Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design

Kinaesthetic Knowing

Kinaesthetic Knowing

Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design

Zeynep Çelik Alexander

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48520-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48534-8 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/ 9780226485348.001.0001

Illustrations in this book were funded in part or in whole by a grant from the SAH/Mellon Author Awards of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Support for the publication was provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Names: Alexander, Zeynep Çelik, author.

Title: Kinaesthetic knowing : aesthetics, epistemology, modern design / Zeynep Çelik Alexander.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017008989 | ISBN 9780226485201 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226485348 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Aesthetics, German—19th century. | Aesthetics, German—20th century. | Aesthetics—Physiological aspects. | Aesthetics—Psychological aspects. | Knowledge, Theory of. | Psychophysics. | Psychology and art—Germany. | Art—Study and teaching—Germany. | Design—Philosophy.

Classification: LCC BH221.G3 A44 2017 | DDC 701/.17—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008989

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Anneme

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

Introduction

A Peculiar Experiment

One day in 1905 a German schoolteacher by the name of Rudolf Schulze gathered a group of children in the courtyard of an elementary school in Leipzig in order to conduct a peculiar experiment. The school was an ordinary elementary school, a Volksschule in the sixth precinct of the city. The children were all girls, aged eleven and twelve. Arranging them in three rows, Schulze first asked the girls to close their eyes while he placed a picture before them. Once the picture was in place, he told them to open their eyes again and to pay attention. Within the next few seconds, another teacher documented the girls’ response to the picture using a camera placed behind it. Schulze meticulously repeated the same procedure twelve times for twelve pictures, which ranged from illustrations from children’s books to depictions of Christ on the Cross and from pastoral landscapes to scenes from medieval mythology.¹

The following year Schulze published the results of the experiment (figs. 0.1, 0.2). He had also asked four adults—another teacher, a learned lady, a scholar, and an artist—to describe the emotional expressions (Ausdrucksbewegungen) documented in the photographs taken in the schoolyard. In addition, the four adults tried to match the photographs with the pictures that the girls had viewed during the experiment. He reported that with two exceptions out of forty-eight possibilities, the adults correctly guessed which picture belonged with which photograph. This was the result for which Schulze, an ambitious advocate for educational reform, had been hoping.² The subjects of the experiment were at the terminus of their education, which meant that, given their age, gender, and position in the lowest level of the strictly hierarchical German education system, they had no hope of advancing to a higher level where they could pursue more ambitious intellectual goals. Yet, Schulze argued, the experiment proved that even these most unpromising of students demonstrated an intelligence—albeit an unconventional one. This intelligence manifested itself not in the girls’ facility with spoken or written language but rather in the minute muscular movements evident in their facial and bodily expressions. These expressions had their own nonverbal language: after witnessing the richness of emotions in the photographs, Schulze pleaded with his reader, who could possibly speak of the cognitive rawness of the ‘insensate masses’ again?³ If these subjects were in possession of an unconventional kind of intelligence, shouldn’t the education system be changed to address it?

Figure 0.1. The group responds to the picture Storks. One girl’s response over time is illustrated in twelve additional photographs. Rudolf Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim künstlerischen Genießen (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 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 künstlerischen Genießen (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 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 für experimentelle Pädagogik 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.⁴ Schulze’s technique for arranging the children’s expressions along an x-axis of arousal and repose and a y-axis of pleasure and displeasure, for example, had been modeled after the tridimensional theory of feeling developed by Wilhelm Wundt in his world-famous experimental psychology laboratory in the same city (figs. 0.3, 0.4).⁵ Following Wundtian theory even more faithfully in subsequent experiments, Schulze measured the involuntary muscular contractions—that is, the breathing, pulse, and sweating—of his subjects in an attempt to arrive at a more rigorous method of analyzing their response to images (fig. 0.5).⁶ A few years later, when Schulze repeated the experiment, he used film instead of photography, a technology that was more appropriate, he argued, for capturing the temporal unfolding of movements across the faces, hands, and bodies of his subjects.⁷

