Alexander - Kinaesthetic knowing: aesthetics, epistemology, modern design

The following year Schulze published the results of the experiment (figs. If these subjects were in possession of an unconventional kind of intelligence, shouldnt the education system be changed to address it?

Figure 0.1. The group responds to the picture Storks. One girls response over time is illustrated in twelve additional photographs. Rudolf Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim knstlerischen Genieen (Leipzig: R. Voigtlnder, 1906), 5.

Figure 0.2. Girls respond to Poplars in the Storm. Their hand movements over time are illustrated in sequence. Rudolf Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim knstlerischen Genieen (Leipzig: R. Voigtlnder, 1906), 30.

In analyzing the girls facial and bodily expressions, Schulze used a specialized terminology borrowed from experimental psychology. As the director of the Institut fr experimentelle Pdagogik und Psychologie (Institute for Experimental Pedagogy and Psychology), he had been instrumental in disseminating among fellow educators concepts, techniques, and equipment that had been developed within this relatively new field.

Schulze did not only borrow his methods and equipment from experimental psychology. His understanding of affective response conformed to the basic assumptions of a field upon which the discipline of experimental psychology itself had been founded in the previous century: psychophysics. As the name implies, psychophysics claimed that every sensation psychologically felt by the subject could be correlated quantitatively to a physical stimulus. Schulze had simply replaced Duchennes electrical current with forms.

Figure 0.3. Diagram demonstrating the Wundtian tridimensional theory of feeling. The three curves in each section are pleasure-displeasure (Lust-Unlust), arousing-subduing (Erregung-Hemmung), and strain-relaxation (Spannung-Lsung). Alfred Lehmann, Die Hauptgesetze des menschlichen Gefhlslebens (Leipzig: O. R. Reisland, 1892), unpaginated.

Figure 0.4. Facial expressions of one subject arranged along an x-axis of excitation and relaxation (Erregung-Beruhigung). Rudolf Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim knstlerischen Genieen (Leipzig: R. Voigtlnder, 1906), 33.

Figure 0.5. Experiment documenting the pulse and breathing of a child while he looks at pictures. Rudolf Schulze, Aus der Werkstatt der experimentellen Psychologie und Pdagogik (Leipzig: R. Voigtlnder, 1909), 84, fig. 68; 89, figs. 74, 75.

Figure 0.6. The girls response to Flowers is compared to their experience of sugar. Rudolf Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim knstlerischen Genieen (Leipzig: R. Voigtlnder, 1906), 23.

Figure 0.7. The girls response to Crucifixion is compared to Duchenne de Boulognes experiments. Rudolf Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim knstlerischen Genieen (Leipzig: R. Voigtlnder, 1906), 22.

As peculiar as Schulzes experiment may seem to us today, it would not have appeared so at the turn of the twentieth century. In fact, Schulzes contemporaries would have rightfully understood the experiment as an exercise in aesthetics from below (Aesthetik von unten). A term coined in the 1870s by Gustav Theodor Fechner, who, not coincidentally, was also the founder of the field of psychophysics, aesthetics from below purported to counter the philosophically inclined aesthetics from above (Aesthetik von oben).

Implicit in Schulzes peculiar experiment were questions that have a long history in Western intellectual life. Is all legitimate knowledge the product of thought? Or can the bodys physical exchanges with the world produce reliable knowledge without recourse to language, concepts, propositions, or representations? Once certain explanatory frameworks became entrenchedmind and body, object and subject, particular and universal, or cause and effectthe conundrum seemed inevitable. On the one hand, one Enlightenment thinker after another recognized in the presumed immediacy of experience another way of knowing. This was what A. G. Baumgarten, the eighteenth-century philosopher who gave the field of aesthetics its name, called