Glossary of Morphology [1st ed.] 9783030513238, 9783030513245

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Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis Series Editor: Alessandro Sarti

Federico Vercellone Salvatore Tedesco   Editors

Glossary of Morphology

Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis Series Editor Alessandro Sarti, CAMS Center for Mathematics, CNRS-EHESS, Paris, France

Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis is an interdisciplinary book series which aims to face the questions of emergence, individuation and becoming of forms from several different points of view: those of pure and applied mathematics, of computational algorithms, of biology, of neurophysiology, of cognitive and social structures. The set of questions above concerns all the manifestations of Being, all the manifestations of Life. At the heart of contemporary embryogenesis lies an essential question: How can form emerge from the constant, chaotic flow? How can a sequence of purely informational elements — an a-signifying combination of chemical substances organized in the DNA molecule — evolve into the highly complex and structured forms of the living organism? A similar question can be asked when we deal with the morphogenesis of vision in neural systems and with the creation of evolving synthetic images, since digital technology makes possible the simulation of emergent processes both of living bodies and of visual forms. Finally the very idea that abstract structures of meaning could be captured in terms of morphodynamic evolution opens the door to new models of semiolinguistics, semiotic morphodynamics, and cognitive grammars. An entire heritage of ideas and concepts has to be reconsidered in order to face new and challenging problems: the theoretical framework opened by Goethe with the introduction of the word “Morphogenesis” is developed by D’Arcy Thompson in “On Growth and Form”, it is reorganized with new theoretical insights by the classical structuralism of Levi-Strauss and formalized by the dynamical structuralism of René Thom. The introduction of the post-structuralists ideas of individuation (in Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze) and plasticity of structures builds a bridge to contemporary problems of morphogenesis at a physical, biological, social and transindividual level. The objective of this book series is to provide suitable theoretical and practical tools for describing evolutionary phenomena at the level of Free boundary problems in Mathematics, Embryogenesis, Image Evolution in Visual Perception, Visual Models of Morphogenesis, Neuromathematics, Autonomy and Self-Organization, Morphogenetic Emergence and Individuation, Theoretical Biology, Cognitive Morphodynamics, Cities Evolution, Semiotics, Subjectivation processes, Social movements as well as new frontiers of Aesthetics. To submit a proposal or request further information, please use the PDF Proposal Form or contact directly: Dr. Thomas Ditzinger ([email protected])

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11247

Federico Vercellone Salvatore Tedesco •

Editors

Glossary of Morphology

123

Editors Federico Vercellone Dipartimento di Filosofia e Scienze dell’Educazione Università di Torino via Sant’Ottavio 20 Torino, Italy

Salvatore Tedesco Scienze Umanistiche Università di Palermo Palermo, Italy

ISSN 2195-1934 ISSN 2195-1942 (electronic) Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis ISBN 978-3-030-51323-8 ISBN 978-3-030-51324-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51324-5 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Salvatore Tedesco and Federico Vercellone

1

Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Salvatore Tedesco and Federico Vercellone

23

Analogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carmelo Calì

29

Artefact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Peppino Ortoleva

33

Artifex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Amalia Maria Sofia Salvestrini

37

Artistic Morphology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Federico Vercellone

41

Atmosphere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tonino Griffero

45

Attractors/Basin of Attraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Francesco La Mantia

49

Biopolitics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Giovanni Leghissa

55

Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andrea Borsari

61

Character/State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Salvatore Tedesco

65

Chreod . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Francesco La Mantia

69

v

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Classics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Giuseppe Cambiano

75

Code (Biological) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alessandro Minelli

79

Code (Juridical) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pier Giuseppe Monateri

83

Colour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Luca Farulli

85

Complexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mauro Ceruti

89

Contour/Outline/Silhouette . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carmelo Calì

93

Dance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Roberto Giambrone

97

Deformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Carmelo Calì Degeneration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Salvatore Tedesco Demography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Hervé Le Bras Development/Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Alessandro Minelli Device . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Massimo Bergamasco Diagrams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Carmelo Calì Diaphane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Anca Vasiliu Drawing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Carmelo Calì Dynamic System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Mauro Ceruti Eidetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Carmelo Calì Emergence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Salvatore Tedesco

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Enactivism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Antonino Bondì Epidemiology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Paolo Vineis Epigenesis/Preformation(ism) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Alessandro Ottaviani Epigenetic Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Sara Franceschelli Epigenetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Paolo Vineis Ethics of Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 Gregorio Tenti Evidence/Intuibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Carmelo Calì Extension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Pietro Corvaja Figuration/Figure/Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 Salvatore Tedesco Folktale, Morphology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 Gianfranco Marrone Food . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Nicola Perullo Form Constancy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 Carmelo Calì Formation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Salvatore Tedesco and Federico Vercellone Formula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Pietro Corvaja Fractal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Francesco La Mantia Generation/Genealogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 Pier Paolo Viazzo Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Paolo Furia Gestalt/Gestalt Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Carmelo Calì

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Graph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Carmelo Calì Groups, Theory of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 Francesco La Mantia Grouping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Carmelo Calì Hermeneutics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Leonardo Samonà Heterogenesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 Alessandro Sarti Historical Form of Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 Federico Vercellone Homology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Salvatore Tedesco Horizon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 Gregorio Tenti Icon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 William John Thomas Mitchell Iconoclash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Federico Vercellone Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Paolo Furia Image/Reproduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271 Federico Vercellone Improvisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 Alessandro Bertinetto Incarnation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 Salvatore Tedesco Individuation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 Alessandro Sarti Intuition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281 Carmelo Calì Isomorphy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 Pietro Corvaja Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 Raffaele Milani

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Legal Formalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291 Pier Giuseppe Monateri Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293 Vallori Rasini Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 Carmelo Calì Mask . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Rosario Perricone Matrix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307 Pietro Corvaja Measure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 Pietro Corvaja Measurement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311 Carmelo Calì Melody . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315 Alessandro Bertinetto Metamorphosis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 Valeria Maggiore Metaphor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 Alberto Martinengo Mimesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 Christoph Wulf Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 Carmelo Calì Morpheme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 Francesco La Mantia Morphology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337 Salvatore Tedesco and Federico Vercellone Museum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347 Danilo Eccher Myth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 Federico Vercellone Niche . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355 Salvatore Tedesco Ontogeny/Phylogeny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359 Alessandro Minelli

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Organ/Organic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365 Alessandro Ottaviani Organic Limit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371 Vallori Rasini Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375 Carmelo Calì Pathos/Pathic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379 Salvatore Tedesco Pattern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385 Francesco La Mantia Perception/Percept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393 Carmelo Calì Phenomenology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397 Elio Franzini Phenomenon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401 Rosa Maria Lupo Physiognomics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407 Federica La Manna Picture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 413 Carmelo Calì Plasticity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417 Valeria Maggiore Plot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421 Roberto Gilodi Polarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425 Alberto Giacomelli Political Morphology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431 Furio Ferraresi Political Theology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435 Francesca Monateri Project/Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 439 Andrea Mecacci Projection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443 Pietro Corvaja Public Art/New Monumentality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 445 Federico Vercellone

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Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447 Paolo Furia Representation, Internal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 451 Carmelo Calì Rhythm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 455 Alessandro Bertinetto Semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459 Francesco La Mantia Shape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465 Carmelo Calì Show . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 469 Chiara Simonigh Sketch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475 Antonella Trotta Space/Place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 479 Paolo Furia Structural Morphodynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 483 Alessandro Sarti Structural Stability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 487 Francesco La Mantia Structure/Structuralism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 491 Gianfranco Marrone Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 497 Federico Vercellone Symbol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 499 Mario Kumekawa Symmetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 503 Valeria Maggiore Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 507 Gregorio Tenti Topological Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 513 Francesco La Mantia Type/Typology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 517 Salvatore Tedesco Umwelt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521 Salvatore Tedesco

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Vision, Form of - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 525 Federico Vercellone Visual Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529 Charlotte Klonk Visualization/Visibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 533 Carmelo Calì Wax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 537 Pietro Conte

Introduction Salvatore Tedesco and Federico Vercellone

Starting from Goethe Currently, there exists no discipline whose specific boundaries could be defined as morphology. Nevertheless, it is possible to trace out its history in ample terms and to define its scope broadly by understanding it as the place where the semantics of forms are defined and where they are connected to a reference image. The central link in the field of morphology is form-image, and it refers to those dynamics of the form and to the dynamic systems that have taken hold in late modernity and that continue to grow today. The morphological event begins with Goethe. It starts not only through the great poet’s instinctual impulse, who for an instant while on his trip to Italy felt essentially like a painter who, by turning seeing into a knowing appropriation, traced out designs to capture an experience. The presupposition behind this type of vision is that the image is a complex structure. The sensible given are organized as something more than just a given: it is a structure whose various articulations are interrelated. In other words, in principle, it is articulation, the link that precedes the discrete being of individual entities. Not coincidentally this is the period when, from Goethe to Fichte, the opening lines of the Gospel of John constitute the big challenge: to conceptualize properly and logically how the logos became flesh, wherein the understanding of these articulations in extenso signifies the production of knowledge. Goethe and Morphology The idea of a morphological science, which has its origins in Goethe, designates a science of the intuition of nature, one that perceives nature as a totality that is revealed through its parts. In other words, a nature that is a self-organizing system that makes itself intelligible through the vision that not only S. Tedesco (B) Dipartimento di Scienze Umanistiche, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, Palermo, Italy e-mail: [email protected] F. Vercellone Dipartimento di Filosofia e Scienze dell’Educazione, Università di Torino, via Sant’Ottavio 20, 10124 Torino, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 F. Vercellone and S. Tedesco (eds.), Glossary of Morphology, Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51324-5_1

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locates it in its superficial morphology but also in its deep structures. The sensible given acquires its significance through the fabric of relations it creates. It is a principle that will come to be shared, in different ways, by Hegel and also by the philological encyclopaedia of Friedrich August Wolf and thus by August Boeckh. Formal Organization thus takes on the guise of a completely scientific and, in a broad sense, political concept by returning to the idea of community. And this is of central significance for morphological science. We are therefore dealing with a presupposition that proposes the concept of form as the principle of intelligibility. Returning to Goethe, the individual components of nature are, in their turn, understood with a glance directed at totality. Each of these components has a reflective nature, referring to an archetypal image that renders its singularity intelligible. The knowledge of the individual entity therefore occurs through the image in which it is rendered true. We are therefore dealing with a knowledge that expands by concentric circles, one that refers to images which, to be recognized, must refer to an icon that acts as a type. This is what Goethe defined as an “originary phenomenon” or what a contemporary author like Mitchell defines as a “meta-picture”. In short, the images are supported by schema that precede them and make them intelligible. Here the lessons of Neoplatonism influence Goethe by determining—in a manner similar to what occurs in structuralism—the idea of an absent structure that constitutes the premise for actually present things. As Olaf Breidbach notes, “Die demonstratio ad oculos wird damit zu der Bestimmung, in der sich jedes Wahrnemen und damit jede Erkenntnis zu sichern vermag [The demonstratio ad oculos thus becomes the determination through which every truth and thus every cognition is secured]” (Breidbach 2006: 304). Within this framework, one of the fundamental concepts of Goethe’s thought can be understood—that of metamorphosis (cf. Breidbach 2006). Goethe’s metamorphosis indicates a development that is conceivable as such, that is, as an extension of the same, only as it proceeds from an originary model—from an archetype that makes all derivatives intelligible as ectypes. In short, this passage reveals a fundamental morphological principle: all knowledge is always also self recognition. This is a decisive overturning of Kantianism that leads to a kind of homology between mind and nature (Breidbach 2006: 300). It thus bears within itself an intrinsic aesthetic signature, as one learns from neuroscience and also from the concept of niche elaborated in the field of biology. Knowledge does not have an alienating nature, and in fact is always the principle of creation for a worldenvironment. It creates a kind of structure or semantic field that leads to its final outcomes in visual studies, to the idea of a real “science of images” conceived as an extensive concept that contemplates and joins all of the fields of iconic knowledge. All of this informs us of the fact that, from the beginning, we are not dealing with an unwarranted confusion of images and discourse, and thus a possible confusion among their respective logoi, but with an unavoidable commingling of the two fields. Metamorphosis thus characterizes the step of modifying nature that allows the archetype to appear in the background as the element that permits and determines the auto-poetic development of nature. It is evident that all of this comprises a broad extension of the field through which one moves from art to science and from science to art. In this way, a doctor and painter such as Carl Gustav Carus, who was very

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close to Goethe, conceives the knowledge of nature and landscape painting as one intricate formation that exhibits the deep structures of nature by making them knowable (Carus 1815–1824). The historia naturalis is expressed and makes itself conceivable through the landscape that, through its own features, exhibits its own historical event. The naturalistic approach need not, however, be misleading. In the context of every morphological consideration, there is also a reference to its historical index of consideration, such that the forms are marked by time and belong in some way to the historical consciousness that crosses through them. It is an index that makes sure that the modern form, from Michelangelo’s unfinished to the Frühromantik, is traversed by time, that constitutes its generating moment; while, on the other hand, the insertion of temporality indefinitely prolongs the morphogenesis, ensuring that its outcome is never definitive. The Rise of Dynamic Systems The issue of formal dynamics, in its intrinsic crossing from art to science, and vice versa, is set forth in its most recognizable form during the Frühromantik period. It is positioned both on the strictly poetological side and on the side of natural evolution. Friedrich Schlegel and Fredrick von Hardenberg, known by his pen name Novalis, are the thinkers who promote this dialogue that supports art as much as it does nature. And if the first claims, in Fragment 116 of the journal “Athenaeum”, that romantic poetry is a “universal and progressive” poetry, which promotes itself as the highest form of Moderne’s most salient characteristic, that of dynamis, or in other words, by the structure and by the features of the epoch always in fieri which must correspond to a poetic form bestowed with the same characteristics—a form that is able to conform to all of the meanderings of reality, to seep ever more deeply into the cracks of modernity in order to give it a form; it is the novel, on the other hand, the new epos of modernity, which is capable of identifying and receiving within itself the romantic ineffable. The novel is nothing but the result of an intense fragmentation of a reality which arrives at its extreme outcome, to the point where the particular is so particularized that it becomes unobtainable. The essence of modernity is thus constituted by that which Nietzsche would define as a “monadological revolution”. Similarly, Novalis, in Allgemeines Brouillon, holds that the development of nature and even of creation itself are still in fieri on the pathway that leads from nature to what lies beyond nature itself; he thus prefigures, in a visionary way, the daily “psychifying” of reality that tends paradoxically to implement itself in its very representation. It is a passage that negates the idea of an aesthetic appearance by being understood as the realm of artistic fiction. All of this shows how at the centre of morphological knowledge one always has to deal with structures of self-recognition, and moreover, with the design of worlds-environments. One can therefore claim that morphology deals with the progressive assumption of a psychic trait by reality, and therefore, with a transposition of an exterior, physical space into another more familiar and known field. The definition of this space is essentially relational. And thus, a web is configured ever more intricately with connections and relations. The psychologizing-spiritualizing of reality is determined and understood as an ever more intense expansion of the relations that cross through it. It promises a “breakthrough” of the real that is realized today through the media

