Kinaesthetic Knowing

Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design

Zeynep Çelik Alexander

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226485348
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Is all knowledge the product of thought? Or can the physical interactions of the body with the world produce reliable knowledge? In late-nineteenth-century Europe, scientists, artists, and other intellectuals theorized the latter as a new way of knowing, which Zeynep Çelik Alexander here dubs "kinaesthetic knowing."     
In this book, Alexander offers the first major intellectual history of kinaesthetic knowing and its influence on the formation of modern art and architecture and especially modern design education. Focusing in particular on Germany and tracing the story up to the start of World War II, Alexander reveals the tension between intellectual meditation and immediate experience to be at the heart of the modern discourse of aesthetics, playing a major part in the artistic and teaching practices of numerous key figures of the period, including Heinrich Wölfflin, Hermann Obrist, August Endell, László Moholy-Nagy, and many others. Ultimately, she shows, kinaesthetic knowing did not become the foundation of the human sciences, as some of its advocates had hoped, but it did lay the groundwork—at such institutions as the Bauhaus—for modern art and architecture in the twentieth century. 
 

1: Kinaesthetic Knowing

The Nineteenth-Century Biography of Another Kind of Knowledge

In the spring of 1853, a thirty-two-year-old Hermann von Helmholtz, professor of physiology at the University of Königsberg, stood before the German Society in the same city to deliver a lecture in which he attempted to answer a troubling question. How was it possible, Helmholtz wondered, that Goethe, the “comprehensive genius” and the embodiment of the German ideal of culture, had been so blatantly wrong in his scientific studies of color and light?1 Helmholtz was referring to the 1810 treatise Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Color), a text in which Goethe had wielded his extensive description of the phenomenal and experiential aspects of light as a weapon against the mechanistic logic of Newtonian physics.2 Goethe’s insistence on refuting the Newtonian principles upon which scientific practice had been so successfully predicated seemed irreconcilable with his genius. Helmholtz thus speculated:

On the one side are a number of physicists, who, by a long series of the ablest investigations, the most elaborate calculations, and the most ingenious inventions, have brought optics to such perfection, that it, and it alone, among the physical sciences, was beginning almost to rival astronomy in accuracy. . . . On the other side is a man whose remarkable mental endowments, and whose singular talent for seeing through whatever obscures reality, we have had occasion to recognize, not only in poetry, but also in the descriptive parts of the natural sciences; and this man assures us with the utmost zeal that the physicists are wrong: he is so convinced of the correctness of his own view, that he cannot explain the contradiction except by assuming narrowness or malice on their part. . . . So flat a contradiction leads us to suspect that there must be behind some deeper antagonism of principle, some difference of organization between his mind and theirs, to prevent them from understanding each other.3

According to Helmholtz, Goethe’s ingenuity had been to recognize forms in the formless heap of phenomena and to induce types from them. Goethe regarded nature first and foremost as a work of art, complete in itself: not under concepts independent of intuition (anschauungslose Begriffe) but rather in forms “inspired by a direct spiritual intuition” (unmittelbare geistige Anschauung).4 Goethe was at his best when he recognized that the human skull carried formal traces of the intermaxillary bone found in other vertebrates, when he observed that the stem, leaves, petals, and stamens of a palm plant formally resembled each other, or when he described the afterimages of shapes and colors.5 Under Goethe’s gaze, nature was no longer a collection of haphazard fragments but became comprehensible as an organic whole. It was no coincidence, Helmholtz noted, that Goethe had realized his most brilliant scientific work in such “descriptive” sciences as botany, zoology, or anatomy. When phenomena needed to be portrayed, compared, or classified according to their form or structure, Goethe proved to be a genius. However, when phenomena needed to be analyzed and their causes explained, Helmholtz noted, Goethe’s morphological thinking did not fare as well (fig. 1.1).

Figure 1.1. Sketches by Goethe comparing the forms of animal skulls, 1776. Eduard von der Hellen, Goethes Anteil an Lavaters Physiognomischen Fragmenten (Frankfurt: Rütten & Loening, 1888), 159.