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.⁸ Rehearsing this logic of duality, Schulze’s experiment assumed that forms, lines, and colors of pictures produced immediate, reflex-like emotional effects on their recipients. Furthermore, Schulze insisted, these emotional effects were determined by the physical changes in the body. The horizontality of a landscape painting, for example, forced the eye muscles to move sideways rather than up and down, resulting in the expression of calm pleasure (fig. 0.6).⁹ Or, the vertical orientation of the Cross in a Crucifixion scene turned the children’s eyes upward, compelling them to assume a pious pose (fig. 0.7).¹⁰ This immediacy between form and affect had important implications for a pedagogue with ambitions to change the system. If a given formal quality consistently produced a certain emotion, it followed that this relationship could be predicted and perhaps even manipulated by controlling the formal qualities that gave rise to it. This also meant that if the girls in the experiment had difficulty learning with words and numbers, they could be taught with forms, whose physiological effects were seemingly more powerful. It was for this reason that Schulze compared his own analyses to those undertaken in the 1860s by the French physiologist Duchenne de Boulogne, who had attempted to induce emotional expressions artificially—at least in cadavers and more suggestible subjects—by applying electrical currents to the appropriate facial muscles (fig. 0.8).¹¹ Schulze had simply replaced Duchenne’s 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-Lösung). Alfred Lehmann, Die Hauptgesetze des menschlichen Gefühlslebens (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 künstlerischen Genießen (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 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 Pädagogik (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 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 künstlerischen Genießen (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1906), 23.

Figure 0.7. The girls’ response to Crucifixion is compared to Duchenne de Boulogne’s experiments. Rudolf Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim künstlerischen Genießen (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1906), 22.

As peculiar as Schulze’s experiment may seem to us today, it would not have appeared so at the turn of the twentieth century. In fact, Schulze’s 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).¹² The former was to steer this field away from abstract concepts such as the beautiful and the sublime toward what psychophysics considered the building blocks of lived experience: impressions, sensations, feelings, and effects. For comparative purposes, Schulze had also photographed the facial expressions of the same girls as they ate sugar, lemon, and aloe, and the similarities between their response to the pleasant sight of a painting and to the pleasant taste of sugar seemed to him to be unmistakable (fig. 0.9).¹³ Schulze thus sought to reestablish the forgotten connection between two meanings of taste: the exalted faculty for aesthetic discrimination that so many philosophers had theorized and its more corporal twin that had been historically depreciated as the basest and the most vulgar of the senses. Schulze’s experiment was aesthetics from below in action. It demonstrated how aesthetics could address lived, embodied feeling by surrendering its lofty position next to philosophy and the arts and descending to an ordinary schoolyard.¹⁴

•

Implicit in Schulze’s peculiar experiment were questions that have a long history in Western intellectual life. Is all legitimate knowledge the product of thought? Or can the body’s physical exchanges with the world produce reliable knowledge without recourse to language, concepts, propositions, or representations? Once certain explanatory frameworks became entrenched—mind and body, object and subject, particular and universal, or cause and effect—the 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 cognitio sensitiva, a sensuous cognition analogous to reason.¹⁵ On the other, this other cognition remained at best an alibi and at worst a handmaiden to its intellectual counterpart. It was in this kind of incommensurability that Immanuel Kant sensed the scandal of human reason: even in the absence of the treacherous authorities so detested by the Enlightenment, reason had a way of setting up traps for the mind and leading itself astray.¹⁶

Figure 0.8. Girls respond to Rumpelstilskin. Rudolf Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim künstlerischen Genießen (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1906), 28.

Figure 0.9. Facial expressions of the girls as they experience sugar (top), lemon (middle), and aloe (bottom). Rudolf Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim künstlerischen Genießen (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1906), 20.