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of images, a passage through which reality is elevated in the direction of the type or of the idea. Even the new media, more or less notably, overturn the physical in the idea, according to a movement that seems to follow the teaching of Goethe. In order to express it in very general terms, one can say that the image expresses all of its own virtuality by basically functioning as the recognizable and yet implied model across the spectrum of its manifestations, from fashion to medical imaging. In short, the image tends to express an icon, and this grounds the possibility for the recognition and the self-recognition that it expresses. The Aestheticization of Science Moreover, this heralds a principle of the aestheticization of scientific knowledge that continues with Ernst Haeckel and his radiolaria—the tiny marine organisms, which he presented in comparative tables to demonstrate a kind of morphological continuum in the development of nature that stood alongside the properly evolutionary one. As the Kunstformen der Natur attests in particular, the radiolaria—depicted with the purpose of demonstrating the evident parallelism between evolutionary development and morphological development—are reduced to mere scientific illustrations by failing in their primary task. Immediately a reason is given in this context for the aestheticization of knowledge, one strongly indebted to the artistic sensibility of the time and connected to the popular aspect which these images acquire (cf. Breidbach 2006). A fundamental function of the image comes into play here, one already well established in the Western tradition, at least since the Libri Carolini. It is a principle fundamental in itself because the illustration contains in itself, from the beginning, the idea of reproducibility that is qualified on the basis of the pedagogical and popular content of the image itself (see image/reproduction). One can add to this claim that not only did the radiolaria almost instantly make themselves autonomous from the originary scientific context and take on an illustrative and popular dimension, but they even presented themselves autonomously as aesthetic models. This occurred both with Rene Binet’s giant radiolarian on exhibit at the 1901 World’s Fair in Paris, a veritable monument dedicated to Haeckel and to his conception of evolutionism, but also with the Haeckelian medusas revived by Henry Van de Velde and used as biomorphic ornamental motifs on the monument in Jena dedicated to Nietzsche. Not only, therefore, is aesthetics a fundamental component of every morphological conception, as one can infer from its Goethean origins, but aestheticization itself is one of its intrinsic characteristics. This discourse likely also applies to D’Arcy Thompson, whose Growth and Form (1917) proposes a double articulation of morphology according to a model that is at once typological or structural, and another one that is evolutionistic. As is well known, the mathematization of nature stands at the centre of his perspective—one that connected Thompson to the antiquity which served as the model for unstated Platonic and Pythagorean influences. That notwithstanding, Thompson does not fail to recognize the energetic, dynamic quality of nature, which he thus formulates in terms that follow his definition of morphology: “Morphology is not only the study of material things and the form of material things, but has its dynamical aspect, under which we deal with the interpretation, in terms of force, of the operations of Energy”

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(Thompson 1917: 19). Thompson’s goal is the creation of a general science of form that is inspired by the Goethean definition of morphology. Moreover, the aestheticizing principle does not always function explicitly as such. The great theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll provides an important example in his Theoretische Biologie (1926), where the influence of Kantian teleology plays a fundamental role in connection to the concept of form. One moves towards a semiotics of nature that in many ways constitutes an almost extreme outcome of morphological research at the start of the 1900s. An incipient aestheticization of knowledge is revealed even in this field where Uexküll, also on the basis of the theory of relativity, favours a transformation of all of the primary qualities into secondary qualities (see Umwelt). One could in this case speak of an aestheticized epistemology that seems to constitute a shared reason behind the morphological approach in increasingly diverse fields. The elements of contamination between aestheticization and morphology are also overlooked, for example, in a work that in those same years was an immense success: Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. This text outlines the idea of a knowledge of history which hinges on analogy, a concept notoriously rich in aesthetic resonances (cf. Melandri 1968). This is his masterpiece and perhaps the last work that proposes an explicitly morphological perspective in which organic development is interwoven with universal history. The Crisis of Morphological Knowledge Undoubtedly there are perspectives connected to the maturing of modernity in its intimately dynamic quality (cf. Koselleck 1986) that produce a crisis of morphological knowledge. The relation between form and time falls into crisis, where acceleration jeopardizes the formal whole that cannot bear excessive centrifugal jolts. This is a crisis that attacks morphology as a discipline dedicated to dynamic systems, or in other terms, that questions the capacity of the form to introject time. It is a crisis revealed at the level of philosophy of history, as evidenced by an emblematic text such as Total Mobilization (1930) by Ernst Jünger, which makes the social dynamic a nearly constant experiment, where it is dominated by centrifugal jolts that seem to become uncontrollable and almost analogous to the “monadological revolution” that Nietzsche mentions in the third of his Untimely Mediations, “Schopenhauer as Educator”. In short, we are dealing, also in this field, with the posing of the morphological question as a question concerning the dynamics of systems and the possibility—which is almost literally a challenge against time—of creating dynamic systems. The morphological perspective, the very idea of the possibility of a morphology, collapses with a clear change of perspective, as occurs in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). This work outlines the idea of an interrogation that regards not entities themselves, but the being of entities, by reducing the significance of the life of forms—that is, their ontological and epistemological weight. The Heideggerian interrogation radically questions the significance and the semantic weight of the perceptual synthesis by posing the question of origin as an essential and in fact a wholly predominant one. The whence replaces the morphological here and now, the genetic gaze of the phenomena, and deprives it of every right to maintain an

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autonomous meaning. The here of perception, the journey that travels from intuition to form and that institutes the genetic gaze is, from the logical and ontological point of view, granted a completely secondary significance and gravity when it is faced with what is truly essential, namely the originary opening of being. The result of this operation goes well beyond the intrinsic meaning of Heideggerian philosophy and instead indicates a nihilistic turn that manifests as an almost historical-epochal symptom. This is a nihilistic outcome of great significance, since what is interrupted is the ontological and gnoseological continuity of the relationship between word and image. We are thus dealing with a definitive aestheticization of the image which provides a counter-melody, a total semanticization of speech that makes it the only vehicle with the ability to express meanings. This produces (or is) the consequence—according to some points of view—of a process of the rationalization of the world that ends up erasing its sensible coherence. In short, we are dealing with—as was highlighted above—that fictitious “end of the world” that is routinely defined as “nihilism”. Heideggerian philosophy thus becomes a symptomatic episode, however significant, of a much wider crisis. From Warburg to Visual Studies The author who represents the start of a new morphological tradition is Aby Warburg. He lays the foundations for a science of images by adapting a universal gaze, one also encouraged by his anthropological training (cf. Bredekamp 2018). This was the starting point for the foundation of visual studies that emerges in the 1990s, thanks to J. T. W Mitchell. He of course represents the most significant return of the morphological tradition by virtue of a radical critique of the aesthetic constitution of the image. The impulse to define a universal science of the image occurred almost contemporaneously in Germany, when two philosophers, Klaus Sachs-Hombach and Klaus Rehkamper, at the end of the 1990s, proposed the idea of a universal science of the image bestowed with a horizon, much wider than the aesthetic one, that tended to cover the entire arc of its manifestations. The implicit premise of this kind of proposal is found in the work of one of the greatest representatives of visual studies, Hans Belting, who in a volume entitled Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? (1983: II), claims that we have reached a zero point in the history of the image that foresees its exit from the most ancient and faithful riverbed, namely the history of art. In other terms, images in the contemporary world escape from the confines of art in order to invade the world’s most diverse fields. Needless to say, we are dealing with a principle of the aestheticization of the world that is underscored by a range of authors like Mitchell, who speaks of the pictorial turn, or Gottfried Boehm, who speaks of the ikonische Wende, of the iconic turn in which the identity of the image is not lost since it is, so to say, constantly protected by what Boehm defines as ikonische Differenz, iconic difference. Alongside iconic difference—the objective genitive that sustains the ontology of the image—one finds an always greater insistence on the active and performative character of images. It is a feature that connects authors as diverse as T. J. W. Mitchell and Horst Bredekamp, and that was emphasized even earlier by David Freeberg. If Mitchell asks “what the images want”, Bredekamp focuses on “the act of the image”, in a fundamental text from 2010 entitled Bildakt, by articulating the performative

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possibilities of the image according to the partition: the schematic, the substitutive and the intrinsic. The ever more intense presence of the images—highlighted by Bredekamp—is accompanied, as we have seen, by the crisis of the models of the history of art that rely on the idea of an image that is aestheticized and thus not directly influential in its relation to the world. The crisis of the history of art, or better, the transformation of its canonical works, puts into play an element that was already announced by Warburg and, in agreement with him, authors like Henri Focillon, La vie des formes (1934), and before him Wilhelm Pinder, Das Problem der Generation in der Kunstsgeschichte Europas (1926), and subsequently in the great work by George Kubler, The Shape of Time (1962). It is diachronicity, as the reason for the stabilization of the historical sense, that in this context is placed into crisis by resorting to the idea of an autonomy of forms and their generative power (Focillon, Kubler). Elements of anachronism, also highlighted by Aby Warburg, are examples of powerful additions to formal development, thanks to the cultural availability of specific places or territories to host new forms (i.e. the case for Focillon of the Ile de France, a region that did not know the Romanesque compared to the Gothic). This movement is realized thanks to the plasticity of the medium of images, which is capable of traversing diverse linguistic forms (Warburg underscores this in la nascita di Venere e la Primavera di Sandro Botticelli). However, there are also zones of necessary opacity, those which instil themselves in the course of the iconic tradition due to deviations or jumps connected to the quality of the semantic medium of the image. In order to return to what was said above, the image is always open to anachronisms and to new emergencies—simply recall one of the great contemporary theorizers of the image, Georges Didi-Hubermann in The Surviving Image (2002). That which is created in the sequence of images, understood as complex forms— semantically powerful—is a logic of contingency that reveals a posteriori its own sense, according to the model that also brings us closer to the theory of evolution (Gould 1989; Pievani 2011), connected to a becoming of the forms that avoids certain variables but that cannot be determined a priori (Minelli 2007). In hindsight, this is a logic inspired by modernity that does not respond to the deterministic criteria of ancient metaphysics, but that is instead founded on contingency and determines the sense of events only a posteriori. Within this complex field, a continual exchange between the semantic media is determined, and thus between word and image. These exchanges are organized according to a progress (if one wants, a totally modern logic of contingency) by orienting it in the sense of what could be defined as a “return of ekphrasis”, a restoration of explicit contact and of reaction between word and image after their traumatic autonomizing in what, through a bit of approximation, could be called “modernist purism” [FV]. Constraints of Form: Methods and Images of Morphology “Morphologie/ruht auf der Überzeugung daß alles was sei sich auch andeuten und zeigen müsse. Von den ersten physischen und chemischen Elementen an, bis zur geistigen Äußerung des Menschen lassen wir diesen Grundsatz gelten. Wir wenden uns gleich zu dem was Gestalt hat. Das unorganische, das vegetative, das animale, das menschliche deutet sich alles selbst an, es erscheint als das was es ist unserm äußern, unserm inneren

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Sinn. Die Gestalt ist ein bewegliches, ein werdendes, ein vergehendes. Gestaltlehre ist Verwandlungslehre. Die Lehre der Metamorphose ist der Schlüssel zu allen Zeichen der Natur”: “Morphology/rests on the conviction that everything that is must also manifest and show itself. From the first physical and chemical elements, to the spiritual expression of man, we find this principle to hold. We turn immediately to that which has Gestalt. The inorganic, the vegetable, the animal, the human, all manifests itself, appears as what it is, to our outer and our inner sense. The Gestalt is something mobile, becoming, passing away. Gestalt theory is transformational theory. The doctrine of metamorphosis is the key to all signs of nature” (Goethe 1987: 349). The original formulation of the morphological project, expressed in all the problematic richness of its implications in this private annotation by Goethe, does not cease to question scientific research and is still reproposed today in all its urgency to the philosophical reflection. To understand the breadth of the stakes, we could perhaps try to read this Goethean statement together with those of two of the greatest interpreters that morphology has had in recent decades. “All human understanding or comprehension of complex objects and events in this world is connected with our perception of form (Gestalt)” states Rupert Riedl (1983: 205), while in a more analytical sense twenty years later Olaf Breidbach would propose: “We define a gestalt as the invariants of a collection of patterns that can mutually be transformed into each other through a class of transformations encoded by, or conversely, determining that gestalt” (Breidbach and Jost 2006: 23). In Riedl’s reading, the emphasis is on “complexity”, which is as much complexity of the object of investigation (the form itself) as it is complexity of the disciplinary approach that holds together natural sciences and human sciences, structural modelling and historical events, guiding a comparison between theoretical construction and understanding, processuality and systemic interpretation (Riedl 2000), establishing a very intrinsic correspondence: “Nowadays, I can show that Gestalt perception even arranges the similarity fields hierarchically” (Riedl 2003: 43). According to Breidbach’s proposal (Breidbach and Jost 2006: 23), the definition of Gestalt “contains two fundamental and complementary aspects”: firstly “different representatives of one and the same gestalt can be transformed into each other according to certain specific rules”; secondly “a specific gestalt also determines what is invariant under those transformations. Therefore, we gain more than arbitrary collections of similarities […]. Since each pattern is transformed as a whole, those invariants can only consist in internal relations”. Therefore, transformation rules and formal invariants correspond according to a model, which is the one expressed by a long tradition of studies on homology, exemplarily represented in the criteria elaborated by Remane (1952: 31–66). Morphology is proposed as the science for which the question itself about the appearance, the manifestation of its theoretical object is configured as the method of research, as it is proposed as the science of a theoretical object, the form precisely, which cannot be thought of except in its strange, even “misleading” condition,

