WHAT LIVING FORM MEANS TO US
(Translated from German by Richard B. Carter)
At a time when many practitioners of the fine arts are consciously turning away from natural forms, the question of the sense of these living forms, of their meaning within the horizon of our psychological and spiritual world, can certainly be asked.
Only when we seek the psychological organs with which we bring ourselves near to living shape, and then how we conceive and grasp it, do we realize to what extent our sense of these shapes has paled-and how long this has been the case. We realize how indistinct that interpretative mode has become which governed the representation of natural beings here in the West for centuries, i.e., that view of natural forms which considered them as symbolic both of earthly processes and of our human fate. That is the view of living nature which came into ascendancy in the early Middle Ages and which, for centuries, gave beasts a high rank because they provided similes which helped us to understand our lives. In that interpretation the dove symbolized the Holy Ghost (sometimes even the church), and the individual phenomena of life were perceived to have a hidden relation to the life and sufferings of Christ and to the pre-ordained course of Providence. To the faithful, the helpless lion cubs were not merely immature nest-huggers with unopened eyes; in accord with very ancient notions, it was much more significant to believers that the lion first awakens its young to life only some days after birth, that they come to see only after a period of blindness—just as, in this view of the world, man first comes to “see,” in the true sense of the word, only after his life on Earth. So spoke the portrait of the young lions in the window glass of the cathedrals, and so spoke the pelicans there who, nursing their young with their own blood, testified of Christ whose death was his self-sacrifice.
All these interpretations of animal shapes are, however, things of the past. Even where the faith from which they originated is alive, the symbolic interpretation of nature as the mirror of a higher spiritual world has long since been lost. Science transformed the picture of living things four hundred years ago, and a new search for comprehension of organic shapes has been undertaken under the influence of that science. That new search viewed plants and animals, both in the details of their form and in their overall appearance, as vehicles of effects which are vital for living—as vehicles of a function which contributes to the conservation of the individual or the species. The realization of this program makes us satisfied with our understanding, with our insight into interrelations; and that sort of satisfaction is so important to many men that they are completely contented by such explanation. Again, the educational process which comprises our schooling controls our understanding of the organism. As a consequence, easily understood programs involving goals will lead us to a badly one-sided judgment upon all life around us and, in the long run, will also lead to corresponding judgments upon our own particular being as well.
The role which rational investigation plays at present results in the complete dominance of that mode of understanding which seeks primarily to demonstrate the relation between form and function. Privileged organisms stand in the foreground, forms whose visible structure comprises an immediately comprehensible expression of a clearly realized effect, as, for instance, the streamlined form of fish, of dolphins, or the dynamic form of running animals (be they antelope or greyhounds). The functional interpretation has become more and more inclusive and, most recently, it has come to dominate the entire view of living form. Indeed, only the functional value shows the way to natural form. Coloration is seen as signaling; it appears either as a sort of natural semaphore or it is observed as camouflage apparel, as a defense mechanism which works by concealment. The display of blossoms will appear first and foremost as an instrument of allurement aimed at pollinating insects and birds. Our museum exhibitions, the popular press, school texts—all these seek to impress upon us precisely this meaning of form. Nothing is easier than that.
One of the ideas which appeared as a fruit of Darwin’s theory of descent is that selection chooses out of newly arisen characteristics (all of which are equally undifferentiated for it) whatever will favor one form and annihilate another in the course of the struggle for existence. This view of natural selection and its power has strongly confirmed the functional interpretation.
Now, no one doubts that the selection of form—insofar as it is the vehicle of functions—comprises an important portion of living reality. It is not without good reason that both general physiological research and human medicine are erected on this relationship. The classical division of organs into those concerned with nutrition, breathing, excretion, movement, reproduction, relation, and the like gives rise to this way of thinking, and it has permitted us to understand important portions of living things. Sometime ago, however, a school of thought arose within morphological studies proper which laid claim to being “functional morphology,” this being the ultimate perfection of morphological work! Sometimes this thinking has led (I am almost tempted to say, fortunately!) to such excesses of utilitarian interpretation concerning function and utility that even the least insightful investigators have realized clearly they have gone too far. Prior to the last two centuries, such excesses were the result of a theologically oriented biology which generally attempted to recognize in living things wonderful ordinances of a Creator. The search after selective factors (in the Darwinian sense of that term) tends to degenerate primarily into a similar, though opposite, extreme in our own time. This way of thinking entirely forgets what great realm of reality is being neglected because of its procedure.
