abstraction and Empathy

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“Abstraction and empathy” is the title of a dissertation written in 1907 by Wilhelm Worringer in the field of art history . The text was published as a book by Piper Verlag in 1908 . The author offers a comprehensive psychological explanatory model for developments in occidental culture.

Art and the overall mental situation

In his work from 1907, which caused a sensation at the time, Wilhelm Worringer establishes a connection between the emergence of art and that of religion , of cultural processes in general, in that he regards psychological conditions as fundamental for the specific forms of development of cultural products. In doing so, Worringer clearly opposes the traditional valuation practice of art, which is in some cases still effective today in art history, and which does not make clear its dependence on templates that have become historical and which they now regard as natural and self-evident. Worringer does not start from a self-sufficient, isolated area of ​​“art” that develops according to pure “laws of art”. He sees art as a function of the psychological situation of a people at a certain historical time and from there comes to an antagonism of the two opposing and complementary processes “abstraction” and “empathy”. Here empathy, as a historically later form, means “aesthetic enjoyment as objectified self-enjoyment” and the historically earlier abstraction “aesthetic enjoyment as a defense against fear” .

The production of art at the lowest stage of human development in prehistory and early history is not a pleasurable imitation of nature that is then continuously improved, but a geometrically abstract sign language against the imitation of nature. Imitation of nature as an art form is only possible after a long historical familiarity with and gradual empathy with the surrounding nature.

At the beginning - and according to regional or race-related factors in the entire development of art to this day - there is an art of abstraction that works with geometric patterns, life-negating inorganic and crystalline patterns. A classic example is the Egyptian pyramid . The sense of such an art and the reason for its production and its "enjoyment" lies in the fact that it offers the "primitive man" a possibility to oppose the threatening, opaque and dangerous natural environment with a world of abstract, controllable regularity, even in linearity to "divest" a pyramid and to find peace and happiness in this emptying. According to Worringer, this has nothing to do with the fact that primitive man was incapable of anything else . The “will to art ” ( Alois Riegl ) was directed towards abstraction and the “ability” in art is a function of the will. The desire to bring the individual things of the natural environment closer to the absolutely abstract could only be achieved through compromise. The approximate fulfillment of this wish determined the development of art history up to the Renaissance as the climax of "empathy".

Abstraction and religion

For Worringer, parallel to abstraction in art, there is transcendence in religion, the shifting of the gods out of this world into an afterlife ( monotheistic oriental religion of salvation and its further development in Christianity ), to which the polytheistic this world religion of classical Greece is called perfect embodiment of the counter-principle "empathy" corresponds. The classical Greek oneness with the world (empathy) is opposed to the dualistic separation of spirit and matter, of this world and the hereafter as transcendence (abstraction).

The division of reality into two opposing worlds, in this world and in the hereafter, in the art of abstraction and real nature, which is carried out in order to cope with fear, causes a specific set of problems which in psychology shows similarities to forms of processing of early childhood, for example in the process of repression , the development of the child's concept of thing or symbol formation .

Southern Europe versus Northern Europe

In a special chapter, Worringer compares the development of the art of Italy as a particularly good example of empathy in comparison to that of the Cisalpine countries as representatives of abstraction. He blames nature, which was particularly repellent in the early history of peoples, for their inner disharmony, which can still be felt today. According to his thesis, their religious ideas were full of dualistic elements and could therefore have offered little resistance to Christianity. However, in her tendency towards abstraction ( Celto-European ornamental art) she did not develop the intensity and tension of the Orientals and remained in a constant search and striving, a tendency towards uncanny pathos . This hybrid formation, abstraction on the one hand and strongest expression on the other, had a lasting impact on the development of art in the northern countries.

The Gothic cathedral as a typically Nordic invention shows a characteristic empathy that has been transferred to mechanical values. The intensity demonstrated here goes beyond anything organic and is "convulsively torn up in a blissful vertigo" , a barbaric extravaganza for southerners. Here the striving without salvation, typical of Cisalpine art, shows itself as a “ puberty period of European people” .

aftermath

Since his dissertation had received such an unexpected public response and his theories were discussed intensively and also hostile, Worringer felt compelled to write a detailed version of his views on Northern European art a little later in 1911 under the title "Form problems of the Gothic". Here he also gives an insight into the basic principle of his approach:

“The historian's hot endeavor to reconstruct the spirit and soul of bygone times from the material of the facts handed down to us remains in the end an attempt with unsuitable means. For the bearer of historical knowledge remains our ego in its temporal condition and limitation, no matter how hard we try to reduce it to an apparent objectivity. [...] His [the historian's] working process here is that of inferring from the present dead historical material the immanent prerequisites to which it owes its creation. This is a conclusion into the unknown, the unknowable, for which there is no other certainty than the intuitive. ” (Pp. 1–2)

Similar to Worringer's first work, the "Formprobleme der Gotik" (first edition 1911) immediately saw numerous editions (1912, 1918, 1920, 1922, 1927, 1930 etc.).

literature

  • Wilhelm Worringer: Writings . 2 volumes with CD-ROM. Munich 2004, ISBN 978-3-770-53641-2 .
  • Wilhelm Worringer: Form problems of the Gothic . Munich 1911. Full text
expenditure
  • Wilhelm Worringer: Abstraction and Empathy (1907). Munich [1976] 14th edition 1987.
  • Wilhelm Worringer: Abstraction and Empathy. A contribution to style psychology. With an introduction by Claudia Öhlschläger. Edited by Helga Grebing . Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-770-54434-9 .