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according to which “invariants” and “transformation” are implied in such a way that, on one hand, only starting from their relationship does the form itself become legible, and yet, on the other hand, conversely only the identification of the form allows us to see “invariants” and “transformation”: “The transformations and the invariants are dual aspects of the same gestalt” (Breidbach and Jost 2006: 23). This dual condition has meant that morphology, and with it the very question of form, appeared to be placed almost “on the edge of scientific research” (Weizsäcker 1942: 382) even in the opinion of those who have mostly strengthened and extended its methodology. In many cases, even the same scientific relevance has been doubted, as happens in the early twentieth century in the case of a convicted anti-Darwinian like Uexküll (1926: 111), who believes that “of all our sciences, morphology has perhaps the most unsatisfactory theoretical basis, if indeed one can speak of a basis at all”, finding an echo some decades later in a rigorous interpreter of Darwinism such as Ghiselin (1980: 181): “To many it has seemed enigmatic that morphology contributed virtually nothing to the synthetic theory of evolution […]. Morphology has contributed so little primarily because it has had so little to contribute”. Almost halfway between the two objections to morphology, we find the authoritative equation between Goethe’s Urpflanze and the DNA molecule, “Urgebilde der heutigen Molekularbiologie”, proposed in a famous essay by Werner Heisenberg (1967: 40; see Carson 2010: 106–127). Yet the Platonism that leads Heisenberg to trace back to Goethe the modern divorce between Richtigkeit and Wahrheit, scientific correctness and metaphysical truth, risks neglecting the essentials of Goethe’s position, which seeks rather the truth of perception in the same way in which the form itself manifests itself (Weizsäcker 1943). It is worth to consider again the reading of Goethe proposed by Weizsäcker (1926, 1940, 1942, 1943), according to which morphology follows a different path compared to the “objectifying” one of the nineteenth-century Sinnesphysiologie, turning rather towards a phenomenology of the lived experience of the senses. In this way, according to Weizsäcker, a specific field of investigation is constituted (as separate from physics as it is from psychology) which concerns rather “the working field of the science of the phenomena of life (Lebenserscheinungen) quite generally” (Weizsäcker 1926: 426); this is the biological sphere par excellence that opens up to a morphology understood as a phenomenological science of the experience of the senses, a biological consideration that “not only measures functions, but also understands sensual impressions (sinnliche Eindrücke) according to their quality, their phenomenal nature, their survival ability or inability” (Weizsäcker 1926: 428). Precisely, the “biological facts” (Weizsäcker 1926: 331: “processes of adaptation and development, phenomena of regulation and transformation”), in their nature of real world phenomena, will escape a purely physiological consideration, opening up on the basis of the Goethean lesson to a morphology as a science of formed reality (“gestaltete Wirklichkeit”: Weizsäcker 1942: 361). The relationship between invariants and transformation rules touched upon by means of the analysis provided by Breidbach is constitutive of the theoretical morphological horizon as such. Weizsäcker (1942: 381) for his part will put into chiasmatic relation the nomophilia of sensible perception and the eidolophilia of thinking.

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Let us still consider the extent of the morphological gaze (Goethe 1987: 349) which extends “from the first physical and chemical elements, to the spiritual expression of man”, theorizing together the permanence of the individual form and the metamorphic processivity that is expressed in the history of form: vis centripeta and vis centrifuga (Goethe 1920: 637). According to Russell (1916: 48), the famous verses of Goethe’s Metamorphose der Tiere: “Also bestimmt die Gestalt die Lebensweise des Tieres,/Und die Weise, zu leben, sie wirkt auf alle Gestalten/Mächtig zurück” (Goethe 2000, vol. I: 202) are just the poetic expression of a vision “neither very clearly expressed nor very consistent”; the same verses for contemporary research programmes delineate instead a perspective of extreme actuality precisely inasmuch as—starting from the point of view of the internal principles of form—they portrait with the maximum methodical coherence the relationship between the structural plan and the classic problem of functional adaptation. The different theoretical elements so far enucleated, however, are united in the Goethean analysis of the temporal dynamics of form, and therefore guide to the elaboration of criteria that concern in one the metamorphosis of the organism and the relevance of historical becoming for the notion of natural history. And still here Goethe’s morphology, finding in this regard its greatest development in botanical studies, presents some notions of extreme interest. Goethe in fact identifies two genetic principles that can guide his comparative approach: it is the principle of refinement of the sap and the principle of the cycles of expansion and contraction (see Gould 2002: 287). If the first principle indicates a direction of development and a rule to understanding the formal relations, the second principle, theorizing a cyclical development, introduces above all the basic concept of a difference in the density of the space of forms. The profound irregularity in the density of forms is called into question not as an empirical “accident” in a theoretically homogeneous logical functional space, but rather as the historical structure proper to morphological space. The alleged centrality of the “perception of form” (Riedl 1983: 205) is thus composed in the morphological method with attention to formed individuality, in a survey that considers together the legality to it immanent and the story of the changes that cross the forms according to a contingency that finds right in the multiple material, physical, mechanical and historical constraints the conditions of possibility of becoming themselves of the forms, from the first physical and chemical elements, to the spiritual expression of man. Nowadays, it is particularly the theme of evolutionary innovation that has had the ability to gather around itself a wide debate, which has concerned and concerns not only the origin of new morphological structures and new functions, but also the emergence of behaviours and interactions with the environment, of cognitive and symbolic functions, deeply rethinking a relationship that the first phase of the “systemic program” between Konrad Lorenz (e.g. Lorenz 1941, 1974) and Riedl himself (e.g. Riedl and Delpos 1996) had probably set in terms that were still provisional and problematic.

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This is what can be verified through a highly articulated theoretical elaboration, far from the temptations of a certain socio-biology, which have often been present also in the philosophical debate (Schaeffer 2007: 139–200), but vice versa attentive both to the disciplinary peculiarities of the different areas, and to the possibility of establishing a broad theoretical circulation of certain themes and above all of a lexicon and a “style of thinking” rooted in the lesson of morphology, in the interplay between invariants and transformations of the Gestalten. It is indeed a now rather common observation that the twentieth-century debate on life sciences left disciplines and fields of study such as embryology, morphology, phenotypic plasticity (especially that present in the botanical field), the coevolution between organisms and environments, evolutionary innovation and the origin of organic forms, constraints and so on at the margins of theoretical discourse. This is a situation that has profoundly changed in recent decades, especially starting from some important theoretical stimuli coming from the research of S. J. Gould (summarized in Gould 2002) and, albeit sometimes in a problematic way, thanks to the theoretical openings of Riedl (1975) and above all those of his school (at least from Wagner 2001 to Pigliucci and Müller 2010). For example, consider this partial summary of the themes that agitate vertebrate morphology as early as the 1980s (Love 2003: 320): “Tissue interactions in morphogenesis, the development and evolution of the vertebrate limb and skeleton, heterochrony, mechanical interactions during ontogeny, and developmental constraints in the evolution of feeding systems”. It is of great importance that in the treatment of these issues not only has an extremely careful consideration progressively been given to “epigenetic” mechanisms and principles of explanation, linked for example to the physical, chemical and mechanical properties of organic materials, or to processes of development (Müller and Newman 2003: 3–9), but also that this has implied a conscious revival of a morphological “old-fashioned” lexicon, however extraordinarily relevant in the description of the phenomena and in the consequent theoretical elaboration (e.g. Müller 1990). In the perspective of contemporary morphology and “theoretical biology” (very important is the reference in Müller and Newman 2003: vii to the ideas of Paul Weiss and Ludwig von Bertalanffy), integrating evolution and development (Sansom and Brandon 2007) according to the Evo-Devo project requires the use of a much broader framework of interpretation than the one codified in the program of a mathematically based population genetics, and the adoption of a systemic approach that finds its ineliminable reference in the reality of the organism and of the living form. In other words, there is the need for a consideration capable of accounting for the plurality of causal factors at stake, and in this way to theorize the emergence of a qualitatively new level of organization; that is what would happen through the analysis of the development mechanisms and the physical interactions that the organic form expresses. If the object of elective investigation of evolutionism within the framework of the standard interpretations disseminated during the twentieth century was a quantitative consideration of variation, that is of the diffusion, of the increase in frequency and maintenance of certain variations within a population, the new

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systemic model would be able to provide us with a causal explanation of the generation of new forms and structures, therefore to question evolutionary innovation distinct from simple variation, and to understand the subsequent phases of fixation and stabilization in living forms, as well as ultimately to reconsider and reinterpret the variation (Callebaut et al. 2007: 25; Pigliucci and Müller 2010: 13). In this regard, Müller and Newman (2003: 3) write that: “The question of why and how certain forms appear in organismal evolution addresses not what is being maintained (and quantitatively varied) but rather what is being generated in a qualitative sense. This causal question concerning the specific generative mechanisms that underlie the origin and innovation of phenotypic characters is probably best embodied in the term origination”. This is a crucial aspect for our purposes, and it is necessary to underline right now that, much more than any merely “applicative” extension of the naturalistic discourse to the areas of human and social sciences, it is precisely this “qualitative” consideration of innovation, together with the meaning concretely addressed to the origin and phenomenological production of forms (“this causal question”), to constitute the decisive moment for the construction of a contemporary morphology that is able to realize a dialogue between life sciences and human sciences, historical perspective and structural discourse. The research programmes that we are following have famously led to the articulation of the proposal of a new evolutionary “extended synthesis” (Pigliucci and Müller 2010) which, in the opinion of the writer, constitutes one of the most effective contributions to the contemporary rethinking of morphology, starting from the interrogation on the reality of the organism in its contingency and determination, on the living form, on the interactions between living beings and environments in all the richness of their meanings, from the physical to the cultural and symbolic one (on this subject exemplarily Kendall et al. 2011). Gerd B. Müller highlighted the consequences of the new theoretical model when speaking of a focus shift which, in the new systemic approach, would allow us to overcome the limits of “modern synthesis”, especially in three main directions: first, it will be necessary to remember that the traditional model entails a continuous and gradual variation in the statistical distribution of certain characteristics of biological phenomena, and therefore a qualitatively indifferent time for carrying out biological processes, characterized by the quantitative accumulation of variation in a selective/adaptive sense. On the contrary, starting from the theories of Gould and Eldredge (see Gould 2002: 745–1024) on the so-called punctuated equilibria, a different approach has started to be valued, attentive to the qualitative and discontinuous character of biological time (also here according to an intuition which was already present in Weizsäcker 1942). It is proper to the dynamism of complex biological systems to present discontinuous forms of temporality, or even to deal with an even more radical temporal discontinuity in the same mechanisms operating in the history of life (Newman 2011). The second aspect to consider is the transition from an “externalist” perspective, based on the selective pressure of the environment and on the consequent adaptive response of the organisms, to an “internalist” perspective, which obviously

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does not reject the selection/adaptation nexus, fundamental theme of the Darwinian perspective, but undoubtedly shifts the attention “to the internal generative properties of evolving phenotypes” (Pigliucci and Müller 2010: 14), where precisely the centrality of the reference to the phenotype implicates an interpretation coherent with a morphological phenomenology. Finally, we move from a “gene-centric” perspective (which is moreover widespread in other versions of Evo-Devo, as demonstrated for example by Carroll 2005) to the consideration of the “genes as followers”, which ensure the routinization of the interactions determined in the organic systems of development by fixing the phenotypic traits put in place from time to time by components that are not genetically pre-ordered: “epigenetic processes […] replace gene sequence variation and gene expression as the primary causal agents in morphological origination” (Müller and Newman 2003: 8). Aggregates and cellular tissues take certain forms not because they are programmed by a genetically coded instruction, but because of the inherency to them of certain physical, morphological and certain developmental mechanical properties (Callebaut et al. 2007: 57). Also in this way we near the great “continent” of the constraints which, twofold and alternatively understood in a negative or positive sense (according to the proposal by Gould 2002: 1025–1178), and variously understood by reason of their physical, architectural, developmental, genetic, otherwise hierarchical and systemic determination, however perform a capital function, according to the intuition that was already set by Riedl (1975: 287–293), in determining not only a drastic reduction in the rate of randomness (Zufall), but also a marked increase of order (Ordnung) and of the predictability of morphological events (morphologische Ereignisse). Because of what Riedl himself defined as “nexus of order qualities” (“Zusammenhang der Ordnungsqualitäten”: Riedl 1975: 290), the logical space and the temporal distribution of living forms will be far apart—at all hierarchical levels, from the molecular structure to the most complex forms of behaviour—from appearing homogeneous and continuous. Just think, in this sense, of what is represented at the theoretical level by the entire metaphorical series of constraints, from the concept of burden (Riedl 1975) to the entrenchment (Wimsatt 2007a, b), passing through the epigenetic traps of Günter Wagner (1989: 64–66). In a similar non-homogeneous morphospace, the activity of the form describes the possible interactions between the elements of the system (Callebaut and RasskinGutman 2005: 209: “Function is understood as interaction without purposive elements”), while the concept of modularity is understood as the nexus between the morphological–architectural organization and the functional integrity of the organisms, so that the function will appear each time ultimately as “a particular instantiation that is environmentally dependent on the ability of a form to interact with other forms” (Callebaut and Rasskin-Gutman 2005: 217). Just starting from the notion of discontinuous occupation of formal space, it is also possible to understand the crucial role played by the concept of homology (see s.v.) for the theorizing of evolutionary innovation. Here too we can only briefly refer

