Theodor Waitz’s theory of feelings and the rise of affective sciences in the mid-19th century.

Abstract

The German psychologist Theodor Waitz (1821-1864) was an important theorist of affectivity in the mid-19th century. This article aims to revisit Waitz's contribution to affective psychology at a crucial moment of its history. First, I elaborate the context in which Waitz's ideas were carried out by showing how affective sciences emerged as an autonomous field of investigation between about 1770 and 1910. Second, I discuss the principles of Waitz's model of affectivity and their contextual significance. Third, I deal with the first major category of affective states identified by Waitz, namely, "formal feelings," which are supposed to be involved in the appraisal of the relational properties between representations. Fourth, I investigate "qualitative feelings," the second major category of affective states identified by Waitz, which refer to affective processes that relate to specific representational contents, namely, intellectual, aesthetic, and moral feelings. In conclusion, I emphasize the genealogical link between Waitz's pioneering research on musical feelings and current research on emotion and expectation in music.

Konrad Lange on ‘the Illusion of Materials’ in Painting and Visual Arts: Revisiting a Psychoaesthetic Theory of the Perception of Material Properties

“…Here we are dealing with a mentalistic research program, according to which all aesthetic properties should be interpreted on the basis of two main categories of mental states: representations (Vorstellungen), the entities of a sensory nature that constitute the content of conscious experience, and feelings (Gefühle), the subjective factors that permit one to evaluate the contents of consciousness (Romand, 2018). In fact, feeling is the core concept of the German-speaking psychological aesthetics, the aim being, first and foremost, to understand the subject's evaluative capacity of the aesthetic object (Romand, 2015). Like the other psychoaesthetic models of that time, Lange's aesthetics has basically to do with the issue of aesthetic feelings (ästhetische Gefühle) (Romand, 2015(Romand, , 2018.…”

“…In fact, feeling is the core concept of the German-speaking psychological aesthetics, the aim being, first and foremost, to understand the subject's evaluative capacity of the aesthetic object (Romand, 2015). Like the other psychoaesthetic models of that time, Lange's aesthetics has basically to do with the issue of aesthetic feelings (ästhetische Gefühle) (Romand, 2015(Romand, , 2018.…”

More on formal feeling/form-feeling in language sciences. Heinrich Gomperz’s concept of “formal logical feeling”(logisches Formalgefühl)revisited

“…The interest in "form-feeling" or "formal feeling" has been recently revived in the history of language sciences, and, more generally speaking, in the history of psychology and aesthetics. This revival was initiated by Jean-Michel Fortis in two papers published in 2014 and 2015 (Fortis, 2014(Fortis, , 2015, in which he discussed the issue of form-feeling in Sapir's theory of language and its presumptive relation to the German aesthetic studies on Formgefühl, and by the author of this article, who showed, independently of Fortis' conclusions, how from the mid-19th century onwards, the so-called Herbartian school of affective psychology developed an early research program on formal feelings (Romand, 2015 ). In a book chapter to be published soon (Romand, forthcoming a ), I tried to specify the typology and the genealogy of what psychologists, language theorists, aestheticians, and art historians, between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, called "formal feelings" or "form-feelings".…”

“…Whatever they may be, they are supposed to be properties of a relational, organizational, or structural nature that contribute to unify experientially a plurality of mental entities. Second, all studies on formal feeling/form-feeling have in common the fact of relating more or less directly to affective psychology (German: Gefühlspsychologie) as it developed in Germany from the early 19th century onwards (Romand 2015(Romand , 2017. Here feeling (German: Gefühl) 2 refers to a category of mental state that has a definite psychological meaning in the context 2 In the 19th-century German psychological tradition, which was still prevailing when Gomperz wrote his Weltanschauungslehre, "Gefühl" was an unambiguous term referring to a definite constitutive entity of the mind.…”

“…Cf. Romand, 2015Romand, , 2017. Moreover, it is worth highlighting that, in the 19th-century German psychological tradition, "Gefühl" was a generic term that contrasts with "Affekt" and "Stimmung", which both refer to specific dimensions of affectivity.…”