Yet in the course of the long nineteenth century, some intellectuals, as wary of idealism as of incipient materialisms, claimed to have found a way out of this troubling conundrum. What if, they asked, the human body was more promising from an epistemological point of view than the mind? What if Western rationality could be constructed anew upon an alternative epistemological principle so that the concept of reason would not be wholly absorbed by the concept of the mind?¹⁷ And, some of them even wondered, what if the boundaries of the mind did not start and end with the subject but started blurring into the subject’s surroundings? This book is the history of the moment between the middle of the nineteenth century and the beginning of World War II, a period during which such questions gave experiential knowledge a provisional legitimacy if not complete equality with more established modes of knowledge. As Raymond Williams has reminded us, experience, a word etymologically related to experiment, developed as having two interrelated meanings: if the term signified, on the one hand, knowledge gathered from past events, on the other, it referred to the fullest, most open, most active kind of consciousness, one that incorporated thought but was distinct from it.¹⁸ Others have demonstrated how experience has historically been granted authority as a self-evident, unquestionable foundational ground.¹⁹ While this idea about the epistemological legitimacy of experience appeared across the West, as I will explain, it acquired a unique saliency in German-speaking lands. The experience that became the focus of this particular epistemological project was not just any experience: even though it was described as lived, embodied, and immediate, it was imagined to be structured by the body’s movements in response to stimuli—even when the response might be in potentia.

I will therefore use a phrase of my own invention, kinaesthetic knowing, to refer to the ratiocination associated with kinesis, the movements of the body. This alternative epistemological principle is the central protagonist of this book. How did kinaesthetic knowing emerge in the nineteenth century as a form of knowledge that many imagined could rival already accepted forms of knowledge? What accounted for its salience? What were the implications—not only epistemological but also political and ethical—of this epistemological project? And to what ends did its advocates attempt to institutionalize it?

The coinage kinaesthetic knowing is useful here for two reasons. First, it helps to distinguish the rise of experiential knowledge in this particular context from comparable historical episodes. To the extent that I explore the history of an alternative mode of Western rationality in which the lines between experience and experiment as well as those between knowledge and know-how become blurry, my account is similar to Pamela Smith’s exploration of artisanal epistemology in early modern scientific experimentation, Matthew Hunter’s account of wicked intelligence in seventeenth-century London, and Otto Sibum’s discussion of the role placed by gestural knowledge in Victorian physics.²⁰ Yet these histories are also very different from the one that I chronicle in this book: not only because their protagonists belong to other geographical or temporal frameworks but also because kinaesthetic knowing was put to social use in an entirely different manner. As I will argue throughout the book, kinaesthetic knowing was, first and foremost, a pedagogical project. The figures who play central roles in this history—the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, the architect August Endell, artists and pedagogues such as Hermann Obrist, Wilhelm von Debschitz, László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee, as well as Rudolf Schulze, whose experiment opens the book—invented new pedagogical techniques with the conviction that there existed a nondiscursive, nonconceptual way of knowing that could nonetheless compete in its rigor with reasoning realized through language, concepts, or logic. Many of them believed that this other way of knowing would be crucial for cultivating the kinds of subjects demanded by modernity. While, for reasons that I will explain below, this cultivation was considered primarily aesthetic, it was not confined to disciplinary contexts in which the arts were central. Rather it was employed at every level of the educational system, especially after the Unification of German states in 1871 as a nation-state governed from Berlin. Schoolteachers like Schulze who wanted to reform the curriculum by instituting drawing classes in elementary and secondary schools, bureaucrats who established the first education programs at German museums, and professors who introduced the slide lecture to universities cited the epistemological distinction between discursive and nondiscursive knowledge as often as artists, architects, and critics.

Second, the phrase kinaesthetic knowing synthetically encompasses the many terms—many of them untranslatable—that were historically coined to describe it. Before the temporal framework that is the focus of this book, we find G. W. Leibniz’s idea of unconscious appetitions, Christian Wolff’s sensuous knowledge (sinnliche Erkenntnis), J. G. Sulzer’s thought of the senses (sinnliches as opposed to spekulatives Denken), and Kant’s discussion of representations that we have without being conscious of them, as well as the aforementioned sensuous cognition (cognitio sensitiva) as an analogue to reason (analogon rationis) coined by Baumgarten.²¹ In the nineteenth century, the publisher Georg Hirth called this other way of knowing unconscious consciousness (unbewußtes Bewußtsein), instinctive logic (instinktive Logik), and hidden perception (verborgenes Gemerk).²² Anglo-American thinkers with an empiricist bent named it the muscle sense, because they believed that it was a form of reasoning achieved with the aid of the musculature.²³ Meanwhile, William James and Bertrand Russell, following in the footsteps of the English philosopher John Grote, adopted the phrases knowledge of or by acquaintance and knowledge-about or knowledge by description.²⁴ If the most frequently used label for what I call kinaesthetic knowing was the notoriously untranslatable German word Anschauung, a presumed direct and intuitive intimacy with the world through the senses prior to intellectual cogitation, the most poetic must have been Wilhelm Dilthey’s equally untranslatable silent thinking (schweigendes Denken), a phrase that uses the peculiarly active German verb for the passive act of being quiet.²⁵