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to questions on which the debate is more than ever focused, to identify that interpretative line that finds the origin of innovation in the systemic effects of evolutionary modifications (side-effect hypothesis: Müller 1990), in the specific response of the developmental systems involved. It is a concept that sees innovation (the “generation” of non-homologues) dynamically channelled and “put in shape” by the network of homologies that weaves the unity of the organism. The homologues would therefore be able to organize the morphological structure of the organism, to guide the production and the stabilization of possible innovations. Let us therefore consider the homologues as criteria for the organization of the morphological structure, and for this reason we can define the homologues as attractors—positively understood constraints—of possible innovation. On the model of this reciprocal implication of homology and non-homology, a very rich field of investigation opens up, as is evident, for an evolutionary consideration of cognitive and cultural processes, as it would be possible to theorize on the example of what was suggested by Wimsatt and Griesemer (2007: 260), who interpret cognitive and cultural innovation with reference to the tension between entrenchment and scaffolding: “Scaffolding involves a mix of (relatively) static resources and constraints and dynamically interacting processes that together facilitate the acquisition of complex skills, knowledge, and behavioural routines when these interactions are appropriately organized. This kind of interactive structure is the key to new kinds of possibilities for innovation and change in culture. It also generates greater possibilities for “deep” or “revolutionary” modifications and much greater rates of change than are characteristic of biological evolution. So understanding the particular potentialities of cognitive development and individual and social learning requires recognizing a multiplicity of systematically interacting cultural channels”. Image and Artefact The long quotation from the work of Wimsatt and Griesemer (but also see Caporael et al. 2014) allows us to reach a salient point, constituted not only by the explicit welding between the life sciences and the debate of the human and social sciences in the field of culture, knowledge and in a specific sense innovation (“a common evolutionary core”, as Callebaut wrote in O’Brien and Shennan 2010: 91), but in a much more specific way consisting in the close connection that—by retranslating Wimsatt’s terminology—is realized between constraints, channelling and form activity. To clarify what is being said, it is nevertheless useful to further develop some methodological considerations, relative to the “carrying out modalities” of morphological events. It concerns, in short, the evaluation of the historical configuration of the same processes. Even again with reference to the life sciences, we could mention here that the progressive rediscovery of the pluralism of Darwin’s causal approach (Gould and Lewontin 1979 is still exemplary in this respect) does not remain without effects on the same configuration of the “historical time” of life; we can also mention the strong morphological and structural matrix that presides over both Ernst Haeckel’s formulation of the “biogenetic law” relative to the relations between ontogenesis and phylogenesis, and its current reversal (“we may assert that ontogeny is the mechanical cause of phylogeny. It must be so, for ontogeny is a mechanical process, while phylogeny

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is a historical phenomenon”: Løvtrup 1984: 261) caused by a reconsideration that powerfully calls into question the material constraints of form. Any consideration that limits itself to emphasizing the chronological axes of mutation and of differentiation or the causal roles or the constraints (material, hierarchical, etc.) will in any case fail to grasp the structure of the morphological events, or rather their historical configuration. Morphological events manifest themselves as Gestalt, that is, a form which, in its dynamics, structures and unfolds a specified temporality. With regard to the possibility of grasping this configuration, to limit ourselves to the references already introduced, some recent considerations by Wimsatt (in Caporael et al. 2014: 77–105) are illuminating for our purposes. Wimsatt argues that for the construction of the architecture of a theory of cultural change, it is necessary to take into account (1) certain information units that are transmitted, (2) Biological individuals considered in their social life, relational and individual development and acquisition of complex skills, (3) Institutions “constituting or containing normative rules or frameworks that guide behaviour”, (4) Organizations capable of self-maintaining and self-restructuring, (5) Artefact structures, whereby artefacts are understood not as mere “external tools”, but as intrinsic constituents of the experience. As Dewey (1922: 425) already observed in a capital essay, in fact, “la réflexion est une réponse indirecte au milieu et l’élément d’indirection peut devenir immense et fort compliqué en lui-même. Mais elle a son origine dans le comportement biologique d’adaptation et sa fonction ultime, dans son aspect cognitif, est un contrôle prospectif des conditions de son environnement”. Embodied in the structure of experience, this perspective control expresses the action and being acted out of a configured multiplicity, that is precisely the temporal configuration of the form that expresses itself as a “morphological event”. The activity of the Gestalt, to return to the Breidbach’s previously proposed dense definition, lies in the interaction between invariants and transformations, but both of them configure, always in contingent and open ways, morphological events which unfold and impart unforeseeable modifications to the forms. These are irreversible changes, and yet regulated precisely in the laws of relation between invariants and transformations: “transformations encoded by, or conversely, determining that gestalt” (Breidbach and Jost 2006: 23). In the activity of form, constraints and dynamic processes channel the production of innovations, and this procedure manifests itself electively in the context of cognitive and cultural innovation. Images and artefacts are therefore not episodic productions nor mere “external relapses” of the experience of form: on the contrary, the experience of form is expressed through configurations, and the structure of the artefact embodies in each individual occurrence a specific temporal modality of the experience of form. These are absolutely central themes in the morphological perspective, about which the twentieth-century and contemporary research, in an ideal heading that, from the often quoted Weizsäcker, through Gestalt Psychology, reaches the most interesting results of the Bildwissenschaft and visual studies, can provide us arguments of extraordinary openness and relevance.

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The morphological consideration of the life of images inaugurated by Warburg and his school leads from this point of view to results of great interest, first of all in the analysis of the temporal structure of the image (think of Warburg’s theme of the Nachleben) and of its reflexive character (the image as elaboration of a specific Denkraum), to focus later on the ability of the image to anticipate—putting it to the test—the overall sense of the reference system in which it is inscribed (Wind 1934), then turning to consider the constitutive relational elements (Belting 2001, 2005) and the activity of form (Bredekamp 2010), according to a conception that considers the morphological event as constitutively open and incomplete (Didi-Huberman 2002, 2003). Gestaltkreis As we have seen, the construction of a “phenomenology of the lived experience of the senses” leads Weizsäcker to articulate a complex theory of interaction between living organisms and reality. First of all it must be remembered that, by offering one of the principal twentieth-century contributions to the methodological rethinking of morphology, Weizsäcker defines “Gestaltkreis”, circle of the form, that through which the deep unity between perception and movement is realized, in a profound mutual implication between living organisms and their environments, so that it would rather be necessary to say that the organism itself is deeply involved in the establishment of the relationship, giving rise to a unitary configuration that Weizsäcker defines as a biological act (biologischer Akt) precisely because it arises from the intimate coherence between perceptive and motor activity, organism and environment. The primacy of motor skills is therefore determined by reference to the self -perceived movement, which is a dynamic unity of perception and movement. At this point, it seems entirely secondary to determine whether the organic movement is aimed at motor action or at a sensitive perception: “the essential is here the arising of the form” (Weizsäcker 1940: 247). “We will designate as Gestaltkreis”, adds Weizsäcker, “the genesis of the movement forms of organisms” (Weizsäcker 1940: 254). In the Gestaltkreis figure, the relationship between perception and movement is configured as a cycle of vital activity that involves all the dimensions of the living being (and of the human specifically but not exclusively), with particular reference to the interaction between cognitive and emotional aspects and the subject– object relationship in the making of the experience of the living being. Making use of the theoretical terms introduced by Bredekamp (2010: 52–53), we are dealing here with a “self-reflexive consistency” in relation to which the form passes, manifesting itself, “from latency to the external effectiveness of feeling, thinking and acting”. Elsewhere Weizsäcker (1946: 54) would define the Gestaltkreis as “an essential structure of the living act grasped in a pathic way”, specifying that through this concept “the fact is expressed that the living being, at the very moment in which it changes, does however also return to himself”. Thus, the reflexivity of the form and its constitutive openness to the external world, to the multiple determinations of life and reality, converge in the determination of the pathic. The dynamic character of the biological act implies a temporality, “develops” by itself a form of time completely different from the continuum of chronological time.

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We have already spoken of this decisive aspect of twentieth-century morphology, but it must now be emphasized that in this rhythm of the form Weizsäcker (1946: 54) investigates the bases of a paradoxical autonomy of Gestalt, which in its cyclicality becomes bildhaftes Symbol, figural symbol, of the possible return to itself of the living being in change. In this figurative structure, Breidbach’s observations on the reciprocity between invariants and transformations are reconciled with Dewey’s exquisitely Darwinist theory. Dewey sees in the temporal scheme of perspective control an indirect response of the organism to the environment that is realized in reflection. This indirect character is decisive for understanding the image and the artefact. We are thus witnessing a continuous metamorphosis of the living form, radically understood as becoming rather than being and at the same time, according to Goethe’s lesson, as a continuous production of Gestalten, a continuous Bildung, in a theoretical vision constantly committed to redefining the modalities of the environmental relationships woven by the living forms in the imaginative as well as the evaluative sphere (Wiedebach 2014). Morphology, in deploying a real phenomenology of Gestalt dynamics as it does in Weizsäcker’s work through the analysis of motility, explicitly explains the material conditions of possibility of that Lehre vom bewegten Menschen (see Krois 2002: 296) on which the Kulturwissenschaft, from the writings of Warburg and Cassirer through Wind up to the debate of our days, is still working. In turn, certain thematic indices—such as the activity/reflexivity of the image or Warburg’s Pathosformeln—signal the constant openness of the representative and experiential circle of the form. It is an intrinsically historical dimension, which precisely in the ways of representation/Darstellung shows the real complexity of the temporal and experiential structure of the form, and once again in a prominent way that of image and artefact. The representative dimension of form has an immanent “narrative” development. Here we see what we can define as a double contingency of the form (MazzocutMis 1994), if it is true that, due to the historicity of the representation, according to Warburg “no rules can be specified for the determination of emotional states in images” (Krois 2002: 301), and that, on the other hand, Weizsäcker himself (1940: 311) warns that it is not possible per naturam rerum to construct a canon permitting to understand “the whole mosaic of the behaviour and acting (des Verhaltens und Handelns) of the living beings”. Description and history refer to each other; if there is no immutable descriptive horizon, on the other hand there is not even a continuum in becoming. Image and Agency From the theory of the biological act, through a decisive enhancement of the self-reflexive capacity of the image, morphologically founded in the pathic components of the gestalt process, nowadays the Bildwissenschaft comes to emphasize the role of the visual agency, indeed in the proper sense it comes to theorize the active character of the image (Bredekamp 2010). In the horizon of an “increasing reflection of the images”, Bredekamp’s analysis (2010: 13–23) develops just around the “basic problem of the autonomy of the

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image”, Grundproblem which is one with that “in the artefact itself latent quality, which in a manner barely susceptible to control may emerge from the mere potentiality into the form of action”. It is precisely this duality which is present in the circulation of the image “as simultaneously inorganic and yet infused with a life of its own (Doppelspiel von Anorganik und Eigenleben)” that is addressed by the “bildaktive Phänomenologie”, a phenomenology of the visual agency proper to the action of the image. “Images”, concludes Bredekamp (2010: 328), “cannot be placed in front or behind the reality, because they co-constitute it (mitkonstituieren). They are not its derivative, but a form of its condition (eine Form ihrer Bedingung)”. Here we find, at the conclusion of these premises, the meaning of what is at stakes in morphology: it presents itself as a phenomenological investigation about the conditions (Bedingungen) of reality; and it is a question, however, of an investigation that develops precisely in the Gestalt dynamics, in its acting in the same world of which it is an image. The “phenomenological vocation” of morphology thus traverses its broad theoretical spectrum, from the domain of life sciences, where it powerfully contributes to returning attention to the phenotypic and qualitative aspects of the organism, through psychological investigation and the biological phenomenology of the sensible experience, up to the bildaktive Phänomenologie conceived by Bredekamp and the modern science of the image. A path more than ever open, in the sign of that morphology understood by Goethe (1987: 349) as the science of everything that manifests itself, appears as what it is, to our outer and our inner sense [ST]. Far from purporting to reconstruct and photograph the various disciplinary issues involved in the complexity of their articulation, the Glossary instead aims, more modestly, to actively encourage and engage an interdisciplinary dialogue. In addition, it aims to outline the possibility of practicing morphology as an original disciplinary synthesis constantly in evolution. Consistent with this dual purpose, an attempt has been made to provide the reader with the keys and tools to continue the work across its wide range from the arts to humanities to the sciences, as well as in specific disciplinary fields such as those of mathematical studies, contemporary biology, juridical studies and so on, thus demonstrating the contribution that a morphological consideration is able to provide precisely on an original methodological level, to which the contents are strictly connected. We are grateful to many people for the realization of this book. First of all to Olaf Breidbach who came up with the idea for it and drew up the first list of headwords, a list we have adopted with only a few modifications. His friendship, his teachings and the memory of him are always very present in this book, which is dedicated to him. We are also very grateful to Alessandro Sarti, who immediately and enthusiastically accepted the task of realizing the book in this collection. Of course we also heartily thank all contributors and, last but not least, Amalia Salvestrini and Gregorio Tenti, who gave us very valuable help not only as authors but also in the editing and preparation of the book.

