16.
- . Lipps, “Zur 'ästhetischen Mechanik,'” 3f.
- . For the links between empathy aesthetics and Wölfflin's early writings, cf. de Rosa, Theodor Lipps; Braungart, Leibhafter Sinn; Büttner, “Das Paradigma 'Einfühlung.'”
- . Heinrich Wölfflin, “Theodor Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen” [Theodor Lipps, spatial aesthetics, and geometric optical illusions], Kunstchronik, Wochenschrift für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe 17 (1898): 292f.
- . Ibid., 293.
- . Ibid.
- . According to de Rosa: “Their common program is the approximation of architecture to expression, the assumption being that empathy is the instrument of choice for reading and deciphering it. But the theoretical shift Wölfflin makes is to suggest that here, in the artistic sphere and that of the spatial arts, expression is bound to the forms, not the content—one reading, incidentally, that had already been prepared by Lipps. Both of them certainly shared another central idea, though, one that was supposed to bring about the transition from form to subject: this idea made the physiognomic model responsible for mediating between them and expected the reading of the body and its composition to provide appropriate schemata for the interpretation of architectonic forms.” Moreover, de Rosa claims that Lipps and Wölfflin shared a dynamic conception of architecture. This comprised the procedural and constructive aspects of perception on the subject side as well as the emergence of the building from dynamic forces on the object side. De Rosa, Theodor Lipps, 84–6.
- . Robert Vischer had still subscribed to both of these Wundtian views.
- . “The evident error in this theory, therefore, appears to be the belief that, because it is the eye that perceives physical forms, their visual properties are the determining factors. Yet the eye appears to respond with pleasure or displeasure only to the intensity of light; it is indifferent to forms or at least is unable to determine their expressive nature.” Wölfflin, Prolegomena, 14 [151].
- . Ibid., 15 [151].
- . Ibid., 15 [151–2]. In defining “architectural creations” as “massive forms” Wölfflin contested the claims of formalist aesthetics, which limited architectural creation to geometry, line, and planimetry.
- . The animistic undertone that pervades all empathy theory is mentioned in relation to Wölfflin by Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, 44.
- . As an immanent will that works its way out of matter, form is no longer something external either, though form and matter are inseparable—this was how Wölfflin used empathy aesthetics to solve the dichotomy. Wölfflin, Prolegomena, 23 [160].
- . Wölfflin, Prolegomena, 22 [159].
- . Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, 42–3, have shown that there is a direct link from Wölfflin's source here—Friedrich von Hausegger's Die Musik als Ausdruck [Music as expression] (Vienna: Carl Konegen, 1885)—to Charles Darwin's Der Ausdruck der Gemüthsbewegungen bei dem Menschen und den Thieren, trans. J. Victor Carus (Stuttgart: E. Schweizerbart'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1872) [The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872)].
- . Wölfflin, Prolegomena, 18f. [155f.].
- . Ibid., 26–8 [163–5].
- . Wölfflin goes on to give examples: “Let us observe… the range of proportions. The square is called bulky, heavy, contented, plain, good-natured, stupid, etc. Its peculiarity lies in the equality of height and width; ascent and repose are held in perfect balance. We cannot tell whether the body is reclining or standing. More width would make it appear at rest; more height would make it appear standing.” Ibid., 31 [168].
- . The development of Wölfflin's art theory was influenced by the final shift in the psychological problem of form: from the level of the individual to that of the collective. Beyond that he came to see the various styles as the expression of historically contingent, culturally differentiated national feeling. The close ties to empathy theory gradually receded in his later writings, and the anthropological constant of the empathetic body made way for an abstracted conception of seeing. The Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Basic concepts of art history) were ultimately about the history of seeing following its own autonomous course. This history was not concerned with the expression of form but with how, according to the “intrinsic development of the eye,” only certain things were visible and representable at specific points in historical time. Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst [1915], (Munich: Münchner Verlag, 1948), 13 [Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M.D. Hottinger (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1932), 12. A new English translation by Jonathan Blower (ed. Evonne Levy and Tristan Weddigen) is forthcoming in 2015 in the Getty Texts & Documents series]; see also de Rosa, Theodor Lipps, 91.
- . August Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung. Antrittsvorlesung, gehalten in der Aula der K. Universität Leipzig am 8. November 1893 (Leipzig: Anton Hiersemann, 1894) [”The Essence of Architectural Creation,” in Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, 281–97].
- . Cf. Bettina Köhler, “Architekturgeschichte als Geschichte der Raumwahrnehmung” [Architectural history as the history of spatial perception], Daidalos. Architektur Kunst Kultur 67 (March 1998): 36–43; Beatrix Zug, Die Anthropologie des Raumes in der Architekturtheorie des 20. Jahrhunderts [The anthropology of space in twentieth-century architectural theory] (Tübingen: Ernst Wasmuth, 2006).
- . Schmarsow described his own approach in terms of Wundt's genetic theory. Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung, 6 [284].
- . Ibid., 5f. [284].
- . August Schmarsow, Unser Verhältnis zu den bildenden Künsten. Sechs Vorträge über Kunst und Erziehung [Our relationship to the visual arts: Six lectures on art and education] (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1903), 13.
- . Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung, 10f. [286–7].
- . On this Schmarsow might have cited Immanuel Kant, “Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raum” [1768], in idem, Vorkritische Schriften bis 1768. Werkausgabe II, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 993–1000 [”Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space,” in Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, trans. and ed. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 361–72]; or Stumpf, Ursprung der Raumvorstellung, 306f.; as Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, have shown.
- . Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung, 15–17 [289–90].
- . Ulya Vogt-Göknil, Architekturbeschreibung und Raumbegriff bei neueren Kunsthistorikern [The description of architecture and the concept of space in recent art history] (Leiden: Groen, 1951), 18. Schmarsow is just as indebted to English empiricism as to physiological psychology in helping to prepare the way for modern, space–time architectural theory.
- . Schmarsow, Unser Verhältnis zu den bildenden Künsten; August Schmarsow, Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft am Übergang vom Altertum zum Mittelalter kritisch erörtert und in systematischem Zusammenhange dargestellt [Fundamental concepts of art theory at the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages, systematically presented with a critical commentary] (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1905); August Schmarsow, “Über den Werth der Dimensionen im menschlichen Raumgebilde” [On the value of dimensions in human spatial constructs], Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Königlich-Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. Philologisch-Historische Klasse 48, no 4 (1896): 44–61; August Schmarsow, “Raumgestaltung als Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung” [Spatial design as the essence of architectural creation], Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 9, no 1 (1914): 66–95.
- . This achievement on Schmarsow's part was already acknowledged in the architectural theory of the early twentieth century.
- . Cf. Kirsten Wagner, “Vom Leib zum Raum. Aspekte der Raumdiskussion in der Architektur aus kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive” [From body to space: aspects of the spatial discourse in architecture from the perspective of cultural studies], Wolkenkuckucksheim. Internationale Zeitschrift für Theorie und Wissenschaft der Architektur 9, no 1 (November 2004), February 15, 2007, http://www.cloud-cuckoo.net/openarchive/wolke/deu/Themen/041/Wagner/wagner.htm, accessed 30 May 2014.
- . Mitchell W. Schwarzer, “The Emergence of Architectural Space: August Schmarsow's Theory of Raumgestaltung,” Assemblage 15 (1991): 48–61, esp. 50.
- . Herman Sörgel, for instance, only finds the influence of empathy theory when Schmarsow is dealing with sculpture, especially since Schmarsow refers to architecture as an inorganic, objective entity that eludes subjective empathy. Still, Schmarsow remains somewhat contradictory on this when he asserts that the tendency to perceive even inorganic nature according to the organization of the body is a basic human characteristic. Besides that, Sörgel points out that while Lipps and Wölfflin largely confine the act of empathetic animation to the effect of architecture—that is, to its reception—Schmarsow goes one further, systematically deriving active design and the production of space from the structure and sensations of the body. Cf. Herman Sörgel, Einführung in die Architektur-Ästhetik. Prolegomena zu einer Theorie der Baukunst [An introduction to architectural aesthetics: Prolegomena to a theory of architecture] (Munich: Piloty & Loehle, 1918), 46f. Schwarzer follows Sörgel here.
- . The latter applies to Köhler and Zug. Ernst Ullmann's Marxian postdoctoral thesis on Schmarsow's architectural theory also went into the particular influence of Wundt, but failed to mention the links to empathy aesthetics. Ernst Ullmann, “Der Beitrag August Schmarsows zur Architekturtheorie” [August Schmarsow's contribution to architectural theory] (typescript dissertation: University of Leipzig, 1967).
- . Schmarsow criticized the excessive compartmentalization of Lipps's investigation, which lost sight of the broader context and the “core of the organism, to which all individual forms and members owe their legitimacy.” Furthermore, Lipps had failed to understand certain architectures as spatial constructs; the Greek temple for instance. Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung; Schmarsow, “Raumgestaltung als Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung.” Schmarsow was also critical of the formal laws enumerated in Wölfflin's Prolegomena. Schmarsow, Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft, 45–7.
- . Schmarsow, Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft, 45.
- . Schmarsow, Unser Verhältnis zu den bildenden Künsten, 88.
- . Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung, 15 [289].
- . Again, cf. Kant, “Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raum”; Stumpf, Ursprung der Raumvorstellung.
- . Cf. Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Bd. 1: Die Sprache (Berlin: Cassirer, 1923) [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume 1: Language, trans. R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953)]; Karl Bühler, Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1934) [Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language, trans. D.F. Goodwin and A. Eschbach (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. Co., 2011)].
- . The image of man underlying Wölfflin's “organic understanding of the history forms” as well as Otto Friedrich Bollnow's concept of experiential space have recently been called into question by Ullrich Schwarz. Bollnow also assumed that the spatial body was axial and subject to gravity. Ullrich Schwarz, “Space, Body, Effect,” in Umzug ins Offene. Vier Versuche über den Raum, ed. Tom Fecht and Dietmar Kamper (Vienna: Springer, 1998), 82–5.