The author would like to express his thanks to the School of Fine Art, to Prof. Alan Robb, and, in particular to Architect Gavin Renwick for the kind invitation to present the following paper on Japanese aesthetics. Thanks go also to Alan Johnston, Edinburgh, and the students for the interesting discussions held at the wonderful castle in Hospitalfield. We urgently need a renewal of our worldviews. And, second, I am also very much convinced that form and art in the widest sense should play a basic role in this 'rebirth'. More precisely, we must discover art as a primary system of cognition in the anthropological sense.
Art is the most ancient way of human perception and conception.
I am convinced that art greatly contributed to the formation of man and culture. Very likely earliest art contributed to the increased capacity of the human brain. Into our modern times art remained alive as a perceptional and conceptional type of cognition, parallel with science. Today it is endangered by science. Unfortunately, art can not be described adequately by science because both are structured antithetically.