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Riedl, R.: Strukturen der Komplexität. Eine Morphologie des Erkennens und Erklärens. Springer, Berlin (2000) Riedl, R.: Riedls Kulturgeschichte der Evolutionstheorie. Springer, Berlin (2003) Riedl, R., Delpos, M. (eds.): Die Evolutionäre Erkenntnistheorie im Spiegel der Wissenschaften. WUV-Universitätsverlag, Wien (1996) Russell, E.S.: Form and Function. A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology. Murray, London (1916) Sansom, R., Brandon, R.N. (eds.): Integrating Evolution and Development. From Theory to Practice. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, London (2007) Schaeffer, J.-M.: La fin de l’exception humaine. Gallimard, Paris (2007) Soler, L., Trizio, E., Nickles, Th, Wimsatt, W.C. (eds.): Characterizing the Robustness of Science. Springer, Dordrecht (2012) Thompson D.W.: On Growth and Form. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1942 (1917) Uexküll, J. von: Theoretische Biologie (1920–1928); Eng. trans. Theoretical Biology. Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York (1926) Wagner, G.P.: The biological homology concept. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 20, 51–69 (1989) Wagner, G.P. (ed.): The Character Concept in Evolutionary Biology. Academic Press, San Diego (2001) Weizsäcker, V.: Einleitung zur Physiologie der Sinne. In: Id. Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 3. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1990 (1926) Weizsäcker, V. : Der Gestaltkreis. Thieme, Berlin, n. ed.. In: Id., Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 4. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1997 (1940) Weizsäcker, V.: Gestalt und Zeit. In: Id., Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 4. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1997 (1942) Weizsäcker, V.: Wahrheit und Wahrnehmung. In: Id., Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 4. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1997 (1943) Weizsäcker, V.: Anonyma. In: Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 7. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1987 (1946) Wiedebach, H.: Pathische Urteilskraft. Karl Alber, Freiburg und München (2014) Wimsatt, W.C.: Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass, London (2007a) Wimsatt, W.C.: Echoes of Haeckel? Reentrenching development in evolution. In: Laubichler M.D., Maienschein, J. (eds.) From Embriology to Evo-Devo: A History of Developmental Evolution, pp. 309–355. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, London (2007b) Wind, E.: Das Experiment und die Metaphysik, n. ed. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2001; Eng. trans. Experiment and Metaphysics: Towards a Resolution of the Cosmological Antinomies. Taylor and Francis, Milton Park 2001 (1934)

Aesthetics Salvatore Tedesco and Federico Vercellone

Aesthetics, Structure and Perception of the Living Form Since its modern disciplinary foundation, aesthetics has developed a position of great interest in defining the relationship between sensitive knowledge, form and the question of living form. In fact, defining as the aim of aesthetics the “perfectio cognitionis sensitivae” (Baumgarten 1750, § 14), and equating this cognitive process with metaphysically understood beauty as “perfectio phaenomenon”, i.e. structuring perfection as a phenomenal object, Baumgarten does not limit himself to translating the metaphysical concept of beauty objectively conceived as “order and proportion of parts”—a concept that covers the whole of Western philosophical thought—into the lexicon of post-Cartesian modern philosophy, but rather theorizes a reciprocal relationship between a phenomenally given formal structure and the logic of perception that finds its articulation in a sensitive argumentative thought that focuses on the capacity of a perceptive element to act as “ratio determinans” (Baumgarten 1750, § 26), which is the fulcrum of the structural order of the beautiful form. Moreover, it is not in any way a self-referential or static concept of form, because in fact Baumgarten places the point of arrival of the strategies of improvement of sensitive knowledge in the “cognitio viva” (Baumgarten 1779, § 669, § 671), which implies the ability of knowledge to be translated pragmatically into action, into a new formative process, in the re-elaboration of the structural and perceptive links of the form. The path taken by Baumgarten opens up to important insights in late eighteenthcentury German thinking, when it binds in a more conscious and focused way with S. Tedesco (B) Dipartimento di Scienze Umanistiche, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, Palermo, Italy e-mail: [email protected] F. Vercellone Dipartimento di Filosofia e Scienze dell’Educazione, Università di Torino, via Sant’Ottavio 20, 10124 Torino, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 F. Vercellone and S. Tedesco (eds.), Glossary of Morphology, Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51324-5_2

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the reflection on artistic forms, and first of all with the figurative and plastic arts; this is what we see in the case of Winckelmann, who wrote in 1763 an important Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst und dem Unterrichte in derselben. Winckelmann theorizes that the “capacity of feeling” is formed through an equilibrium in which the exercise of external sense contributes to the formation (Bildung) of the internal sense; that is to say, the mechanical action of the external sense becomes intellectual formative activity, but only on the condition of a constant exercise of the external sense in the attendance of the masterpieces of Antiquity: “Es kann also die wahre und völlige Kenntnis des Schönen in der Kunst nicht anders als durch Betrachtung der Urbilder selbst und vornehmlich in Rom erlangt werden” (Winckelmann 1763: 150). It is therefore a process in which the duplication of perception in intellectual activity is possible only in the determined experience of form in the figurative work of art, and in a specific sense in that artistic representation of an accomplished humanity that takes place in Greek art. Here opens the road that leads to Herder’s reflection (exemplary in this sense is his theory of sculpture: Herder 1778), to Goethe and to the birth of morphology in the proper sense. In this sense, Goethe and Herder start the investigation on the method of a knowledge that can scientifically articulate the historical determinacy of the form and its living productivity; here lie the origins of the methodical interest for the principle of analogy (Irmscher 1981; Verra 1987) and in a broader sense the origins of the same question on form (Gestalt) and on formation processes (Gestaltung, Bildung), and finally on morphology as mobile and plastic knowledge of a territory, nature, that is itself equally plastic and becoming. The order of the living forms and the legality of their metamorphosis thus become the two salient theoretical objects of aesthetic morphology in the theoretical development of the constant questioning and redefining of its territory of investigation. The interweaving of form and life in the territory of art and in a specific sense in the figurative image of ancient statuary finds its point of arrival in the reflection of Schiller, who dedicates to the theme of the living form (Schiller 1795, 614: lebende Gestalt) one of the highlights of the letters Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen; through that concept of living form Schiller intends to designate “allen ästhetischen Beschaffenheiten der Erscheinungen und mit einem Worte dem, was man in weitester Bedeutung Schönheit nennt”; beautiful will be the Gestalt whose “Form in unsrer Empfindung lebt”, which is also the one whose life “in unserm Verstande sich formt”. The reflexivity of the image, understood here as the aesthetic condition of a free, “realen und aktiven” determinability (Schiller 1795, 632), understood as an impulse to play arising from the dual activation and mutual inactivation of sensibility and formal impulse, becomes an accomplished representation of humanity and the political community to come (Rancière 2004).

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The Aesthetic Experience and the Living Being in the Crisis “The expressiveness of the object of art is due to the fact that it presents a thorough and complete interpenetration of the materials of undergoing and of action, the latter including a reorganization of matter brought with us from past experience […]. The expressiveness of the object is the report and celebration of the complete fusion of what we undergo and what our activity of attentive perception brings into what we receive by means of the senses” (Dewey 1934: 103). The theoretical results of the intense foundational season of disciplinary aesthetics lead us to a renewed understanding of some twists of the twentieth-century and current view of aesthetics, strongly characterized by the return of the double question of form and experience, and particularly marked not only by interconnection between senses and intellect and by the relationship between form and perception, but primarily by the reciprocity between activity and passivity: qualities that now characterize both experience and form as such. These are processes that largely cross the philosophical thought of the first decades of the 1900s: if the “general science of art” in Germany cultivates a long reflection on the form and its dynamics, the commitment in French is no less, exemplarily in works like Souriau’s (1929). In this way, there is not merely an overcoming and a redefinition of modern “subjectivism” nor is the partiality of an anthropological approach attested, but in a more fundamental way the form and the living being are understood starting from the crisis that constitutively crosses them. Weizsäcker (1940: 316) writes: “„Gestaltkreis”heißt: Die biologische Erscheinung erklärt sich nicht aus einer ihr zugrunde liegenden kausalen Reihe von Funktionen, aus denen die Erscheinung stamme; sondern sie ist Bestandteil eines in sich geschlossenen Aktes. Seine Einheit ist von der Analyse der Krise aus darstellbar”. This acute awareness is present as much in the reflection based on theoretical biology, as in the phenomenological tradition (Merleau-Ponty, Dufrenne, Maldiney), and far from being only an element of an existential analytic, it rather offers a structural framework of reference for a description of the images indifferent to the traditional alternative between forms and functions, and therefore capable of accounting for both functional and formal models; notable examples of a similar way of proceeding are found in the work of Menke (2008) as in that of Bredekamp (2010) and in that of Bertram (2014). In this perspective, to express it according to the excellent formulation by Breidbach (2013: 221), “Styles are not a reflex of functionality, but can define cultural functions”. Thus, the primacy of the relational structure constituted by the Gestalt is highlighted, and it is precisely from this relationship that the universe of functions finds its concrete articulation. The Gestalt—object of the new morphological perspective—is characterized as “a structure that forms the rules of reference in itself”, while the semantics proper to forms “is determined as the space of possibility of open relationships in intuition” (Breidbach 2013: 226) [ST]. History and Theory. From Goethe to Nietzsche The perspective of a morphological aesthetic has, also with regard to the philosophy of art, its most remote origins in Goethe who, starting from his trip to Italy (1785–88), contested the idea that there

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could be some separation between art and life. On this basis, which constitutes a strong protest against any form of autonomy of art, he began his confrontation with the Romantics, often conducted on the basis of an intense and sometimes almost contemptuous controversy. However, it is impossible not to recognize how much the influence of Goethe and his Gestalt theory is present on the Romanticist front. What separates Goethe from the Romantics is the idea, promoted by the latter, of a dynamic form, that is to say a form crossed by time, which is proposed in passage 116 of the magazine “Athenäeum”, and then in Novalis’ Allgemeines Brouillon, and had already appeared through Goethe’s great friend Johann Gottfried Herder. The question of the dynamic form thus became the central point of a research that spread from the philosophy of art to other disciplines, contemplating in itself a series of incalculable connections that probably constitute the real epicentre of the morphological question. It is around this concept that the central issues related to the proposal of an aesthetic conceived in a morphological key accumulate. On this basis, the perspective, elaborated by Umberto Eco, of an intense dynamic of form that finds its outlet in the idea of The Open Work (1962, 1976), for example, opens up. It is on this path that we can also place the perspective, which also underlies that of Eco, elaborated by Luigi Pareyson in his Aesthetics (1954, 1988). Here, the idea of a work that is carried out by creating its own becoming is developed. And here, among other things, a considerable centrality is attributed to materials that are themselves endowed with their own intrinsic symbolism. This being the case, the very idea of an anonymous technology indifferent to materials that had been developed by a large part of the so-called “culture of crisis” from Weber to Heidegger, declines in its deterministic aspect, and instead we come to affirm the idea, which is also an ideal—promoted by authors from different backgrounds such as Paul Valéry, Gilbert Simondon, Alfred Gell—of an indeterministic concept of technology itself that has considerable influence on the development of cultural forms and civilization itself, approximating, among other things, technology to art and craft. This is the path that leads us to a maturation of aesthetics in directions that lead it towards a transcending of the concept criticized by Hans Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method, of the autonomy of art. Taking a step back now it must be said that it is necessary to include in this consideration the aesthetic/anthropological nexus, where the structure of sentient subjectivity is at stake. Friedrich Nietzsche lucidly describes the terms of the question in his second Untimely Meditations, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, where the condemnation of historical culture is the universal symptom of an aestheticization of culture and the subject itself. Nietzsche writes: Looking further, we see how the banishment of instinct by history has turned men into shades and abstractions: no one ventures to show a personality, but masks himself as a man of culture, a savant, poet, or politician (UBII, 296–297). From Haeckel to Warburg The transition from aesthetics to aestheticism is very fast along this route. The weakening of specific aesthetics coincides with an immense gaining of power for aesthetics as a whole. It is probably on this focus that the

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traditional idea shatters of a morphological aesthetics that finds its final ramification in the pages of Spengler’s Decline of the West, where the structure of analogy pervades the entire cosmos of culture and history itself, every component referring to every other as if we were dealing with an immense work of art. It is with Martin Heidegger that a total interruption of the morphological tradition is produced in favour of an essential question about a being that is not the being of the entity. On this basis, any dimension of an immanence of meaning, presupposition of a morphological vision, which had traversed German thought through thinkers like Haeckel and Riegl, is lost. Thus, a path emerges which, on the one hand, through Haeckel, joins Goethe and his Gestalt theory, and on the other hand, together with the Darwinian tradition through the idea of a Kunstwissensenschaft promoted by Alois Riegl in his Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts (1966), the dynamic and historical character of the vision is affirmed, which moves from an original close or “tactile” phase characteristic of the Egyptian world to the completion of a process that leads, through Greek art, to Romanesque figuration in which there is a clear prevalence of the optical theme over the tactile one. The presupposition for the definition of a morphological aesthetic is naturally connected to the emergence of a semantic autonomy of the image which is accompanied by a historical declination of the vision which emerges again in “pure visibility”, and in particular in authors such as Konrad Fiedler. It is a course that goes through a fundamental phase with Aby Warburg to then mature further in visual studies. Warburg’s research, based on a fundamental anthropological assumption that matured particularly in the year in Berlin, that is 1930 (see Bredekamp 2019), proposes itself as a universal science of images in the sense of a science of relations between them. This means that the images are first of all subjected to an analogical trend that determines the logic iuxta propria principia (according to their own principles) as evidenced by the Mnemosyne Atlas. The culture of images is at stake here, as it is structured according to nonlinear segments, as evidenced by the very idea of the Renaissance, of a rebirth of the ancient that does not follow a simple logic of succession. This is the basis on which the ideal of an autonomous “science of the image” was founded in the 1990s by two philosophers, Klaus Sachs-Hombach and Klaus Rehkämk, going on to found visual studies through Hans Belting, Gottfried Boehm, Horst Bredekamp and then Georges Didi-Huberman. First of all Boehm underlines the peculiarity of the “iconic difference” that characterizes the image, its grammars and its recognition. This makes it possible to rethink the image according to a transversal look that goes from art history to all the other disciplines involved in its sphere. With Horst Bredekamp, art history then moves in the direction of a general theory of the image that transcends all disciplinary boundaries as well as the distinction itself between the sciences of the spirit and the sciences of nature. Nature sciences, economics and even sports, football in particular, are also included in its perspective. The history of art continues to build the starting point, and the central theme of the unified science of the image that looks at scientific, cultural and political relations through the medium of the image, the actual pulsating location of the realities analysed. Bredekamp deals with them with a look that favours interstices as well as the critical and fracture zones. In this perspective, the idea of

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an autonomous act of the image, of its performativity as proposed by Bredekamp first of all in the volume Theorie des Bildakts, is also proposed alongside the visibility of the image. It is renewed in this way, but at the same time, it represents that Goethean look that had inaugurated the history of a knowledge of forms in the twofold objective and subjective sense of the genitive [FV].