The interpretation of the organism as purposive form frequently finds powerful support in our aesthetic experience. For instance, we find that the shape-producing power of a closed form (which has also been noticed by psychology) comes into play for each of us, so that living beings formed in this way force themselves on our unquestioning awareness, imprint themselves clearly as shapes, and thus very powerfully codetermine our concept of living things—if not perhaps authoritatively determine it. Such closed shapes are exemplified in the already mentioned streamlined forms of fish. Equal to these, and indeed even more powerfully effective, are the flight forms of birds. The sharp outline, the detached, silhouetted essence of the shape in space, the conquest of heaviness in the flight form itself—all these strike us with great power. But still other laws of experience coeffect these preferences, such as our inclination towards certain proportions. That one called “The Golden Mean,”1 particularly, comes to mind when we consider the force with which we are impressed by quadratic forms as such. In this way, a very broad group of privileged shapes has arisen: these are the “noble” animal shapes which, we must remember, appeared again and again during certain periods of classical art. It is the proportion of the horse or of a stag; it is the shape of the greyhound which Dürer, as well as Pisanello, studied. These force themselves on our awareness entirely differently than, say, the shape of a salamander or a toad.
The association of aesthetic experience with that easily presented way of thinking which is characteristic of technical understanding led to an interpretation of the organism in which our feeling for definite proportion was connected to our satisfaction with the functional sense of form. No wonder the just-mentioned group of especially favored forms authoritatively determined the picture of living things for innumerable men!
The power this technologically oriented thinking can assume in its role as a definitive movement in the development of art is manifest in the example set at the end of the nineteenth century. Natural form at that time was recognized as the principal stimulus in the yearning to overthrow the dominant stagnation of the architectonic experience and forms of the day. Natural form had been the great stimulator in the revival movement since John Ruskin, and it played a fruitful role in the art nouveau style. Ropes of algae and leaf shapes, strands of hair and ornamental forms of lower animals such as polyps and medusae—these were to be rich sources for form production, and they were exploited until their visual sense was exhausted.
As a consequence of this exhaustion, there then began to prevail in architecture a physiologically oriented point of view which was intended as an extreme form of the idea of function. According to this thesis, form should be the strict expression of a performance—as it is in nature. This thesis became the leitmotif of the innovators. Even before the turn of the century, Louis Sullivan in America had given the formula: “Form follows function.” This became the catchword for many of the reformers among the architects. First and foremost, this physiological concept led to the devaluation of ornamentation. As a consequence, it also led to the rejection of all the expressive worth of the outer appearance of buildings. “A facade” —since that time this term has come to refer to a negative subject, to the gross, repellent example of empty ostentation, to senseless veiling of the living function. This physiological thinking then led to the further broadened implication that the act of building must be determined completely in the way it is for the organism: from within outwards, beginning from their support functions. The strict realization of this principle must present the form of the outside as coming from inside, from itself—as a pure being rather than as a false appearance. Today we must realize how the one-sidedness of this principle misinterprets natural forms and how widely it threatens to divert us from a real understanding of living form.
If the vision of the architects and the conception of life given us by the influence of biological work have been compelled—especially in physiology—to move towards a heightened stress on function, so much more is it the task of the life sciences today to examine their own proper object once again: to ponder whether the mode of investigation which biology itself produced during an earlier phase is really the most important, or whether, as a consequence of that mode, meaningful aspects of living appearance have not wrongly been forgotten. I am in hopes that this present essay might help us to entertain such a possibility seriously.
*
We would do well not to continue to use these privileged forms further for our examinations; rather let us turn now to life forms which have not in recent times occupied the full center stage in the public mind. Such strange organisms are found in considerable numbers in the so-called lower world of animals: for instance, sea stars, and sea urchins or sea anemones, as well as jellyfish. All these are potentially of considerable interest to us. So far, no one has attempted to explain the multiplicity of coloration in the visible image of these animal forms by an appeal to some special adaptation. Their appearance is sometimes quite riotously colored and is neither protective nor the means of species identification. They do not serve to locate sexual partners, nor are they at the service of other sorts of relationships between individual animals. Thus we discover laws which, although they are especially striking to us in these instances, nevertheless also apply to other life forms once they have come to our attention.
I shall take as an instance a large, beautifully colored sea anemone with many feelers, which is found widely in exhibition aquaria. Looking at it very carefully, we discover that in the thickened ring of the tentacles two of them are marked strikingly with color. What do they accomplish? They serve only to delineate the single plane of symmetry of these animals which are, at first glance, simply radial in their structure. I search further and find yet two other pairs of tentacles which lie in quite definite planes with respect to the primary pair; and, once again, these are distinguished from all the others— not so richly displayed as the two which act as a cardinal pair, but still more exuberantly than the rest. And in this way, the inquiring glance leads to the discovery of a series of degrees of display in strict geometrical order—ornamentally effective formations which reveal absolutely no functional value but which constitute the expression of this sort of characteristic inner structure, the expression of a special sort of structure and absolutely no other. Nothing useful! There is no clearly definable function in the sense of life-maintaining accomplishments. This peculiarity was known, however, even rather early, and such characteristics were designated as “functionless.” In periods when high value was placed on performance structures, functionless ones were simply dismissed and no further notice was taken of them. Even so it was sometimes remarked that they might have classificatory worth, that is, they help us to recognize the kind of animal under consideration; they serve our taxonomic attempts.
