Psychological Aesthetics in Russia on the Threshold of the Nineteenth-Century

What is it about?

João Pedro Fróis narrates the story of Tsezar Pavlovitch Baltalon (1855–1913), a forgotten figure used as a concrete historical case of the early period of psychology and how the founders of physiological psychology were actually involved in a serious debate about aesthetics. The repetition of Fechner’s experimental protocols with rectangles and the inclusion of new experimental insights into raised hypotheses permitted him to conclude that the aesthetic pleasure that comes from the perception of geometric forms does not depend on their formal mathematical properties and proportions. The geometric shapes organized according to different mathematical relations could cause similar impressions of aesthetic pleasure or, on the contrary, forms with equal mathematical proportions could cause displeasure. The aesthetics of geometrical shapes could scarcely be confined to psychology merely as the aesthetics of spatial relations. It should be understood mainly as the aesthetic of visual, motor, and other perceptions that occur as a consequence of a combination of sensations and feelings.

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Why is it important?

This chapter shows very nicely how the tormented relationship between aesthetics and psychology was affected by the chair wars between philosophers and emerging experimental psychologists. A couple of centuries later, it does not seem as though much has changed.

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