As I will show in the next chapter, the idea that there might be a form of sentience or even intelligence in kinesis had existed previously, but it started to gain both momentum and a particular valence starting in the middle of the nineteenth century. Especially influential in this history was a distinction made by the formidable German physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, who deployed two commonly used German verbs for knowing to evoke a conceptual pair akin to the Aristotelian epistêmê and technê.²⁶ In his popular lectures delivered in the middle of the nineteenth century, Helmholtz distinguished between Wissen, propositional, discursive, and conceptual knowledge that was conventionally understood to be the ideal of rigorous science, and Kennen, nondiscursive, nonconceptual knowledge obtained by experiential acquaintance.²⁷ Helmholtz noted that Kennen had been discussed previously under a variety of other names such as unconscious ratiocination (unbewußte Vernunftmässigkeit) or sensible intelligibility (sinnliche Verständlichkeit), but he now identified a distinct operation at work in this other way of knowing:²⁸

We might possibly, in opposition to logical induction [logische Induction] which reduces a question to clearly-defined universal propositions, call this kind of reasoning aesthetic induction [or artistic induction, künstlerische Induction], because it is most conspicuous in the higher class of works of art. It is an essential part of an artist’s talent to reproduce by words, by form, by colour, or by music, the external indications of a character or a state of mind, and by a kind of instinctive intuition [instinctiver Anschauung], uncontrolled by any definable rule, to seize the necessary steps by which we pass from one mood to another.²⁹

There was not much surprising in Helmholtz’s claim that Wissen proceeded by inducing universals from particulars according to the laws of logic, but what was the aesthetic induction that he claimed was the modus operandi of Kennen? On one level, he explained, logical and aesthetic induction were similar: logical induction was the result of the syllogistic reasoning of the mind just as aesthetic induction was of the body. The difference in the case of Kennen was that Helmholtz attributed the unbridgeable gap in induction between the particular and the universal—a gap that none other than Francis Bacon had acknowledged required a leap—to an elusive unconscious.³⁰ Crucially, this unconscious was, on the one hand, the mind’s mirror and, on the other hand, its other. This meant that Kennen played the role of the doppelgänger of reason. For example, the relationship between cause and effect—which was linked at midcentury to the urgently political question of whether or not there was telos in the universe—could be bracketed in the alternative epistemic realm of Kennen but not in Wissen. To put it in Kantian terms, in Helmholtz’s Kennen the antinomies of reason that amounted to a scandal could be temporarily suspended if not altogether eliminated. Furthermore, Helmholtz suggested in these lectures that rigorous science was not exclusively in the jurisdiction of Wissen. One day, he speculated without specifying exactly how, Kennen might reach a level of accuracy and precision that had hitherto only been attributed to discursive and conceptual knowledge.³¹ In fact, he suggested, rigorous aesthetic induction was already practiced regularly in one area: the arts.

It is in this light that the centrality of aesthetics in this epistemological history should be understood. Helmholtz anticipated many nineteenth-century thinkers who would argue that aesthetics offered unique epistemological possibilities but only if it could be studied scientifically. Hence the ascendancy of Kunstwissenschaft at the end of the nineteenth century: a scientific study of art that resembled neither the kind of art history that relied on biography, philology, and connoisseurship nor philosophical aesthetics. In the words of Max Dessoir, the editor of one of the most important journals dedicated to the subject of Kunstwissenschaft, while this science, just like any other, required the explanation of facts, its unique challenge was to shape the freest, the most subjective, and frequently the most synthetic of human activity in the direction of necessity, objectivity, and analysis.³² The ambitiousness of this goal should not be underestimated. By the end of the century it even seemed conceivable to philosophers like Dilthey that the entirety of the human sciences could be predicated on the foundation of what Helmholtz called Kennen rather than on Wissen. For a brief moment in history, kinaesthetic knowing was poised to play as foundational a role for the human sciences as mathematics had for the natural sciences.