Once we have really looked at the realities of “functionless” characteristics, we discover at every step an incredible richness in them. Just a glance at the store of wonders to be found in plants illustrates this. We are in agreement, and scientific research has demonstrated in the face of all doubt, that blossom display is determined primarily by the workings of the eyes of pollinating insects or birds. If, however, we investigate the blossom seekers through trials with artificial models of blossoms, we find that although many of the blossom characteristics are necessary to entice the pollinators and thus for the completion of the pollinating act, still, very many of those characteristics of the blossom are functionally irrelevant and, therefore, they have no more than classificatory value. This mere system, however, includes a strikingly large number of entries concerning the blossoms and, among these, we find what appear to us as especially lovely and appealing—what the particularly unmistakable display of poppy blossom, of the carnation, or the wild rose, gives to appearance. Further, if I immerse myself in the green world of leaves, I meet with the same thing. To the blossom seeker the greenery is pure background. The shape of leaves has no functional value here. For the grazing animals, that same greenery is the source of nourishment where, once again, leaf shape as form is irrelevant. The morphologist, however, will very often begin with the shape of the leaf. For him, leaf shapes contain very valuable criteria of genus and species, and a look into the green profusion of leaves opens to the artistic observer a storehouse of wonders of very intimate beauty.
But still more. If I take pains to distinguish the leaves of a plant in their correct sequence from the bottom up to the region where blossoms are found—that is, if I distinguish them in their order of occurrence—then we all will be amazed to find how consistently the leaf outline is transformed from the earliest, simplest form over a variety which unfolds and ends in a later second simplification next to the blossoms.2 Goethe, as is well known, gave his deepest attention to these appearances and summarized them under the name of Metamorphosis, “change of form.” But this change of form is part and parcel of the great phenomenon of which we just spoke-the expression of an inner state of being of the organism.
We have previously decided—and we continue to think this way—that we are not going to characterize this sort of expressive property as a “function” because function has its proper signification in a narrower universe of discourse concerned with the capacity for preservation. Thus, we intend to emphasize the entire universe of form phenomena and give it a special designation—self-representation. Once attention is focused on this self-representation, then a more intense study of living form reveals an unforeseen wealth of such elemental forms and leads to a proper reassessment of their value. What until now has been designated as being properly in the periphery of attention, because it is functionless or “merely systematic,” suddenly becomes a central phenomenon. It was considered merely subordinate as long as self-preservation and species-preservation were ranked as the highest property of living things. However, the organism is not only there in order to preserve itself for a longer or shorter time; on the contrary, the preservation of the individual and the species serves a greater purpose, namely, the rich existence of manifold forms—all of them, without exception, more than bare carriers of preservative functions.
Indeed, our own strivings are rooted in a deeply hidden impulse beyond that of the mere span of time of our existence. Even when we are struggling for existence—how much we long for freedom, for recreational play, for forms which have their boundaries beyond mere necessity! We all follow such final strivings, and whoever thinks through the problem of living form will conclude that unknown, but kindred, powers manifest themselves and point far beyond the necessities concerned with the mere span of life. This occurs in the realm of colors and displays, in the manifold of behavior, in the song of birds; these are never explained in their richest manifestation through the demands of preservation. And this is just what is demonstrated by the experiment which showed that many form-producing structures concurring in the shaping of the butterfly’s wings, which are so beautiful to us, are superfluous-and nevertheless, here they are in abundance.
We discover the expense incurred by the organism for self-representation; we discover that living forms, inside, build according to rules that differ from their outward appearances—we perceive that in nature a facade has a definite value and that appearance is not a deception but an element of manifestation and, in particular, of the manifestation of a being whose source is hidden from us. The facade-despite the continued devaluation of form both in the human domain and in the arguments of biology—this “expression” becomes essential once again when we consider it anew.
No one denies the importance of the preservative functions in the game of life; they are also present in the organs of appearance. Still, prior to all functions in the service of bare preservation, prior to all this sort of activity which has gained so much attention, we encounter the straightforward appearance, the self-representation of the living being. And thus, time and time again, the fathoming of form leads beyond the realm in which research shows us merely functionally significant structures. A comprehensive morphology presupposes the insight that every appearance in living things must be viewed within the widest of spiritual horizons. Plants and animals, just as we ourselves, must be experienced as an incomprehensible manner of being which is grounded in the mystery of reality.
