Aesthetics of the wildlife
The treatise Aesthetics of the Animal World , published in 1908, is the last major scientific work by the zoologist and naturalist Karl August Möbius . This concerns the writing and continuation of his lecture "The aesthetic consideration of animals" held from 1896 to 1907 at the University of Berlin.
The aim of the tract is to use natural science, which in the 19th century was to become the core science of the age, to penetrate a very own philosophical-literary topic by exploring the aesthetics of nature and making aesthetic judgments in addition to their subjective components based on evidence verifiable, objective level.
aesthetics
Until the 19th century, it was only the science of philosophy that deals with the concept of aesthetics . The traditional philosophical systems put art before natural beauty and thus grant nature an aesthetic value that is subordinate to art. With the emergence of new scientific findings and the associated technical achievements in the 19th century (see also: industrialization ), natural science gained the self-confidence to doubt the primacy of the beautiful in art.
Shape of the work
In this work Möbius follows a strictly systematically conceived elaboration of an animal aesthetic. While in older studies he mainly concentrated on the aesthetic meaning of animals, in this elaboration he is very keen on a strictly scientific derivation. Accordingly, one goal of this work is that the evidence should be comprehensible from its prerequisites to its results.
The work contains an abundance of biological, psychological, geographical, aesthetic and art-historical specialist literature with references to the writings of philosophical authors. In addition, the work offers a large selection of own sketches, collections and lecture manuscripts, as well as numerous illustrations of the animals, which should enable the reader to understand the theses independently.
Möbius attached great importance to a thorough approach to the philosophical / cultural-historical subject of aesthetics, which is why the treatise is not part of popular scientific literature, but rather represents a manual of its own zoological specialty, which is intended for an academically trained audience.
Introduction to the work
Möbius begins his work with the assertion that an animal is beautiful when the view, the color, the shape and the movement captivate the attention of the viewer. It is only when an animal is liked that its properties acquire a beauty value. Because if its shapes, colors and movements were beautiful in themselves, they would have to please everyone equally. But this scenario, in which everyone agrees on the beauty of something, could never exist.
Möbius deduces from this that the reason for the beauty or ugliness of a thing is neither entirely to be found in the object nor entirely in the eye of the beholder, but is a mixture of both:
“ Our judgments about the beauty and ugliness of animals arise, like all aesthetic judgments about objects of nature and art, from multiple composite perceptions of external appearance and from other mental activities. All aesthetic judgments have special objective and subjective bases. "
Building on this basis, Möbius formulates his categories of a natural aesthetic.
Categories of Möbius' natural aesthetics
The aesthetic unit
Already Goethe wrote to CG Körner: “The pure aesthetic effect arises only from the feeling of the whole.” Möbius also formulates that an object that aesthetically captivates us acts on us as a unit of different content presented separately from its surroundings.
For example, we perceive a tree as a unity of trunk, branches and leaves, or a forest as a unity of all the trees we see. Even parts of a whole can, viewed individually, please as an aesthetic unit, such as the outstretched tail of a courting peacock.
Laws of beauty
By underlaying a regularity in aesthetics, Möbius manages to process the concept of the beautiful using scientific categories. He is served by the scientific law (law of the compared phenomena), which emerges from the observation of similar, compared phenomena that recur in nature and in human life. He sets this in relation to the aesthetic law, which represents the law in a peculiar, individual appearance and is thus an individual expression of the law and therefore represents an aesthetic pleasure. There is even a law hidden in the way of an aesthetic judgment. In the same way that a child learns a language, they learn to judge aesthetically:
“ So the child acts according to laws that it has come to know through sensory perception. It judges on the basis of these laws, although it is not aware of them as their own objects of thought in abstract form. "
Everyone follows a previous educational path to enjoy the beautiful. And those people who seem to have a talent for aesthetics, such as painters, sculptors and poets, have no other sensory gateways for external appearances than normal people. According to this, there is no genius who invents laws, but only an artist who discovers the regularity of the natural object and illustrates it so sharply in his works that it is visible to everyone. As a result, no human mind creates works of art or thoughts directly through inner perception / intuition and without external perception. This is the only way that the works of the geniuses of science and art do not move into the incomprehensible and only through the bondage to external perception is there a possibility for an aesthetically enjoyable observer who recognizes the beautiful in the works.