References Baumgarten, A.G.: Aesthetica. Frankfurt a.d. Oder 1750–1758, reprint Olms, Hildesheim 1973 (1750) Baumgarten, A.G.: Metaphysica. Halle, reprint Olms, Hildesheim 1982; Eng. trans. by C.D. Fugate, J. Hymers, Metaphysics. A Critical Translation with Kant’s Elucidations. Bloomsbury, London, New York 2013 (1779) Bertram, W.: Kunst als menschliche Praxis. Eine Ästhetik. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main (2014) Bredekamp, H.: Theorie des Bildakts. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. Eng. trans. Image Acts: A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency. De Gruyter, Berlin 2018 (2010) Bredekamp, H.: Aby Warburg, der Indianer. Berliner Erkundungen einer liberalen Ethnologie. Wagenbach, Berlin (2019) Breidbach, O.: Neuronale Ästhetik. Wilhelm Fink, München (2013) Dewey, J.: Art as Experience. Perigee, New York 1980 (1934) Eco, U.: Opera aperta. Bompiani, Milano; Eng. trans. The Open Work. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1976 (1962) Gadamer, H.-G.: Truth and Method. Continuum, New York, London (2003) Goethe, J.W.: Italian Journey. Suhrkamp, New York (1989) Herder, J.G.: Plastik. In: Werke, Bd. 4, Schriften zu Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Altertum 1774–1787. DTV, Frankfurt am Main 1994: 243–326. In: Eng. trans. Sculpture Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2011 (1778) Irmscher, D.: Beobachtungen zur Funktion der Analogie im Denken Herders. DVJs 55, 64–97 (1981) Menke, Ch.: Kraft. Ein Grundbegriff ästhetischer Anthropologie. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main (2008) Nietzsche, F.: Untimely Meditations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1997) Pareyson, L.: Estetica: teoria della formatività. Bompiani, Milano 1988 (1954) Rancière, J.: Malaise dans l’esthetique. Galilée, Paris (2004) Riegl, A.: Historische Grammatik der bildende Künste, ed. by K.M. Swoboda, O. Pächt, K. Böhlau; Eng. trans. Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts. Zone Books, New York 2004 (1966) Schiller, Fr.: Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen. Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 5. Hanser, München 1962; Eng. trans. by E. Wilkinson, L.A. Willoughby, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1967 (1795) Souriau, E.: L’avenir de l’esthétique. Alcan, Paris (1929) Spengler, O.: Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte; Eng. trans. The Decline of the West. G. Allen and Unwin, London 1932 (1918) Verra, V.: Die Vergleichungsmethode bei Herder und Goethe. In: Chiarini, P. (ed.) Bausteine zu einem neuen Goethe, pp. 55–65. Athenäum, Frankfurt am Main (1987) Weizsäcker, V.: Der Gestaltkreis. Thieme, Berlin, n. ed. In: Id., Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 4. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1997 (1940) Winckelmann, J.J.: Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst und dem Unterrichte in derselben. In: Id., Kleine Schriften – Vorreden – Entwürfe, pp. 212–233. De Gruyter, Berlin 1968 (1763)

Analogy Carmelo Calì

Analogy is a mode of reasoning that is employed in problem solving, logic, science and art (see homology, isomorphy, metaphor). The scheme of analogical reasoning is centred on the detection of similarity or common features across domains. Drawing an analogy between the domains A and B means: to ascertain that A has the same features as B under some known respects, to find that A has one further feature X, and to discover or to conjecture that B has the feature X* similar to X or the same feature X as A (Copi and Cohen 2005). Therefore, if A and B are considered as sets of elements among which relations hold, an analogy between A and B amounts to a pairing function, through which a correspondence between selected elements of A and B is identified. Once elements and relations of A and B are assigned to terms and predicates of a language L, the known common features of A and B can be denoted by the list P of valid statements for A and B; the features for which A and B are known to differ from each other can be denoted by the list S of statements, which are valid for A but not for B, and T of statements valid for B but not for A; the features for which it is not still known whether A and B share them can be denoted by the list F of statements, which hold for A but it is not known if they hold for B; the feature X that is conjectured to belong to A and B can be denoted by the statement Q in the list F. Keynes (1921) called the content of P positive analogy, the content of S and T negative analogy, the content of F neutral analogy and Q hypothetical analogy. Analogical reasoning allows to conclude that Q with a degree of likelihood provided by the known similarities expressed by P statements, once the known differences expressed by S and T are discounted. If there is no negative analogy, the knowledge of positive analogy increases a priori the probability that Q is true. This argument holds, however, in conjunction with the principle of the

C. Calì (B) Università Di Palermo, Dipartimento di Scienze Umanistiche, Viale delle Scienze, 90128 Palermo, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 F. Vercellone and S. Tedesco (eds.), Glossary of Morphology, Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51324-5_3

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limitation of independent variety, for which no object is so complex that its qualities occur in an infinite number of independent aggregates. This scheme is not, however, an analogical inference rule. It admits of all arguments, because it tells nothing about the relevance of the features. Relevance must instead be determined to account for the fact that not every similarity increases and not every difference decreases the probability that Q. Carnap (1980) put forth some principles of analogy by similarity for inductive inferences, when the predictive probabilities of events are based on the relative frequencies of the observed events of the same kind. He assumed as a prior requirement the symmetry principle that neither the order of the events nor the observed occurrence of events of other kinds is relevant. This runs counter common sense and scientific analogies (Achinstein 1963). De Finetti (1938) proposed an alternative treatment of analogy as inference on what is invariant across statistical distributions of distinct event kinds. Clues to relevance and the role of similarity may come from the study of the cognitive mechanisms of analogy. Analogical reasoning differs from algorithmic procedures and heuristics. In problem solving, algorithms are effective procedures by which the solution is deterministically found. They may require, however, amounts of time and cognitive resources that violate the principle of limited rationality or cognitive plausibility (Chomsky 1965). The heuristics are procedures that reduce the costs of the search for the solution by restricting the exploration of all the available alternatives for each step of the solving process. A heuristic selects the alternatives with higher likelihood to be successful, but it cannot afford the certitude to find the solution or to find it satisfying optimality. Instead of moving from the initial state of the problem to the end state of the solution, analogical reasoning proceeds by searching for a similar problem that has been already successfully solved, from which the solving procedure may be inherited. Therefore, analogical reasoning relies upon the ability of transposing information between the domains of two similar problems. Gentner (1983), Falkenhainer et al. (1989/1990) and Gentner and Markman (1997) explain analogical reasoning through a multi-stage model of distinct operations, which act on relations within and across the domains and specify the relevant information as similitude of structure. The content of analogy is expressed by nadic predicates that denote the relations which connect the elements of one domain, the source or the previous problem, and are transposable to the other domain, the target or the problem to be solved. The higher the order of relations, as a function of the connected elements, the more likely will it be to map it from one domain onto the other one. The recognition of similitude plays a key role, but it pertains to systematic relations. The implementation of the structure-mapping engine requires the recruitment of cognitive functions like working and long-term memory, by which the example and the target are maintained, retrieved, aligned and mapped. Holyoak and Thagard (1995) showed, however, that the similarity between superficial features enhances the likelihood to retrieve structural information, although it is not systematic. Dunbar and Blanchette (2001) claimed that superficial and structural similarity makes a distinct contribution to the mapping and the abstraction of analogies. Holyoak and Thagard (1989, 1995) and Hummel and Holoyak (2003) treated structural similitude as a constraint, rather than a rule. It constrains the activation patterns of a network,

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whose nodes are the features of the domains, and selects the connection of shared features, along with a semantic and a pragmatic constraint, which regard the similarity of features and the purpose for which they become relevant. Science and art provide important test beds for models. The analogy with acoustics was employed by nineteenth-century physicists to study the spectral lines of the electromagnetic energy (Hájek 2018). The role played by this false analogy in scientific discovery may be the by-product of the pre-theoretic similarities, which were recognized as fundamental to analogy by Hesse (1966) together with the causal relation within the features of the transposable domain and the fact that the latter must not figure in a negative analogy. The structural similitude and the analogical reasoning in grasping the gist of artworks are other phenomena against which to compare the implications of theories, since they do not involve truth or predictability (Arnheim 1974; Minissale 2013).

References Achinstein, P.: Variety and analogy in confirmation theory. Philos. Sci. 30, 207–221 (1963) Arnheim, R.: Art and Visual Perception. A Psychology of the Creative Eye. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles (1974) Carnap, R.: A basic system of inductive logic part II. In: Jeffrey, R.C. (ed.) Studies in Inductive Logic and Probability, vol. 2, pp. 7–155. University of California Press, Berkeley (1980) Chomsky, N.: Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass (1965) Copi, I., Cohen, C.: Introduction to Logic, 12th edn. Prentice-Hall, New Jersey (2005) de Finetti, B.: Sur la condition d’equivalence partielle, tr. In: Jeffrey, R.C. (ed.) Studies in Inductive Logic and Probability II, pp. 193–205. University of California Press, Los Angeles (1938) Dunbar, K., Blanchette, I.: The in vivo/in vitro approach to cognition: the case of analogy. Trends Cogn. Sci. 5(8), 334–339 (2001) Falkenhainer, B., Forbus, K., Gentner, D.: The structure-mapping engine: algorithm and examples. Artif. Intell. 41, 2–63 (1989/90) Gentner, D.: Structure-mapping: a theoretical framework for analogy. Cogn. Sci. 7, 155–170 (1983) Gentner, D., Markman, A.B.: Structure mapping in analogy and similarity. Am. Psychol. 52(1), 45–56 (1997) Hájek, A.: Creating heuristics for philosophical creativity. In: Gaut, B., Kieran, M. (eds.) Creativity and Philosophy, pp. 292–312. Routledge, New York (2018) Hesse, M.B.: Models and Analogies in Science. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame (1966) Holyoak, K., Thagard, P.: Analogical mapping by constraint satisfaction. Cogn. Sci. 13, 295–355 (1989) Holyoak, K., Thagard, P.: Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought. MIT Press, Cambridge (1995) Hummel, J., Holoyak, K.: A symbolic-connectionist theory of relational inference and generalization. Psychol. Rev. 110, 220–264 (2003) Keynes, J.M.: A Treatise on Probability. Macmillan, London (1921) Minissale, G.: The Psychology of Contemporary Art. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2013)

Artefact Peppino Ortoleva

Human To what extent are artefacts a character and prerogative of the human species? In general, the existence of objects intentionally produced, particularly tools or things created through the use of tools, has been considered in paleontology as the evidence of the presence of a settlement of Homo in its different declinations such as habilis, erectus, and obviously sapiens in its more advanced declination. This means that the production of artefacts is generally recognized as both typical of humankind in the widest definition of the term and universal in the whole species so defined. But is it an exclusive prerogative of Homo? The observation of the behaviour of some non-human species has led to this presumed monopoly being brought into question, particularly since the publication in the 1970s of some of the studies conducted by Jane Goodall, whose results were confirmed by later research. Chimpanzees have been proved to be able not only to intentionally use objects found in the environment as tools for their goals, as in the famous case of stones employed as nutcrackers, but also to create their own, however simple, tools, as in the case of the careful stripping a twig of its leaves in order to use it to chase ants. In this case, can we define the twig so adapted as an artefact? If we accept this definition, the field of application of the concept must go beyond the limits of Homo. Humans and Tools In the production of artefacts, humans have been greatly helped by the use of instruments, from the simplest such as various kinds of percussive tools, mere stone tools and sticks, to machines. In fact, Gilbert Simondon has defined tools as the primary form of technical object. This leads us to two questions: (1) Do all artefacts need the use of tools to be created? (2) Can we speak of artefacts that are produced not just with the help of instruments, but also directly by them? The answer to the first question is no; many kinds of artefacts have been and are produced without the use of instruments other than the hand, which in Aristotle’s definition is “the tool of tools”. For instance, many samples of primitive pottery P. Ortoleva (B) Università degli Studi di Torino, Via Saluzzo 5, 10125 Torino, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 F. Vercellone and S. Tedesco (eds.), Glossary of Morphology, Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51324-5_4

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have been created through the manual moulding of clay and its later drying in the heat of the sun. So, a technique is used, that is, a traditional and regulated series of actions, even though it does not require the use of specific tools. The second question is very relevant to our time because of the progress of automation first and of artificial intelligence later. Since the 1960s, automation has been making the production of artefacts possible using machinery that is only indirectly guided by human hands. One of the perspectives of artificial intelligence now is the totally autonomous production of artefacts by self-organized apparatuses. Again, we are seeing a production of artefacts that partially or totally goes beyond the limits of Homo. Intentional The term “intentional” has been widely discussed after the publication by Daniel Dennett of The Intentional Stance in the early 1970s, in which intentional attitude is defined as typical of human beings (and intelligent machines), and is the basis for an explanation of human behaviour. It is not necessary to subscribe to all of Dennett’s theses, however, to accept the idea that in general, the production of things by humans may be intentional, unintentional or partially intentional, depending on the degree of self-consciousness and self-control of the human being in the act of production. So, for instance, the human body unconsciously produces physical extensions such as nails that may be used as tools, and even become part of specific techniques. Likewise, human excrements are certainly physical objects produced by humans, but the intention is secondary to the production. On the other hand, many artefacts are the product of a joint effort by many people, and the coordination of their intentions is strategic to their production. Physical Objects Is the term artefact only applicable to things, that is, to objects belonging to the physical world? Humans have always been capable of creating non-physical objects, from speech to ideas. The possibility of defining language as an artefact, for instance, has recently been argued against the thesis of its being an innate ability. But: (1) recognizing all that is created by humans as an artefact makes this concept so far-reaching as to lose any specific identity; (2) physical presence or absence is not an accidental attribute of an entity; it qualifies its existence in time and space. So, human civilizations produce not only artefacts, but also other products that are not definable with this term, such as non-physical entities, starting with ideas, and unintentional objects. Modern technology poses the problem of the physical existence of artefacts from a different perspective, with the introduction of technologies whose results are, or seem to be, “immaterial”, from radio broadcasts to digital “virtual reality”. In this case, we may ask whether we are faced with a new class of non-physical artefacts, or whether the term “immaterial” is not appropriate, since the material existence of an object is simply de-localized in relation to its perception. From this point of view, information that circulates on the Internet is not immaterial; it exists thanks to a series of very material apparatuses, such as the cable and wireless networks that circulate it and the big “data farm” that stows it. If we accept this view, we may speak of artefacts, and in particular of “cognitive artefacts”, also when referring to many seemingly immaterial aspects of modern life.

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The Roots of a Word The term “artefact” is strictly tied on the one hand to the word “art”, but in its pre-contemporary meaning which, like with “artisan”, is not tied to aesthetic aspects but rather to the use of techniques, and on the other hand to the word “artificial”, a very complex word that implies “man-made”, but also “unnatural”, a deep connotation we should never forget. In saying artefact, we are implicitly speaking of an addition to the pre-existing world, that is produced by humans.

