- 著者
-
金田 千秋
- 出版者
- 美学会
- 雑誌
- 美学 (ISSN:05200962)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.68, no.1, pp.25-36, 2017 (Released:2018-07-01)
I would like to nominate the thoughts of Hermann von Helmholtz, a celebrated
German physiologist and mathematician in the nineteenth century, as a framework for
interpreting sculptor Adolf Hildebrand’s great work, ‘Das Problem der Form in der
bildenden Kunst’ (1893). It can be clearly inferred from Hildebrand’s letters that he
had inspected Helmholtz’s popular papar on the non-Euclidean geometry system. The
concept of the “plane” in this paper was decisive. Helmholtz’s thinking experiment, “Can
an insect with only plane perception crawling on an egg recognize its three-dimensional
curved surface?”, probably influenced Hildebrand’s sculpture-aesthetics, which analyzed
the shapes of objects with a series of concepts, “face”, “layer”, “face layer”, etc.
Helmholtz’s insight that “The world is made of flat surfaces” had thus profoundly
affected the sculptor.
What kinds of human abilities are needed to perceive the composition of the world?
At the end of the eighteenth century, a controversy broke out between Immanuel Kant
and the followers of Gottfried Leibniz about whether to lay the foundation of space on
“intuition” or “intuition and concept”. However, Hildebrand’s involvement in this history
made him confront the conflict between “intuition” and “intuition and concept”, which
unexpectedly led to a serious political and racial problem.