The specialty of the beautiful
Möbius therefore sees the peculiarity of the beautiful in the fact that it is integrated into a regularity of nature, but in the form that it represents a unique, individual expression of this law:
“ The beauty of an object is based on its own special nature of lawful properties, which does not recur in any other object in the same way as it is realized in it. "
The peculiarity of the beautiful is subject to a concept of freedom that does not mean a groundless, individual, free choice of the peculiar realization of the law, because this would make the cause of its existence scientifically inexplicable and would merge into the mystical. Rather, the uniqueness of the beautiful is subject to a concept of freedom, as Schelling and Theodor Lipps have attested:
“ Beautiful is what we call a figure in whose design nature seems to have played with the greatest freedom and within the limits of the strictest necessity and regularity. "
“ Beautiful nature is a symbol of freedom. And because she is, she is beautiful. Everything else is included in this freedom: the strength and abundance of activity, activity, and unity of the individual, which forms the basis for all of this. "
The freedom of the particular expression of the beautiful is therefore to be understood in such a way that they appear as special effects of the world as a whole, which at the same time cannot also be assumed by other similar formations. The peculiarity is defined as the emergence and action that are unique to them as a part of the whole of nature. No member of the world as a whole is completely free from all influences of the other members with which it is connected. Its properties are the product of the co-operation of spatially and temporally determined circumstances and are only defined by the difference to the properties of other members. In aesthetic perception, both directions, namely the search for the individual and for the regular connection in the peculiar, are satisfied:
“ In the special ephemeral phenomena we look directly at the legal, the eternal. "
A paradox that Möbius solves by postulating that the beautiful is only special and ephemeral in the first place. And this moves within the framework of the legal and the eternal.
Aesthetic empathy
With the concept of aesthetic empathy, which goes back to Theodor Lipps, Möbius means togetherness with nature, in which one, immersed in the perception of external appearances, simultaneously enjoys one's own inner being. It describes a state in which the phenomenal world is equated with the emotional world. Möbius is referring to Lipp's idea that the aesthetic relevance of an animal is that it induces the perceiver to empathize with the animal based on its stimuli. On the one hand, the psyche allows the idea that animals are animated because we know them from ourselves, on the other hand, the animal has its own specific properties on the perceiver. Friedrich Theodor Vischer therefore describes this state of mind as the soul's empathy with inanimate forms.
Möbius picks up on this when he says that we into the animals that aesthetically captivate us, our own feelings of resting and moving, our feelings of the pressure of firm and soft fabrics, of the smooth and rough, the light, the dark and the color, move sensual sensations, but in a modified and weakened form. Accordingly, for Möbius, as for Lipps, aesthetic enjoyment is a psychological fact, because what affects us aesthetically is indeed perceptible to the senses, but the pleasure or displeasure of what is perceived is an act, a state of our mind.
Value of aesthetic judgments
Möbius, although he attaches great importance to the verifiability of his statements about aesthetics, is very well aware of the lack of persuasiveness of aesthetic judgments in relation to mathematical judgments. He attributes this to the fact that mathematical judgments are irrefutable for anyone who can understand them because they postulate pure thoughts. In contrast, aesthetic judgments express the effect of a viewed object on the mind and spirit of the perceiver. Thus, the judgment does not only depend on the perceived legal and special nature of the object, but also on the level of education and the momentary mood of the perceiver. This results in the weakness of conviction of aesthetic judgments for other people, since they express states of enjoyment and displeasure that no science can describe.
literature
Text output
Möbius, Karl August: Aesthetics of the animal world. Franz Steiner Verlag, Jena 1908, ISBN 978-3-515-09281-4 .
Secondary literature
Kockerbeck, Christoph: The beauty of the living: aesthetic perception in the 19th century. Boehlau Wien Verlag, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar, 1997, ISBN 978-3205987550 .