Reviews and Comments

Francastel in this book tries to construct a relay, a deep common ground, between the aesthetic and the technological. His methodology is roughly a sociological or even anthropological one. By means of anthropological analysis he tries to single out the concordance that supervenes the two - the aesthetic and the technological. However, his focus, his aim, is towards a much deeper level of confluence: a complete re-evaluation of the schema of categorization that generates the segragation between the aesthetic and the technological, between fine art and architecture and technology. Hence what he's actually trying to do is a:

[...] (metaphysical-theological restructuring) or in a complete reformulation of the categories which originated in, roughly speaking, the 12th centuries, e.g. in the work of St.Bonaventure (De Redcutione Artium ad Theologiam), that may possibly in a structural manner resolve the tension that maintains the cleavage [...]

(See (Preface to) an Intellectual Grasp of the Meaningfulness of Art)

His investigation is incomplete and only gives a faint idea of the direction that one should take in order to initiate an all-encompassing project, but a feeling, an intuition, should slowly emerge, as to a kind of future metaphysics that in its shapes takes the form of a sort of "structural regulation principle" that fully incorporates the pivotal role of human being that is coupled to the milieu and thenceforward generate the categorization schema.

This is the work that gave the final blow to classicism in visual art. German expressionism stems from the writing, and Wyndham Lewis, the founder of Vorticism, read Worringer's works and was hugely inspired by them.

By arguing for the case of Abstraction, the visual arts of the Western tradition were finally led back to their Platonic tradition from the Aristotelian classicism, and beyond that, by tracing the origin of forms in art to artistic will.

It is also a work that should be regarded as proto-psychoanalysis. Even if Freud had already founded the discipline named "psychoanalysis" by then, now it should be clear that psychoanalysis is a result of the confluence of several strands, one of which is the aesthetics in the tradition of Schiller and Nietzsche. Abstraction and Empathy fully employs the psychologizing tendency of the German thought of the days, and should be regarded as a milestone that manifestly exhibits psychoanalytical arguments and speculations, and hence becomes implicitly metaphysical in its perspective by adopting a Hartmann-ish and Schellingian undertone.