physiognomy

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As physiognomy (Greek. Φύσις physis = nature γνώμη Gnome = knowledge) refers to the appearance of living beings, in particular that of the people , and here especially the characteristic for a human face trains. Occasionally it is also understood to mean his entire stature, for example as a constitutional type .

Psychology and philosophy

In infancy , people learn to recognize other people by their physiognomy (see developmental psychology ).

Modern psychology can show how people actually communicate emotions through their facial muscles (see facial expressions ). Physiognomy is understood to mean everything that is not influenced by communication behavior - the length of the nose , folds, position of the ears, etc.

Traditionally, pathognomics was responsible for the theory of facial expressions , to which the theory of affects and expression belong. The facial expression was understood as a set of signs that indicate the states of the soul on the surface of the body.

In philosophy , this theory is part of the mind-body problem .

Physiognomics, facial expressions and phrenology

Different emotional states and their physiognomic expressive content

Most people intuitively believe that there is something to be learned about a person's soul from physiognomy . The attempt to read methodically from the physical appearance of a person is called physiognomics . Physiognomics is an ancient sub-discipline of medicine since and with Hippocrates and Galen. The precise observation of the color of the face, the constitution of the skin, pimples or pustules as well as the " hippocratica facies " as the face of a dying person as well as the physiognomic evaluation of the entire figure and the internal organs are part of it.

Pathognomics as opposed to physiognomics has only been used since Lavater and Lichtenberg. In the pseudo-Aristotelian script "Physiognomonika" from the 3rd century BC In most of the tracts of the following years, facial expressions are usually dealt with under the term “physiognomics”. The first individual studies on facial expressions come from the theory of behavior (Erasmus on the making faces of pupils in 1524) and then from early modern art. Charles Le Brun , the court painter to Louis XIV, made a mimic pattern book in 1688, where 24 facial expressions are represented with the corresponding terms. The famous picture book Le Bruns, published posthumously by Morel d'Arleux, with comparisons between humans and animals, Traité concernant le rapport de la physionomie humaine avec celle des animaux (1806) also takes up ancient traditions.

Charles Darwin's book The Expression of Emotion in Animals and Men in 1872 was also well-known . Faces averaged out using computer graphics can now be created, reminiscent of Francis Galton's methods. It was found that averaged faces appear generally friendlier and more attractive. As the father of more recent research on facial expressions and the inventor of the FACS, Facial Action Coding System , Paul Ekman became known worldwide.

Art and literature

In the modern era , a strong interest in the individual and thus also in the physiognomy of individuals developed. The history of portrait painting shows that the interest in individual physiognomies arose at the same time as the interest in the life history and experiences of individual individuals (see autobiography , identity ).

An important function of portraits was to record individual facial features and to preserve them for posterity. After the painters of the Italian Renaissance , Albrecht Dürer was the first German artist after the Middle Ages who consciously tried to record the facial features of his friends and business partners in order to preserve them for posterity. Towards the end of the 18th century , with the appearance of Johann Kaspar Lavater's Physiognomic Fragments, there was a flood of portraits - paintings , drawings and silhouettes . The profile of the face in particular was considered to be that part of the physiognomy from which a great deal could be read about the soul, which is why one often had silhouettes made and interpreted as a parlor game.

The face is often regarded as a memory for character, experience and life story. In Oscar Wilde's novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray, there is a portrait painting that is aging in place of its owner. All the sins that he commits leave his mark on the painting, not on him. Today photography plays a similar role. Photographic portraits can capture changes in individual physiognomies over the years.

Law

Profiles , passports and identity cards rely on the uniqueness of the individual characteristics. As early as the Middle Ages, official documents recorded what a person looked like in order to identify them .

With the criminological technique of Bertillonage , physiognomic measurement data were archived in the 19th century and used for identification. However, the technique was too inefficient and was quickly replaced by fingerprint storage . The English natural scientist Sir Francis Galton tried to identify certain common physiognomic characteristics of criminals with the help of multiple exposures . At that also racially influenced forensics also belongs phrenology (skull customer), which in 1800 by the German physician Franz Joseph Gall developed by the Italian Cesare Lombroso in the 1867 criminology was introduced. Some racists under National Socialism tried to write down special identifying features of Jewish faces, invoking Lombroso's theses.

Today's police use photographic or digital techniques to reconstruct the physiognomy of criminals and suspects according to descriptions (see phantom image ).

Computerized facial recognition relies on the unchangeable features of physiognomy. Computers should learn to recognize and identify individual people in a crowd or during security checks.

medicine

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In medicine, the physiognomy of a person is included in part of the diagnosis , for example through external examination of the face, in order to draw initial conclusions about the state of health. This is important, especially in the context of emergencies.

Changes in physiognomy have always been made through masks and cosmetics . Plastic surgery has been used to permanently change physiognomies for several decades . Here, the reconstructive surgery by prosthesis to restore a destroyed through accident or illness physiognomy.

Since the attractiveness of the face can have an impact on social status , changes for purely cosmetic purposes are increasingly popular, but also controversial. Some television shows take advantage of the popularity and sensationalism of plastic surgery.

Other forms of body modification that mean temporary or permanent interventions in the physiognomy are piercings and tattoos . They have become more widespread in western societies over the past few decades and are usually considered to be a sign of individuality by those who wear them .

See also

literature

Web links

Wiktionary: Physiognomy  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Computer graphics methods for superimposing a series of portraits. Face Research ⇒ Experiments about face and voice preferences. .
  2. ↑ Beautiful to fall in love with. In: Spectrum of Science. 11/2006, p. 28.
  3. ↑ Jörgen Schmidt-Voigt: The outpatient cardiac examination cardiological basic diagnosis for the practice. Springer-Verlag, Berlin 2011.