Yet Helmholtz was not prepared to call Goethe’s scientific endeavors a failure, either. He detected in the poet’s intuitive approach to nature an intense antipathy to dissection (Zergliederung) and a resolute resistance to understanding phenomena in any manner that was not aesthetic. In Goethe’s thinking, “nature resists the interference of the experimenter who tortures and disturbs her,” he wrote.6 Helmholtz was also aware that his own work in physics and physiology penetrated precisely that which Goethe had deemed impenetrable: the deep mechanical laws at work in “the levers, the cords, and the pulleys which work behind the scenes” as opposed to “the beautiful appearance of nature.”7 Thus, instead of calling a winner and a loser in what was in fact Goethe’s long-lost war against Newton, Helmholtz tactfully proposed an alternative. The reasoning practiced by Newton and Goethe, he offered, should be understood as guided by competing epistemic principles. Newton’s reasoning followed logical induction, which, with the aid of syllogisms, “reduced a question to clearly defined universal propositions.”8 Goethe, by contrast, subscribed to another kind of reasoning that Helmholtz described as aesthetic or artistic induction (künstlerische Induction).9 Aesthetic induction also followed the protocols of syllogistic reasoning but was performed by the body as opposed to by the mind. For example, the eye drew conclusions from major premises (what one had in store as past experience) and minor premises (sensations locally presented to it in the current moment) in perception as if there were a logician embedded in it.10 Unlike a logical induction, however, an aesthetic induction was carried out unconsciously. Helmholtz called these “judgments which do not depend upon our consciously thinking over former observations of the same kind . . . ‘unconscious inferences’ [unbewußte Schlüsse].”11 Each kind of induction corresponded to a distinct mode of ratiocination:

Besides the knowledge [Wissen] that operates with concepts [Begriffe] and is, therefore, capable of expression in words, there is another department of our mental operations, which only combines sensual impressions [sinnliche Eindrücke] that are not capable of direct verbal expression. In German we call this Kennen—as when we say that we “know” a man, a road, a dish, an odorous substance, we mean that we have seen, or tasted, or smelt these objects, hold on to their sensual impression in memory, and will recognize it again when it is repeated, even though we may never be able to describe the impression in words, even to ourselves.12

Viewed from the perspective of the Helmholtzian distinction between Wissen and Kennen, the difference between Goethe and Newton no longer seemed irreconcilable. Even when they concerned themselves with the same object, Helmholtz explained, the two pursued different kinds of knowledge. In Zur Farbenlehre Goethe poetically described the experiential effects of light: he was interested in how the sensorial apparatus of his body experienced itself, perceived afterimages and illusions, and associated phenomenal effects with moral values (fig. 1.2). By contrast, Newton, even when he gathered evidence from observation or experiment, was concerned with formulating principles of causality beyond such experiential effects. As others who ruminated on the same epistemological distinction would put it, while Goethe wanted to know light, Newton wanted to know about light. Kennen, then, was acquired through an experiential familiarity with phenomena; Wissen attempted to establish supra-experiential facts by inquiring into questions of cause and effect. Kennen required the description of appearances and analogical reasoning; Wissen, the analysis of the machinery behind appearances and causal reasoning.

Figure 1.2. Table compiled to survey subjective colors. When viewed through a prism, the pairs of figures no longer appear black and white and the same size. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre (Tübingen: J. G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1810), plate IIa.