References De Vaujany, F.X., Mitev, N.: Materiality and Space: Organizations, Artefacts and Practices. Palgrave Macmillan, London (2013) Dennett, D.: The Intentional Stance. MIT Press, Cambridge (1987) Goodall, J.: The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Patterns of Behavior. Houghton Mifflin, Boston (1986) Leroi-Gourhan, A.: Le Geste et la Parole. I, Technique et Langage, Albin Michel, Paris; Eng. trans. by A.B. Berger, Gesture and Speech. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass 1993 (1964) Mauss, M.: Les techniques du corps. Journal de Psychologie 3–4 (1936) Popitz, H.: Der Aufbruch zur artifiziellen Gesellschaft. Zur Anthropologie der Technik. Mohr, Tübingen (1995) Simondon, G.: Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, Aubier, Paris; Eng. trans. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2017 (1958)

Artifex Amalia Maria Sofia Salvestrini

Man and God The figure of artifex in Medieval philosophical and theological texts is indicated also by the terms opifex, faber, and more rarely pictor, sculptor, architectus (Augustinus Hipponensis (IV–V c.) 1845: q. 78; Iohannes Scotus seu Eriugena (IX c.) 2006: liber II, p. 172; Anselmus Cantuariensis (XI c.) 1946: capp. 10–11; Bonauentura (XIII c.) 1855: liber I, dist. 3, pars 1, articulus unicus, q. 2, conclusio; Thomas de Aquino (XIII c.) 1889: I–II, q. 57, a. 3, resp.; Iohannes Duns Scotus (XIII–XIV c.) 1966: liber I, d. 11, q. 2, p. 148; Guillelmus de Ockham (XIV c.) 1970: dist. 3, q. 10, p. 556). These terms refer to a wider semantic field compared to the modern concept of artist. In the Middle Ages, the concept of art in the modern meaning of fine arts did not exist, and then, the maker was one who was busy in a productive activity of any nature. Therefore, the artifex could be an artisan, a smith, a painter, or a sculptor, but the last two notions imply having a particular know-how. It is therefore not only a productive activity, which entails a kind of relationship with the matter, but also a theoretic activity, that presupposes a knowing that orients action. The maker in the Middle Ages is therefore God, who creates from nothing, or man, who properly produces from pre-existing matter. In the Augustinian tradition, the relationship between man and God is analogical, that is, a similarity of ratios between the Trinitarian structure of human knowledge—memory, intelligence and will—and the Trinitarian structure of God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—(Augustinus Hipponensis (IV–V c.) 1841b; Parodi 2006). The Medieval authors considered the maker activity as the action that best explains the nature of God and his creative activity. In this way, the Latin Medieval world reinterpreted the platonic idea of demiurge and Aristotelian ideas of poiesis and techne.

A. M. S. Salvestrini (B) Università di Pavia/Università di Torino, Italia - EPHE, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 F. Vercellone and S. Tedesco (eds.), Glossary of Morphology, Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51324-5_5

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Form The relationship between know and do entails a central notion from the morphological point of view, that is the notion of form: the activity of the maker is, firstly, to have a project in mind, that is imago or verbum, secondly, to form the matter according to the model in the mind, that becomes criterion (see model). Especially in the authors that are inspired by the Augustinian tradition, the conception in the mind of the human maker is inner Word and as such similar to the divine Word, that is the place of eternal notions, like the Good and the Beautiful (Augustinus Hipponensis (IV–V c.) 1841b: XV.10; Anselmus Cantuariensis (XI c.) 1946: capp. IX–XI; Bonauentura (XIII c.) 1891: capp. II–III). From a morphological perspective, it seems significant that among the terms used in the Middle Ages to indicate the concept of Beauty, there are forma, formositas and species. Even though the latter has a wide semantic spectrum, these expressions refer to the idea of form and also about beauty. In the fourteenth century, Ockham reinterprets traditional concepts in his theory of knowledge and, in the first phase of his thought, he writes about the fictum that the human maker forges in his mind from the observation of sensible things and that become a productive model (Guillelmus de Ockham (XIV c.) 1970: dist. 2, q. 8, p. 272). Therefore, the artifex produces the work on the basis of a primitive conception and a project in the mind. The structure of the work analogically reveals the form, structure, criteria with which the things are created. In the twelfth century, in particular in the Commentaries on Timaeus, the notion of exornatio mundi related to the moment in which the shapeless matter received a form becomes significant (Guillelmus de Conchis (XI–XII c.) 2006: liber II, capp. 174–176; Eco 1987: Sect. 4.3; Gregory 1955). Beauty as Criterion Among the criteria that orient the creation of the artifex and those one finds in the work, there is the notion of beauty that in the Middle Ages appears frequently in the classical formulation of an ordered disposition between parts, as in the Augustinian tradition in which the idea of proportio or æqualitas numerosa is central (Augustinus Hipponensis (IV–V c.) 1841a: VI.13.38; Bonauentura (XIII c.) 1891: II.5). The idea that beauty is the structural criterion of the only form (Albertus Magnus (XIII c.) 1972: IV.2; Eco 1987: Sect. 3.6), or of the organism, that is of the whole substance, emerges in the Aristotelian tradition (Eco 1987: Chap. 8) (see organization, symmetry, type/typology). Leonardo and Valéry. For a Phenomenological Perspective The notion of beauty connected with the activity of the artifex, according to the classic formulation, which also belongs to the Augustinian tradition, reappears in several Renaissance interpretations: it could be conceived as the ideal form (Alberti, Raphael), or as— about painting—“l’armonica proporzionalità delle parti che compongono il tutto, che contenta il senso” (Leonardo da Vinci (XV–XVI c.) 1924: I.19; Franzini 1987: 62). The poietic activity of the Medieval artifex persists in the Renaissance and in modern readings of Leonardo, like in Paul Valéry, but it is unrelated to the transcendental dimension, because in these last cases, it is the artifex which gives a meaning

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to the work. According to Valéry, the constructive relationship between the artist and the world allows for a “phenomenology of artistic forms,” that is an “interpretation and transformation of nature” (Franzini 1987: 191) (see phenomenology). Also in this case, the notion of form is significant, because it is that that guarantees the validity of the processes of the artifex as a result of poietic action. Art is in fact building by “formed objects” and implies “seeking for the genesis of the form,” connecting in this way the work with the formative activity that produced it (Franzini 1987: 213–214) (see technology). Into this picture, according to Valéry, Leonardo understands the “formative forces” of reality, in order to keep together matter and action, construction and formation. From this point of view, Leonardo could be conceived as the “angel of morphology” (Franzini 1987: 215) (see morphology).

References Albertus Magnus: Super Dionysium de divinis nominibus. In: P. Simon (ed.), Albertus Magnus, Opera omnia, vol. XXXVII/1. Aedibus Aschendorff, Monasterii Westfalorum (XIII c., 1972) Anselmus Cantuariensis: Monologion. In: Schmitt, F.S. (ed.) Anselmus Cantuariensis, Opera Omnia, vol. 1. Nelson, Edinburgh (XI c., 1946) Augustinus Hipponensis: De musica. In: Migne, J.-P. (ed.) Patrologia latina, vol. 32. Venit apud editorem in vico dicto Montrouge, juxta portam, Gallice dictam, Barrière d’Enfer, Paris (IV–V c., 1841a) Augustinus Hipponensis: De trinitate. In: Migne, J.-P. (ed.) Patrologia latina, vol. 42. Venit apud editorem in vico dicto Montrouge, juxta portam, Gallice dictam, Barrière d’Enfer, Paris (IV–V c., 1841b) Augustinus Hipponensis: De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus. In: Migne, J.-P. (ed.), Patrologia latina, vol. 40. Venit apud editorem in vico dicto Montrouge, juxta portam, Gallice dictam, Barrière d’Enfer, Paris (IV–V c., 1845) Bonauentura: Commentaria in quattuor libros Sententiarum Magistri Petri Lombardi. In: PP. Collegii a S. Bonaventura (eds.) Bonauentura, Opera omnia, vol. II. Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, Firenze (XIII c., 1855) Bonauentura: Itinerarium mentis in Deum. In: PP. Collegii a S. Bonaventura (eds.) Bonauentura, Opera omnia, vol. V. Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, Firenze (XIII c., 1891) Eco, U.: Arte e bellezza nell’estetica medievale. Bompiani, Milano (1987) Franzini, E.: Il mito di Leonardo. Sulla fenomenologia della creazione artistica. Unicopli, Milano (1987) Gregory, T.: Anima mundi: la filosofia di Guglielmo di Conches e la scuola di Chartres. G.C. Sansoni, Firenze (1955) Guillelmus de Conchis: Glossae super Platonem. In: Jeauneau, E.A. (ed.) Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (CCCM 203). Brepols, Turnhout (XI–XII c., 2006) Guillelmus de Ockham: Scriptum in librum primum Sententiarum (ordinatio). In: Brown, S., Gal, G. (eds.) Guillelmus de Ockham, Opera Theologica, vol. II. St. Bonaventure University, New York (XIV c., 1970) Iohannes Duns Scotus: Lectura. In: Commissio Scotistica (ed.) Iohannes Duns Scotus, Opera omnia, vol. XVII. Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, Civitas Vaticana (XIII–XIV c., 1966) Iohannes Scottus seu Eriugena: De diuisione naturae. liber II, In: Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, vol. 162. Brepols, Turnhout (IX c., 2006) Leonardo da Vinci: In: Borzelli, A. (ed.) Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della pittura. Carabba, Lanciano 1924 (XV–XVI c., 1924)

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Parodi, M.: Il paradigma filosofico agostiniano. Un modello di razionalità e la sua crisi nel XII secolo. Lubrina Editore, Bergamo (2006) Thomas de Aquino: Summa theologiae. In: Commissio Leonina (ed.) Thomas de Aquino, Opera omnia, vol. 5. Ex Typographia Polyglotta S.C. de Propaganda Fide, Roma (XIII c., 1889)

Artistic Morphology Federico Vercellone

The question of artistic morphology coincides in many ways with the investigation of the origin or root of the figurative arts (see Aesthetics, morphology). Vasari identified it in drawing, while colour corresponds to an enrichment of the original structure. The primacy of drawing in the history of figurative arts, in decline after German romanticism which proposes the primacy of colour, began first with Vasari, was then developed by J. J. Winckelmann in whose History of the Art of Antiquity (1764) drawing expresses the necessary element and the primordial component, and later “a search for beauty manifested itself, followed in the end by the superfluous”. According to Winckelmann, this approach, in many ways formalistic, combines with a naturalistic model of the development of art that is substantiated through the parallel with childhood, adulthood and decline of old age. The laws of culture are thus brought back to those of nature. The development of the historical-artistic story is accompanied, in the History of the Art of Antiquity, by a melancholy gaze (see historical form of art). This is what can be deduced from the conclusion of the work in which the lost splendours of Greek art are compared to the melancholy gaze of the woman in love who sees her beloved, whom she will never see again, leaving on a ship, believing that she can still glimpse his features in the sail that is drifting away. Here, we outline a story of pure forms, which are such precisely because they are casts, copies of the originals that no longer exist, almost ghosts. It is this melancholic gaze that establishes the history of art as a story that contemplates a historical development inclined to aesthetise itself, as evidenced by the rise, through Kant, of modern aesthetic consciousness. This is where the real story of artistic morphology begins, unfolding along two opposing trends. It oscillates between a form that lets “other” content be revealed through itself and one that self-understands as pure—perhaps mere—formal production. In the first F. Vercellone (B) Dipartimento di Filosofia e Scienze dell’Educazione, Università di Torino, via Sant’Ottavio 20, 10124 Torino, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 F. Vercellone and S. Tedesco (eds.), Glossary of Morphology, Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51324-5_6

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case, we are dealing with forms characterized by a content that transcends them in different ways—one could define them as symbolic—in the second case, there is a formalistic slant. The first type of form is the one exemplified by Goethe who refers to the structure that refers, in absentia, to an archetype, which establishes a type-token relationship, such that the distance relationship between the two poles determines the morphogenesis (Petitot 2004). It is a passage that is outlined in Goethe’s letter of 17 May 1787 to Herder in which the idea of the Urpflanze, of an infinite production of plants from this original model that acts as a mould, is outlined. Carl Gustav Carus and Alexander von Humboldt, two great figures of German Humanism of the late eighteenth century and the first decades of the following century, both share the view that the morphological development is loaded with a cognitive and semantic fabric. If for the former, doctor, painter and philosopher, the artistic gaze over the landscape corresponds to the cognitive one, then for Alexander von Humboldt, the morphology of the landscape reveals its history, “und es kann uns gelingen”, as can be deduced from the first pages of Kosmos, “die Natur begreifend, den rohen Stoff empirischer Anschauung gleichsam durch Ideen zu beherrschen”. The joining of idea and nature produces the form that, as Gestalt, constitutes a complex system, intimately organized and therefore endowed with a semantics strongly connoted with an affinity with art. Fundamental in order to grasp and develop the theme of artistic morphology at the beginning of the twentieth century is of course the figure of Aby Warburg, who articulates in his writings and in the Mnemosyne Atlas a paradoxical logic of the life of images, subjected to rebirth and survival (Didi-Hubermann 2002; Bredekamp 2019), based on analogy and practical themes. The first decades of the twentieth century are sometimes characterized by the emergence of plainly stylistic paradigms, as in Heinrich Wöllflin’s Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915), even if the memory of the organicistic paradigm of development is something that will never be lost in German culture, as evidenced by a little-known but nevertheless very significant book by art historian Wilhelm Pinder, Das Problem der Generation in er Kunstgeschichte (1926), which refers to the idea of seasons of art determined by the epochal rhythm of the generations. Furthermore, the activity of forms and their link with technology is underlined by Henri Focillon’s great essay, La Vie des Formes (1934), in which form’s active role in establishing itself in the living world is exalted. In the following decades, the theme of form pervaded reflection on art, as evidenced, among others, by Susan Langer in Feeling and Form (1953), which emphasizes the symbolic meaning of making art in connection with and in consideration of the scientific universe, and Georges Kubler in The Shape of Time (1962). More recently, the features of the theme of artistic morphology are defined on the one hand within the relationship with the theme of art history and its end (articulated in particular by Hans Belting) and through the intention of laying bare the formalistic character of art history in the face of the power of the image (initially thematized by artists such as Paul Klee), and on the other hand, recently, through the great representative of visual studies Horst Bredekamp, in particular in the volume Bildakt.

