Form and Style in the Arts. An Introduction to Aesthetic Morphology (review)

134 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY lems are examined in detail as they apply to the concepts of "revelation," "incarnation ," and "mediatorship." The general theory of "religious rationalism" is then supplemented by expositions of the particular implications of this position for the idea of "history" and for the obligations imposed on the historian by the variety of perspectives. The conclusions arrived at show that in this kind of teleological existence and thinking it is futile to entertain the hypotheses of "meaningless history" and of "historical finality." Professor Patterson's cool reasonableness in the face of what he calls the "hysterical tones of . . . the contemporary Theology of Crisis" (p. 53) is impressive. And his effective use of The Free Religious Association of the last decades of the nineteenth century, and of Mazzini's "educational idea" in his bold letter to the Vatican Council entitled "From the Council to God," are but two illustrations of Patterson's rare ability to call back to historical life events that are usually buried as no longer relevant. This brief book is very substantial indeed, worthy of careful study by both historians and philosophers, and extremely enlightening for anyone who ventures into a philosophy of history. I-IBI~ERT W. SCHNEIDER Claremont, California Form and Style in the Arts. An Introduction to Aesthetic Morphology. By Thomas Munro. (Cleveland and London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University in collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1970. Pp. 467. $17.50) His organizational abilities carried Thomas Munro, curator of education (retired) and professor emeritus of art at the Case Western Reserve University, far beyond the confines of the United States. Not only was he the true founder of the American Society for Aesthetics but he stimulated the organization of similar organizations and their journals abroad and initiated, after World War II, the organization of international congresses for aesthetics. This monumental work is the first fruit of his retirement and an outgrowth of his courses of comparative aesthetics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. The text of the book, which would correspond to some one thousand pages in a normal format, is accompanied by thirty-two pages of halftone illustrations and eight pages of color plates. The book encompasses all the major arts, yet its center of gravity--as the illustrations show lies in the visual arts. Professor Munro wanted to realize here his favorite idea: a morphology of art, an idea that had in its original form, invented by Goethe, a connotation of NaturphUosophie. Here it is something else: an empirical, naturalistic study of art and therefore a branch of scientific aesthetics concerned with "description, comparison and stylistic analysis of works of art," "a treatise on the forms of art," "a typological system for use in aesthetic theory." The term "morphology" was initially applied in biology, i.e., to living forms. New "paintings, poems, cathedrals, symphonies have different forms---and the systematic analysis, comparison and classification of such forms are tasks for aesthetic morphology." This project, the didactic purpose of which is evident, is therefore based on the assumption of the unity of all the arts and especially on the similarity of visual and auditory forms whereby form is "a mode of arrangement." In the detailed analysis these forms are always compared: it is the task of morphology to describe and compare the components used in the arts such as rhythm in poetry, melody in music, solid shape in sculpture or perspective in painting. It follows that rhythm or melody are conceived BOOK REVIEWS 135 as components. Morphology is supposed to show how such components produce works of different styles and types such as Greek temples, baroque operas, Elizabethan tragedies and abstract expressionist paintings. Professor Munro states that the psychological materials and forms of art include not only sensory stimuli which can be seen or heard but also meanings and close associations of these meanings. Thus the elementary psychological components of art are line, color, pitch, rhythm, desire, emotion and conceptual thinking. A phenomenologist aesthetician such as, for instance, Roman Ingarden, would question here whether such objective components of art as line and color are psychological and, on the other hand, ask how desires, being subjective phenomena...