Abstract
Widely regarded as Adolf Portmann’s most important (and controversial) work, Animal Forms and Patterns has been the object of extensive analysis and criticism from many different perspectives, such as evolutionary and theoretical biology, psychology, philosophy, ethology, and environmental studies. Yet, very little attention has been paid so far to the significant differences between the first edition of the book, dating from 1948, and the second edition, which only appeared 12 years later, in 1960. After highlighting the crucial role that such differences assumed in the evolution of the Portmannian way of understanding the “spectacle” of nature and its meaning, I shall concentrate on the topicality of Portmann’s thought in the specific field of morphological aesthetics, particularly focussing on the notion of play as a possible bridging concept between science and art.
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Notes
- 1.
All the existing translations of Die Tiergestalt are based on the first German edition of the book, with the exception of the Italian La forma degli animali. Studi sul significato dell’apparenza fenomenica degli animali. Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2011 (not to be confused with Le forme degli animali, published in 1960 and based, again, on the first edition of Portmann’s work).
- 2.
This systematisation is not at all devoid of ambiguities, and even inconsistencies, in Plato himself, as masterfully shown by Ernst Cassirer (Cassirer 2013).
- 3.
- 4.
Not coincidentally, Carnevali’s book refers directly and from the very first pages to Portmann’s notion of “appearance”.
- 5.
The term is used frequently in Portmann (1967, orig. Portmann 1948), for instance where it expresses “the valency of a living thing in the same way as the nuclear number of an atom represents its position in a system. The form value does not give any information about the performance of an organ; it merely indicates the place occupied by this part of the body in a classification of organic forms” (46–47).
- 6.
Portmann, in particular, penned a long foreword to the 1956 edition of Uexküll’s masterpiece (originally published in 1934) Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen. Ein Bilderbuch unsichtbarer Welten (Uexküll 1956: 7–17).
- 7.
As highlighted by Salvatore Tedesco (2010: 29), Portmann’s thought – particularly of late years – is to be regarded as clearly embedded “in an evolutionary framework”.
- 8.
This quote is taken directly from the original German edition of Portmann’s Neue Wege der Biologie (Piper, München 1960: 84), as it has been inexplicably expunged from the English translation by Arnold J. Pomerans (Portmann 1964: 52).
- 9.
- 10.
Cf. Portmann (1976: 32).
- 11.
Portmann (1959).
- 12.
This quote is taken directly from the original German edition of Portmann’s Neue Wege der Biologie (Piper, München 1960: 221), as it has been inexplicably expunged from the English translation by Arnold J. Pomerans (Portmann 1964: 154).
- 13.
On this, see Dewitte (2001).
- 14.
Significantly, the French translation of this text was published in the journal Études Phénoménologiques, devoted to phenomenology and phenomenological aesthetics (Portmann 1996).
- 15.
On this, see Gambazzi (1999), where the author argues that the potential character of being-seen extends far beyond the “realm of the mere empirical” and is not limited to “the simple fact of someone actually seeing”.
- 16.
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Conte, P. (2021). Playing Appearances: On Some Aspects of Portmann’s Contribution to Philosophical Aesthetics. In: Jaroš, F., Klouda, J. (eds) Adolf Portmann. Biosemiotics, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67810-4_9
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