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References Belting, H.: Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? Deutsche Kunstverlag, Berlin-München; Eng. trans. The End of the History of Art? University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1991 (1983) Bredekamp, H.: Der Bildakt. Wagenbach, Berlin (2010) Bredekamp, H.: Aby Warburg, der Indianer. Berliner Erkundungen einer liberalen Ethnologie. Wagenbach, Berlin (2019) Didi-Huberman G.: L’image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps de fantômes, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris; Eng. trans. The Surviving Image. Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park 2016 (2002) Focillon, H.: La Vie des formes. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris; Eng. trans. Life of Forms. The MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 1992 (1934) Humboldt, A. von: Kosmos. Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung, Cotta, StuttgartTübingen; Eng. trans. by E. C. Otté, Cosmos. A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe. Harper & Brothers, New York 1866 (1845–1862) Kubler, G.: The Shape of Time. Yale University Press, New Haven (1962) Langer, S.K.: Feeling and Form. Scribner’s, New York (1953) Petitot, J.: Morphologie et esthétique. Maisonneuve & Larose, Paris (2004) Pinder, W.: Das Problem der Generation in der Kunstgeschichte. Bruckmann, München, 1926 (1961) Vasari, G.: Le vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti; Eng. trans. The Lives of the Artists. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1998 (1550) Warburg, A.: Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Akademie Verlag, Berlin (2000) Winckelmann, J.J.: Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums; Eng. trans. History of the Art of Antiquity. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles 2006 (1764) Wölfflin, H.: Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst. Bruckmann, München; Eng. trans. Principles of Art History. Dover, New York 1929 (1915)

Atmosphere Tonino Griffero

Saying “there is something in the air”, one is expressing the qualitative and vague “something-more” of a certain situation, i.e. its atmosphere, without being able to precisely define it (let alone rationally explain it). In everyday language, the term “atmosphere”—that comes from the Greek (¢τμ´oς = vapour and σϕα‹ρα = sphere) and in meteorology denotes the gas envelope surrounding a planet—can either qualify a situation, which can be, for example, tense, relaxed, gloomy, etc., or implicitly axiologically refer to a favourable condition. This irritating but also fascinating semantic ambiguity, due to the kind of expectations involved in the situation (the only cordial atmosphere of a political summit in which high hopes are placed is probably a failure!), shows that an atmosphere can be, paradoxically, everything when it gives an account of the quality of life, but almost nothing when it only indicates the superficial occultation of conflicts. Although the use of “atmosphere” has been metaphorical since the eighteenth century along with some forerunners (aura, Stimmung, genius loci), it has boomed only recently in the humanities: a “career” that is explained by both the so-called aestheticization in advanced capitalist economies and the interdisciplinary “affective turn” in all those disciplines (design, geography, architecture, art and media studies, sociology, urban and organization studies, anthropology, marketing studies, etc.) that are increasingly focused more on the vague and expressive qualia of reality (the how) than on its quantified materiality or defined semantic value (the what). In its recent theoretical sense, the notion was independently introduced by psychiatrist Tellenbach (1968) and philosopher Hermann Schmitz (from 1969 on). Tellenbach conceives of atmosphere as an essential quality of intersubjectivity, especially generated through olfaction and taste. An oral atmosphere would give the newborn the necessary trust for a correct development of his personality and provide the

T. Griffero (B) University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Via Francesco Valesio, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 F. Vercellone and S. Tedesco (eds.), Glossary of Morphology, Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51324-5_7

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psychiatrist with an effective diagnostic tool of psychic diseases whose symptom is indeed a loss or deterioration of olfaction. Schmitz, on the basis of a wide and challenging antireductionistic (neo)phenomenology of the felt body (Leib) and a philosophy understood as a selfreflection on the way in which one orientates within one’s environment and on (especially involuntary) life experiences, considers all feelings as atmospheres, thus restoring the Homeric concept of feelings—as demons poured out into a nonlocalizable space—that preceded the age of introjection (from Plato onwards). Atmospheric feelings are not, therefore, subjective-internal moods projected outside, but affective powers that exist discontinuously but objectively outside and that authoritatively fill a certain surfaceless lived space. Thanks to felt-bodily qualities common both to perceived forms and perceivers (suggestions of movement, synaesthetic qualities), in principle, atmospheres can then be experienced by anyone, regardless of whether the single perceiver merely notes them or is so deeply involved in them that he/she is assured of his/her personal identity through these absolute subjective facts. This ambitious and externalizing neophenomenological approach to feelings as atmospheres was then developed by Gernot Böhme’s project of an aesthetics (aisthetics) of atmospheres (from 1989 on) aimed at overcoming the intellectualism of classical aesthetics and its obsessive focus on “great” art. Underlining the extraordinarily rich atmospheric competence of today’s aesthetic work (architecture, interior design, light design, art, sound engineering, scene painting, music, advertising, marketing research, etc.), he can claim that, being atmospheres involved wherever something is being staged thanks to various generators (movement impressions, synaesthesia, scenes, social characters, ecstasies of things, etc.), they are almost everywhere, especially in late capitalist aesthetic economy, increasingly based more on lifestyle or stage value than on use and exchange values. This background has also helped me to develop an atmospherology (from 2014 on) that is placed in a broader “pathic aesthetics”. It is focused on atmospheres (of various kinds) and quasi-things understood as wholes of affordances that, for their marked expressiveness and intrusiveness, have a real physiognomic “character” (see physiognomics). This atmospherological approach aims at better explaining expressive qualities as well as social phenomena such as collective and emotional states of mind, and not least at developing through an increased atmospheric “competence” (both productive and receptive) a more critical discussion of the media-emotional manipulation underlying today’s aestheticization.

References Andermann, K., Eberlein, U. (eds.): Gefühle als Atmosphären. Neue Phänomenologie und philosophische Emotionstheorie. Akademie Verlag, Berlin (2011) Böhme, G.: Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M., rev. ed. 2013 (1995) Böhme, G.: Anmutungen. Über das Atmosphärische. Tertium, Ostfildern v. Stuttgart (1998)

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Böhme, G.: Aisthetik: Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre. Fink, München (2001) Böhme, G.: Architektur und Atmosphäre. Fink, München (2006) Böhme, G.: The Aesthetics of Atmospheres. Routledge, London, New York (2017a) Böhme, G.: Atmospheric Architectures. The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces. Bloomsbury, London (2017b) Böhme, G.: Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism. Mimesis International, Milan (2017c) Bulka, T.: Stimmung, Emotion, Atmosphäre. Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Struktur der menschlichen Affektivität. Mentis, Münster (2015) Debus, S., Posner, R. (eds.): Atmosphären im Alltag. Über ihre Erzeugung und Wirkung. PsychiatrieVerlag, Bonn (2007) Goetz, R., Graupner, S. (eds.): Atmosphäre(n). Interdisziplinare Annäherungen an einen unscharfen Begriff, 2 voll. kopaed, München (2007) Griffero, T.: Atmospheres. Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces. Routledge, London, New York (2014) Griffero, T.: Quasi-Things. The Paradigm of Atmospheres. Suny Press, New York (2017) Griffero, T.: Places, Affordances, Atmospheres: A Pathic Aesthetics. Routledge, London, New York (2019) Griffero, T., Francesetti, G. (eds.): Neither Inside Nor Outside. Psychopathology and Atmospheres. Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle upon Tyne (2019) Griffero, T., Moretti, G. (eds.): Atmosphere/Atmospheres. Mimesis International, Milan (2018) Griffero, T., Tedeschini, M. (eds.): Atmospheres and Aesthetics. A Plural Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, London (2019) Hasse, J. Atmosphären der Stadt. Aufgespürte Räume. jovis, Berlin (2012) Hauskeller, M.: Atmosphären erleben. Philosophische Untersuchungen zur Sinneswahrnehmung. Akademie Verlag, Berlin (1995) Heibach, C. (ed.): Atmosphären. Dimensionen eines diffusen Phänomens. Fink, München (2012) Iulmi, C.: Situations and Atmospheres in Organizations. A (new) Phenomenology of Being-in-theOrganization. Mimesis International, Milan (2017) Mahayni, Z. (ed.): Neue Ästhetik. Das Atmosphärische und die Kunst. Fink, München (2002) Pfaller, L., Wiesse, B. (eds.): Stimmungen und Atmosphären. Springer, Wiesband (2018) Rauh, A.: Concerning Astonishing Atmospheres. Aisthesis, Aura, and Atmospheric Portfolio. Mimesis International, Milan (2018) Schmitz, H.: System der Philosophie. Bd. III.2, Der Gefühlsraum. Bouvier, Bonn (1969) Schmitz, H.: Der Leib, der Raum und die Gefühle. Sirius, Bielefeld-Locarno (2007) Schmitz, H.: Atmospharen. Alber, Freiburg-München (2014) Schroer, S.A., Schmitt, S.B. (eds.): Exploring Atmospheres Ethnographically. Routledge, London, New York (2017) Tellenbach, H.: Geschmack und Atmosphäre. Müller, Salzburg (1968) Thibaud, J.-P.: En quête d’ambiances. Éprouver la ville en passant. M¯etisPresses, Genève (2015) Weidinger, J. (ed.): Atmosphären Entwerfen. Technische Universitätsverlag, Berlin (2014)

Attractors/Basin of Attraction Francesco La Mantia

It is a controversial issue to decide who first coined the term “attractor”. According to Peter Tsatsanis, the editor of the English version of Prédire n’est pas expliquer, it was René Thom who first introduced such a term. It is necessary, however, to remember that Thom thought that it was first introduced by the American mathematician Steven Smale, “although Smale says it was Thom that coined the neologism “attractor”“(Tsatsanis 2010: 63–64 n. 20). From this point of view, Bob Williams expressed a more cautious opinion by saying that “the word “attractor” was invented by these guys, Thom and Smale” (Cucker and Wong 2000: 183). But other mathematicians are of the opinion that the term “attractor” was introduced neither by René Thom nor by Steve Smale (cf. at least Milnor 1985: 177– 178). In short, the “authorship” of such a word cannot be easily established. Despite this, the etymology of “attractor” is transparent: this word comes from the Latin attrahere, a verb which literally means “to pull” or “to drawn to” (de Vries 2012: 541). Indeed, an attractor is generally a mathematical object “that represents a steady stable state adopted by a dynamic system” (Kim et al. 2013: 1): such a state “attracts the dynamics of the system” (Bernal and Gomez 2014: 61), or, in other words, it is a stable state towards which the behaviour of the system is moving over time (see dynamic system). In the framework of the so-called Dynamical Systems Theory (see dynamic system), it is usual to distinguish at least four types of attractor: (1) fixed point; (2) limit cycle; (3) limit torus; (4) strange attractor (cf. at least Wang 2014: 78– 79; Buzzi 2005). Nevertheless, before to proceed by defining each type, we need a formal concept of dynamical system. More precisely, it is essential to differentiate between real dynamical systems (henceforth, referred to as RDS) and mathematical dynamical systems (henceforth, referred to as MDS). While RDS refers to every F. La Mantia (B) Dipartmento di Scienze Umanistiche, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, Palermo, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 F. Vercellone and S. Tedesco (eds.), Glossary of Morphology, Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51324-5_8

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“real system that changes over time” (Giunti 1997: 114), MDS refers to “an abstract mathematical structure can be used to describe the change of a real system” (cf. Giunti 1997: 114). Such a structure can be defined as a triple of the form:    MDS = T, M, g t , where 1. “T ” is a not empty set, called the time set of MDS, which specifies the set of all temporal instants along which evolves RDS; 2. “M” is a not empty set, called the space of states o phase space of MDS, which specifies the set of all possible states of RDS; 3. “{gt }” is a family of maps from M to itself, each of which specifies a state transition of RDS at a particular time. Generally, MDS is discrete when “T ” is N or “M” is denumerable; it is continuous when “its time set T is the set of the (non-negative) real numbers, or […] the state space is not denumerable” (Giunti 1995: 561). As first approximation, attractors are parts or subsets of M towards which tend “many” orbits or trajectories of MDS (cf. Buzzi 2005: 145). Put in slightly different terms, “An attractor is a subset of state space with at least two properties: first, it is an invariant set: if the system begins in an invariant set, it never leaves it. Secondly, that invariant set is attractive: if the system starts sufficiently close to it, the system will ultimately converge to the attractor” (Hogan and Sternad 2013: 3). Having said that, it is appropriate now to define each type of attractor. A fixed point attractor (or singleton attractor) is “a fixed point that is also an attractor” (cf. at least Formenti et al. 2014: 196). A limit cycle attractor (or periodic attractor) is “stable limit cycle” (Tang et al. 2007: 52), that is, a “periodic orbit such that all other trajectories in its sufficiently small neighbourhood spiral towards […] it” (cf. at least Tang et al. 2007: 52). A limit torus (or toroidal attractor) is “the result of a limit cycle that is cycling along two axes rather than one” (cf. at least Guastello and Liebovitch 2009: 11). A strange attractor (or chaotic attractor) is an attractor which is not a fixed point, a limit cycle or a limit torus. Generally, it has a fractal dimension in phase space by definition (cf. at least Buzzi 2005: 145; Bergé and Dubois 1992: 124–125).

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Starting from these definitions, it would be possible to develop a more detailed “formal portrait” of each of these mathematical objects. But, because of the level of generality of these introductory remarks, I prefer to highlight only the first one: the reader will master the definitions of all the other types of attractor by consulting the specialist literature here reported. So, as regards the fixed point attractors, we need to define the concept of fixed point of a map. In order to achieve this purpose, we can take into account any element of {gt }, that is, to say any endomorphism of M. In this case, we will assert that an element m ∈ M is a fixed point of gt : M → M, where, gt : M → M ∈ {gt }, if and only if g t (m) = m, for all t. Put in more general terms: “Le point fixe d’une fonction est celui où la valeur de la fonction coïncide avec celui de sa variable” (Bitbol 2019: 259 n. 24). For example, if M = R and if the map gt : M → M is defined by gt (m) = m2 , the points 0 and 1 will be two fixed points of gt ∈ {gt }: g t (0) = 0, for all t; g t (1) = 1, for all t; Having defined the concept of fixed point, we can introduce the concept of fixed point attractor (or attracting fixed point). A fixed point of a map gt , i.e. a point m ∈ M such that gt (m) = m, is a fixed point attractor of gt if and only if there is an interval a