Salvatore Tedesco

Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis is an interdisciplinary book series which aims to face the questions of emergence, individuation and becoming of forms from several different points of view: those of pure and applied mathematics, of computational algorithms, of biology, of neurophysiology, of cognitive and social structures. The set of questions above concerns all the manifestations of Being, all the manifestations of Life. At the heart of contemporary embryogenesis lies an essential question: How can form emerge from the constant, chaotic flow? How can a sequence of purely informational elements — an a-signifying combination of chemical substances organized in the DNA molecule — evolve into the highly complex and structured forms of the living organism? A similar question can be asked when we deal with the morphogenesis of vision in neural systems and with the creation of evolving synthetic images, since digital technology makes possible the simulation of emergent processes both of living bodies and of visual forms. Finally the very idea that abstract structures of meaning could be captured in terms of morphodynamic evolution opens the door to new models of semiolinguistics, semiotic morphodynamics, and cognitive grammars.

Edgar Wind’s The Experiment and Metaphysics examines, in the sense of Goethe’s morphological project, the common structures of scientific and artistic thinking in the light of the reflective value of the image and the technological processes of research and construction of reality. In Wind’s philosophy of embodiment the image plays a role in the artistic field comparable to the function of experiments in science. The picture is neither a ‘copy’ nor just a ‘part’ of reality, but rather an ‘embodiment’: at the same time the ‘result’ of human activity and a ‘condition’ for all interpretation of the world. It opens up as an embodiment to a temporality which is not just linear but ‘configured’, i.e. morphologically constituted. The aim of this chapter is to reconstruct the main articulations of the wind proposal, while testing the possibility of linking image and technology experiments through the interactions of current augmented reality.

Nature doesn’t seem reducible to rigid systems and classifications. Although resorting to metaphors may give rise to contradictions, it allows the elaboration of explanatory models which help us to organize thought and to find orientation in the natural world. Giving form through metaphors stands for seeking the way by which mankind looks for both solutions and new configurations to face nature’s enigmas. The creation of morphological and/or evolutionary metaphors framed in a schematic way what Hugo called “man’s groping in the universe of nature”. Circles, arrows, spirals, scales, etc. stood for research directions: for example, scale became metaphor of an “animal universe” that – as it was thought to be in the Eighteenth Century – organized itself in a bottom-up scale. The circle referred to “metamorphosis” , which reminds us of Goethe’s thinking. Metaphors are never an aim in themselves: they always determine a way of thinking as well as choices and research directions. Such a use of the linguistic image deeply influences the very notion of metaphor as figures of speech . If, on the one hand, metaphor shows unknown structures of nature, on the other it rediscovers its own ‘naturalness’. Starting from the deep interconnection between functional and formal tasks in morphological discussion, metaphor turned from “figure” to “figuration”, Gestaltung , and in doing so it revealed a dynamic structure able to make us understand new links and directions in the sense of a metamorphic nature. Far from limiting itself to a historical retrospection, the methodological significance of having recourse to metaphor profoundly informs the most recent questions in the scientific field and notably in life sciences, in the very moment in which it leads and encourages a renewed dialogue between sciences and philosophy

Is it achievable to read aesthetic experience as a modular adaptation, and what would be its implication on the image of man, on aesthetics and on evolutionary theory itself? An alternative path is offered by evolutionary morphology, starting from the elaboration of a biologic concept of organism and from the notion of homology of function as a system of interconnections organized in a hierarchy. We deduce the possibility of thinking the peculiar innovation of aesthetic experience in an evolutionary way.

The concept of homology is a key component of contemporary theoretical biology because around it and through it numerous joint research projects aims to rethink the centrality of the organism, its evolutionary paths and the significance of its interaction with the environmental reality. The network of homologies that weaves the organismal form allows to structure and channel its morphological and functional innovations. Even this systemic component makes homology a fundamental concept for a dynamic consideration of the living form, like that sought by an aesthetics that does not intend to limit itself to investigate aesthetic attitude and the artistic productions, but knows how to tackle questions related to the more comprehensive question (eminently elaborated from the morphological traditional) of the unity of action and perception as aesthetic configuration of the living being.This study offers a survey of some of the key moments of the historical foundation of the concept of homology, from Goethe's botanical research and their significance in the whole project of Goethe's morphology, to continue with the elaboration of the concept of “anatomical element” by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and its problematic (or even misleading) reinterpretation by Arthur Schopenhauer, leading up to the foundation of the modern concept of homology with Richard Owen, in connection with the concept of analogy and the elaboration of the concept of “vertebrate archetype”. In conclusion, this study aims to identify some maior interest of the concept and the theoretical potentialities that find expression in it, between morphological perspective and attention to the material constraints of the form.

Aim of this paper is to outline a new evolutionary interpretation of aesthetic emotions, in the light of the most recent developments in Evolutionary Biology, in particular the so-called “Extended Synthesis of Evolution” (Pigliucci-Müller 2010). Focussing on the biological concept of homology, the Author argues that, in order to effectively understand role and evolutionary value of aesthetic emotions, it should be asked not “what aesthetic emotions are for?”, rather “what kind of constraints and homologies influence the specific “shape” of human aesthetic emotions?”. In a few words, we should move from a functionalist approach to human aesthetic emotions towards a morphological one