On the one hand, then, this turn to an alternative epistemic principle based on the body rather than the mind was fueled by an intellectual agenda: an aversion to Hegelian Idealism and the emergence of epistemology (Erkenntnistheorie) as a distinct field of inquiry in the nineteenth century.³³ The field of aesthetics held promise in this intellectual environment, but only if understood in the sense implicit in its etymological origin aesthesis, perception of the world by the senses. This was what Fechner had meant by aesthetics from below. By contrast, philosophical aesthetics, or aesthetics from above, was anathema. As the architectural theorist Richard Streiter saw it, at a time when systematic and dialectical thinking were seen as suspect, philosophy was dethroned, and the inductive methods of the natural sciences had proven to be extraordinarily successful, philosophical aesthetics had lost all credibility.³⁴ Others were less kind. The publisher and critic Hirth’s distaste for philosophical aesthetics was so impassioned that he described it as a plant of prejudice that had for too long grown on philosophical manure, while Hugo Eckener, an erstwhile Wundt student, denounced with equal vigor the oracular profoundness and unfruitful conceptual fissures of speculative aesthetics for giving his contemporaries an upset stomach.³⁵

Instead of philosophy, those who aspired to restore aesthetics now looked to psychology, which, as I will explain in the next chapter, was seen at the end of the nineteenth century as a model science—not so much as a natural or human science but as a field uniquely positioned to bridge the disciplinary divide. Even though there was no shortage of debate about the disciplinary project of psychology at this moment (in this sense, it would be more accurate to speak of psychologies), advocates of aesthetics from below almost universally subscribed to a psychophysical logic—of sensation and stimulus, for example—if not to all the methods of experimental psychology. As the German physician Hans Kurella put it, introducing the Danish pathologist Carl Georg Lange’s work, the new aesthetics had to be scientific (wissenschaftlich) and sensualistic (sensualistisch) in order to achieve its goal of "allowing artists, connoisseurs, and the public to really sense [empfinden] and feel [fühlen] when confronted with an artwork."³⁶ Reporting from Germany, the American psychologist G. S. Hall was more skeptical about the prospects of such scientific aesthetics, but he still found it more meaty than the inane speculations about the nature of the Beautiful and Sublime which [filled] so many pages of text-books on aesthetics.³⁷

On the other hand, however, it would be a mistake to consider this history a purely intellectual one. The rise of kinaesthetic knowing was also closely related to changes in the German educational system and debates about the kinds of subjects that it should cultivate. In fact, those who theorized the possibility of another way of knowing in the second half of the nineteenth century did so with a retrospective eye on the ideal of Bildung, that unique concept denoting both institutional instruction and individual self-cultivation.³⁸ Formulated in the late eighteenth century and established in the early nineteenth century upon this ideal of perfectibility, the education system was arguably Prussia’s most important export (which explains, at least in part, this book’s geographical focus).³⁹ Even though it was intended to cultivate an enlightened citizenry, this system remained inflexibly exclusive and hierarchical even at the end of the century. Schools such as the Volksschule in which Schulze conducted his experiment occupied the lowest possible stratum, while the Gymnasium was the guaranteed path to university training, civil service, and membership in the educated middle classes (Bildungsbürgertum).⁴⁰