In fact, Helmholtz’s distinction sought to reconcile more than the long-standing antagonism between Goethe and Newton. In a theoretical move that would prove anticipatory of the organization of the disciplines at universities at the end of the century, Helmholtz associated Wissen and Kennen with distinct fields of knowledge whose differences would now have to be understood in methodological terms. Logical induction belonged with the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften), whose contributions to Prussia’s modernization were widely recognized and celebrated by the middle of the nineteenth century despite ongoing debates about their role in education. By contrast, Helmholtz argued, aesthetic induction was at home with the arts and the loosely defined human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften; what we call the humanities and the social sciences in North America today), sciences of the mind whose intellectual rigor was considered central to the nineteenth-century ideal of Bildung.13

Helmholtz’s theoretical move was as deft as it was reconciliatory. Whereas positivism argued that all fields of knowledge be reformed on the methodological model of the natural sciences and the German Historical School insisted on the separation of the natural sciences from the human sciences, Helmholtz diverted the debate by attributing the difference between these two constellations of fields to two distinct kinds of knowing.14 Still questions remained: however similar the basic operation of aesthetic induction and that of logical induction might be, could one assume that the two kinds of knowledge were equally legitimate? To what extent was each reliable in guiding action? Helmholtz himself expressed some reservations. Aesthetic induction could “never be perfectly assimilated to forms of logical reasoning,” he wrote, “nor pressed so far to establish universal laws.”15 Still, given the central role that it played in the translation of sensations into perception, he thought that Kennen held the promise of another kind of rigor:16

And yet it is certain that this kind of knowledge [Kennen] may attain the highest possible degree of precision and certainty, and is so far not inferior to any knowledge [Wissen] which can be expressed in words; but it is not directly communicable, unless the object in qestion can be brought actually forward, or the impression that it produces can be otherwise represented—as by drawing the portrait of a man instead of producing the man himself. . . . I would also note here that this “knowledge” of the effort of the will [Willensimpuls] to be exerted must attain the highest possible degree of certainty, accuracy, and precision, for us to be able to maintain so artificial a balance as is necessary for walking on stilts or for skating, for the singer to know how to strike a note with his voice, or the violin-player with his finger, so exactly that its vibration shall not be out by a hundredth part.17

This chapter is the intellectual biography of the kind of knowing that Helmholtz dubbed Kennen, the kind of knowledge, which, despite its resistance to language, concepts, propositions, or representations, was nonetheless understood to guide correctly the fingers of a violinist, the voice of an opera singer, or the hand of an artist. This history is crucial to understanding the emergence of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century techniques that I discuss in subsequent chapters. As I explained in the introductory chapter, I call this other way of knowing “kinaesthetic knowing”: nondiscursive and nonconceptual knowledge assumed to be gathered from the body’s experiential exchanges with the world. This is not to say that kinaesthetic knowing had no discursive existence before Helmholtz theorized it in the middle of the nineteenth century. I will briefly summarize in the next section how others before and after Helmholtz proposed the idea that there might exist a unique form of ratiocination associated with the musculature of the body. Yet it was at the middle of the nineteenth century, in the midst of heated debates about teleology and mechanism, that kinaesthetic knowing acquired unprecedented salience. The dependence of this alternative mode of knowing upon experience, as we will see, allowed it to accommodate teleological and mechanistic explanations simultaneously. The political expediency of this accommodation proved crucial to the success of kinaesthetic knowing: for such debates did not only purport to explain the order of the universe theoretically but also sought to dictate the order of the world here and now.

The Longer Historical Arc: From Sympathy to Proprioception

Kennen differed from other theorizations of experiential knowledge—intuitive, instinctive, or otherwise—in that Helmholtz assumed that it was attained by the musculature of the body. In his monumental study on the physiology of vision, he stressed—over against the usual arguments for the perfection of the eye as evidence of God and preexisting harmony in the universe—that the eye had numerous inherent flaws: chromatic irregularity, spherical aberration, and imperfect transparency, among many others. If, despite these flaws, it was still able to provide the subject with a correct perception of the world, it was because and only because of the tireless work undertaken by the eye muscles. By constantly adjusting and readjusting themselves, these mu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: A Peculiar Experiment
• 1  Kinaesthetic Knowing: The Nineteenth-Century Biography of Another Kind of Knowledge
• 2  Looking: Wölfflin’s Comparative Vision
• 3  Affecting: Endell’s Mathematics of Living Feeling
• 4  Drawing: The Debschitz School and Formalism’s Subject
• 5  Designing: Discipline and Introspection at the Bauhaus
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Plates