KARL BÜHLER: THE PRINCIPLE OF GESTALT
KARL BÜHLER: THE PRINCIPLE OF GESTALT

Summary/Abstract: Karl Bühler’s last essay dedicated to the principle of Gestalt was published 1960. By publishing it, Bühler closed in the final period of his life the circle he had opened in 1913 with his Gestaltwahrnehmungen. The said essay was essentially founded upon observations, experiments and rigorous measurements. Its introduction stresses the connections between researches in psychology of perception and the field of aesthetics. In particular, it positively comments on the following passage by Adolf Hildebrand, taken from his work Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (1908): “A play, a symphony, presents an architecture, an internal structure; it constitutes an organic whole of relations, like a painting, a statue, even though the different arts inhabit worlds of totally different forms.” The same quotation opens, almost fifty years later, Bühler’s work Das Gestaltprinzip im Leben des Menschen und der Tiere, enlarging the discussed fields and adding further reflections on language, philology, cybernetics, biology, and the life sciences.

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