Nineteenth-century Bildung’s attempts to cultivate a very particular kind of subject was a thoroughly political project. According to Wilhelm von Humboldt, linguist, philosopher, and a primary architect of the Prussian education system, self-examination through contemplation was an essential attribute of this subject. Education was understood as a process of disciplining the self such that one could learn to focus inward in a manner entirely independently from external sensations. In fact, attempts to preserve Bildung throughout the nineteenth century were frequently defended with the argument that only the abstract laws of neo-humanistic and philhellenistic learning would produce a much-desired inwardness (Innerlichkeit).⁴¹ Informed equally by Enlightenment ideas and techniques of Pietist introspection, Humboldt was against the protean and impressionable selfhood suggested by French sensationalism and British empiricism on philosophical as well as nationalistic grounds. He was so adamant in his opposition, in fact, that when he visited Paris in 1798, he complained to his friend Friedrich Schiller that "[the French] have no idea, not even the slightest inkling of anything other than appearance; pure volition, the true good, the moi, pure self-consciousness—all this is totally incomprehensible to them.⁴² Priding himself on his ability to continue his train of thought even while carrying out a long conversation without having any appearance of absence of mind," Humboldt, like many of his Romantic contemporaries, saw the self as a will-centered stronghold that resisted the onslaught of external sensations:⁴³

I think it always better when the spiritual life within flows outward, than when, reversely, that which is without flows inward. It seems, it is true, as if the soul could only be enriched and fertilized from without; but this is a mere delusion. What is not already in a man cannot come to him from without, and whatever appears to be derived by him from some external source is nothing but an accidental stimulus, of which the spirit avails itself for the development of its own proper resources.⁴⁴

Such a model had a practical rationale as well as a political one. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the possibility that the self was nothing but a loosely bound conglomeration of sensations jeopardized notions of private property and moral responsibility, to say nothing about political authority.⁴⁵ It was with an eye on this volatile political milieu that Johann Gottlieb Fichte, another influential theorist of Bildung and the first rector of the University of Berlin, posited an introspective, contemplative, and uniquely German self as the absolute Subject and the spring of a science of knowledge at the end of the eighteenth century.⁴⁶ Language—dead ones as well as those alive—was crucial in the constitution of such a subject. Intuitive cognition acquired through sensual acquaintance (Kenntnis) did not count as real knowledge (Erkenntnis) in Fichte’s eyes. Just as speech was necessary for the child to awaken from a state in which all impressions of the surrounding world press upon him at the same time, mingling in a dull chaos in which no one thing obtrudes from the general tumult, language was required for the moment of self-reflection so that one could lift oneself out of obscurity and confusion into clarity and determinacy.⁴⁷ It was thus that the study of languages and hermeneutic activity were given central positions in curricula in German institutions of learning throughout the nineteenth century.

If there had always been a Protestant subtext to Bildung’s unitary, will-centered model of selfhood in the nineteenth century, that subtext became more pronounced in the context of the anti-Catholicism that became official policy after 1871. During the so-called Kulturkampf, when the Prussian government took legislative measures to strip the German Catholic church of its economic and social influence over the Catholic minorities who occupied the margins of the newly unified German territory, the impressionable self that the likes of Humboldt and Fichte had found so objectionable after the French Revolution was conflated with a kind of selfhood associated with Catholicism.⁴⁸ As the historian David Blackbourn has demonstrated, in 1876, at the height of the Kulturkampf, when three eight-year-old girls claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary in the woods of the provincial town of Marpingen, for instance, it was their impressionability and suggestibility that became the center of public debate.⁴⁹ After a massive Catholic piety revival movement at midcentury, Catholic subjects were portrayed as uneducated, backward, effeminate, sentimental, and thus susceptible to political manipulation.⁵⁰ As much as this subject fascinated Protestant observers, they saw it as the antithesis of reason.⁵¹ Catholicism, by reason of its multiplied dogmas, its puerile ceremonies, its miracles, and its pilgrimages, places itself outside the atmosphere of modern thought, wrote the Belgian economist E. L. V. de Laveleye, while Protestantism, by reason of its simplicity, and its various forms, capable as they are of indefinite improvement, can adapt itself thereto.⁵² If, as Helmut Walser Smith and other historians have pointed out, anti-Catholicism was an important component of Germany’s nation-building after the Unification, the suggestible self forged in the Protestant imagination in the mold of Catholic stereotypes should be considered a necessary foil to the unitary model of selfhood historically promoted by the Prussian state’s educational policies.⁵³