Our concern with the significance of living form not only involves a deepening and enrichment of our own experience. It is also a matter of knowledge for the sake of strengthening our responsibility with respect to the alien forms we find in nature. Indeed, we do not intend to initiate a new evaluation of natural forms merely insofar as they are a source of stimulation in artistic creations; indeed it is even a question now of the very existence of splendid life forms whose continuation is threatened—threatened indeed in their bare existence in the wilderness! We today face the difficult question of the right to live of all those things which we ourselves could never create, of a new international legal issue of unforeseeable dimensions.
When someone finally takes note of his developing relationship with living things, he then becomes aware of a new feeling for the magnitude of the mystery that every organism before us is with us, of a feeling to which a rationally mediated grasp of our own being also leads us.
*
At the beginning of the century, a great teacher of aesthetics, Heinrich Wölfflin, ventured this assertion concerning classical art: The proportions and masses sought after by classical art have their legitimacy not in a willful arrangement but in the rationality of Nature. Nature determined a certain conception of beauty which the artist carried in his soul and which is identical with the idea of beauty in Nature. It could as well have been Hans Thoma,3 in whose name we are gathered together today, who said that.
We would no longer venture to speak of natural form in this sense today. It is much too obvious to our way of thinking that the classical view only admitted choice from among options already present. Consequently, even in the fine arts, we repeatedly find breaches into another world, whether it be the vision which speaks to us out of the work of Hieronymus Bosch, or the world of Pieter Brueghel, or the forever recurring new attempts collected under the name “mannerism.” Ultimately, however, that breach stands as a stern reminder to that other life which does not care to consider the carefully cultivated game preserve of the classics. Along with Rilke, we once again know that the beautiful is only the beginning of the terrible;4 and it is not without reason that the world of forms belonging to the anti-classicists has been elevated so far from art in the direction of light that we can no longer experience that world as ugly. Instead, we experience it as powerful and terrible.
In our perception of organisms, we experience this power and this terror, alien, and yet at the same time, near to us. We know that all forms in which individual being is living, right there, before us, give ear to the flow of time as do we, because we, too, are individuals.
The molecular world, as the lowest level of living being, knows only multiplication and constant increase through division. Here, death occurs only through annihilation from outside. Death as a law of inner development is only known by higher life—whatever kind of life that might be. This world in which the individual and death occur is the world in which we all stand in deep union and unbreakable solidarity. And this is the world with which, even if by lengthy and sometimes odd detours, artistic formation concerns itself over and over.
As Wölfflin once said when praising classical art, “Nature offers us the rare opportunity to share in a greater, purer, existent [Dasein].”
We experience nature differently in our time—so very differently that the creation of paintings has often entirely wandered away from natural form and permitted itself to be mastered and motivated by the play of immensely elementary powers.
I do not believe this turning away will persist. We are aware, on the one hand, of the limitation of our ability to discover forms and of the weariness which accompanies each and every new attempt at it; but, on the other hand, we know the unimaginable fullness of the forms of Nature. Can we really go on believing that in the long run creative artists will still choose to join the many who today avoid these springs of new inspiration? We investigators of nature have nothing to prescribe to the artist, and so I do not wish to prophesy to them. However, I do wish both to vouch for and to labor for my conviction. Thus I speak of this belief in the greatness of living forms and of the depth of their mysteries which everyone will comprehend who surrenders to the might of the impression of these shapes with an open soul.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
1. The Golden Mean or section is obtained by cutting a line into unequal segments such that the greater segment is to the lesser as the whole line is to the greater. Zen Buddhist temples are designed on this principle.
2. Portmann told me that he is here also referring to the works of a woman whose thought “was a turning point in my life”: the British botanist Agnes Arber and author of The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), see esp. ch. 6: “The Partial-Shoot Theory of the Leaf,” and ch. 8: “The Bearing of the Partial-Shoot Theory of the Leaf on Other Morphological Problems.” She was also the author of The Mind and the Eye: A Study of the Biologist’s Standpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954).
3. German painter (1839–1924), born at Bernau in the Black Forest, his painting was scarcely “modern,” apparently being definitively formed by his early experiences in the lovely Bernau district. His work has affinities with the early German masters Altdorfer and Cranach, as well as with the pre-Raphaelites. His work is largely concerned with “nature.”
4. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegie I: “Denn das Schöne ist nichts / als des Schrecklichen Anfang … Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich (For the beautiful is nothing / but the beginning of terror …Each and every angel is terrible).”
Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1982): 27–38
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