A Predictive Dream Seen by A Two-Dimensional Human: Adolf Hildebrand

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Other Title
  • 二次元的人間の予知夢
  • 二次元的人間の予知夢 : アドルフ・ヒルデブラント
  • ニジゲンテキ ニンゲン ノ ヨチム : アドルフ ・ ヒルデブラント
  • アドルフ・ヒルデブラント

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Abstract

I would like to nominate the thoughts of Hermann von Helmholtz, a celebrated German physiologist and mathematician in the nineteenth century, as a framework for interpreting sculptor Adolf Hildebrand’s great work, ‘Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst’ (1893). It can be clearly inferred from Hildebrand’s letters that he had inspected Helmholtz’s popular papar on the non-Euclidean geometry system. The concept of the “plane” in this paper was decisive. Helmholtz’s thinking experiment, “Can an insect with only plane perception crawling on an egg recognize its three-dimensional curved surface?”, probably influenced Hildebrand’s sculpture-aesthetics, which analyzed the shapes of objects with a series of concepts, “face”, “layer”, “face layer”, etc. Helmholtz’s insight that “The world is made of flat surfaces” had thus profoundly affected the sculptor. What kinds of human abilities are needed to perceive the composition of the world? At the end of the eighteenth century, a controversy broke out between Immanuel Kant and the followers of Gottfried Leibniz about whether to lay the foundation of space on “intuition” or “intuition and concept”. However, Hildebrand’s involvement in this history made him confront the conflict between “intuition” and “intuition and concept”, which unexpectedly led to a serious political and racial problem.

Journal

  • Aesthetics

    Aesthetics 68 (1), 25-36, 2017

    The Japanese Society for Aesthetics

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