Moreover, the attributes of the suggestible Catholic were transferred—with backing from the Catholic Church, which viewed the popular piety movements as bulwark against revolutionary impulses that had resurfaced repeatedly throughout the nineteenth century—to the masses. In the formulation of Blackbourn, it was especially "German Catholics who [were] cast below in the role of the people."⁵⁴ Observing the pilgrims flocking to sites of Marian apparitions, Protestant commentators expressed fear that the characteristically Catholic impressionability would spread like a contagion. They were not alone in their wariness. In his widely influential work on crowds, for example, the French physician Gustave Le Bon, fearful that the masses had been rehearsing the revolution of 1789 over and over again in the course of the nineteenth century, wrote of the impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgment and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments of such masses.⁵⁵ Crowds were inherently susceptible to being keenly impressed, as if hypnotized; as in sensationalist philosophy, individuals in masses became automata no longer guided by their own wills. The danger seemed to be especially serious if the masses were under the influence of such new technologies as photography and film.⁵⁶ This description of the workings of the mind of a child at the movie theater captures the kind of selfhood that caused so much anxiety at the turn of the twentieth century:

Being habituated to the scurrying, twitching, dithering pictures on the flickering screen slowly and surely disintegrates his mental and his moral solidity. First of all, one gets used to abruptly jumping from one image to another; one loses the slow steadiness of sequential presentation [Vorstellung] or the ability of cohesion, which is the prerequisite of all sound judgment. Secondly, one gets used to pursuing the arbitrary grouping of images and to following them submissively [willenlos]; one can no longer follow the logical sequence of a continuous thought, which binds individual presentations together. . . . The mere absorption of pictorial presentations, which are only arbitrary and do not logically or psychologically adhere together out of necessity (as in a real drama, story, or a scientific argument), amounts to the surrendering of the soul. . . . Thirdly, as a result of the fast scurrying of images, one becomes accustomed to taking in an approximation of an impression; the images in their singularity are not made clear and conscious. . . . The regular cinema viewer thinks only in crude, approximate presentations. Whatever image lights up his mind’s eye absorbs his entire attention, he does not review or rethink it any more. . . . When the presentation is crude and the emphasis is on affects, he has already declined beyond rescue.⁵⁷

It was with the goal of aligning this unwieldy model of selfhood found in a wide variety of marginal subjects with the ideal of Bildung that intellectuals in post-Unification Germany resorted to kinaesthetic knowing at the end of the nineteenth century. In doing so, they frequently used a term that, in fact, had always been part of the Prussian ideal of education: Anschauung. Despite Kant’s, Fichte’s, and Schelling’s discussion of intellektuelle Anschauung, an adamantly intellectual faculty, Anschauung maintained its meaning throughout the Enlightenment as an immediate and intimate apprehension of the world without the aid of abstract or discursive concepts or a reproductive imagination.⁵⁸ In the formulation of the American psychologist James Baldwin, Anschauung referred in pedagogy to the grasp of knowledge through the use of the senses.⁵⁹ Pedagogues had been defending the didactic efficacy of Anschauung and nontextual learning at least since it had become possible to reproduce images mechanically; the object lesson (called Anschauungsunterricht in German) offered by nature had been especially important to Protestant theologians eager to prove the existence of God without Scripture.⁶⁰ But, above all, it was in the new pedagogy advocated by the Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and his student Friedrich Froebel at the turn of the nineteenth century that Anschauung became a salient term.

Form played a critical role in this pedagogy. Pestalozzi and Froebel argued that children had an inherent capacity to learn through form as well as through word and number.⁶¹ In fact, formal structures such as lines, angles, and curves enabled in children a readiness in gaining sense-impressions, as well as skill of hand, of which the effect will be to make everything that comes within the sphere of observation, gradually clear and plain.⁶² According to Pestalozzi, the absence of a method of instruction that focused upon the question of form was not only "a defect but rather the defect in the structure of human knowledge."⁶³ Pestalozzi and Froebel continued to occupy an important place in pedagogy throughout the nineteenth century, but their agenda was taken up with renewed enthusiasm after the Unification. Whereas Pestalozzi’s project to make abstract thought immediately available to senses had been confined to the earlier years of schooling, knowledge based on Anschauung permeated every level of the educational system after the Unification.

It was along with Anschauung, then, that the concept of form came to occupy such an important role in discussions of modernity. In this sense, the title of