How Scientific Theory Became Fascist Rhetoric

The shape of your jaw. The length of your nose. The curve of your ears. For those who believe in physiognomics, these details define not only your face but also your personality.

Physiognomics—the study of the relationship of physical features and character—was introduced in ancient Greece. It was reintroduced by Swiss pastor Johann Lavater in the late 1700s to improve human relations. But it later found darker purposes in Germany prior to World War II. Richard Gray, professor of Germanics, has been studying the emergence of physiognomics as a “natural science” and its role in the development of racism.

“The tradition of physiognomics actually goes way back to the Greek philosophers,” says Gray, “but the context had been artistic expression or prophecy. With Lavater, that changed. He asserted that one can predict people’s innate characters, their intellectual and moral fiber, by their appearance. Prior theories focused on dynamic facial expression, but Lavater’s focused on things that are static and genetically predetermined, like bone structure.”

What made Lavater’s theories particularly dangerous, says Gray, is that he “presented physiognomics as a natural science, but one that relies on intuition. The practitioner is required to be ‘an artist’ and make character judgments.”

Even in Lavater’s day, his theories were exposed as unscientific and non-valid. But the theories gained popularity due to support from Schopenhauer, Goethe, and other major thinkers. Lavater’s four-volume series, Physiognomic Fragments, was extremely popular in Europe in the final decades of the eighteenth century.

After World War I physiognomics regained popularity in Germany. Again mainstream philosophers led the movement, but this time political ideologues used the theory to legitimize their ideas about race. (Physiognomics was also pursued in France and England, but in those countries the focus was on facial expression, not on unchangeable features.)

“The narrowing of physiognomics to unalterable features is how it came to be viewed as a science,” says Gray, “but it is perfectly clear how this fed into racial stereotypes. It was all spun toward the celebration of the Aryan race—what they called the Nordic race—and toward demeaning the Mediterranean or Eastern races and, of course, the Jews and other non-Europeans.”

Lavater would have been shocked by the turn his theory had taken. “He wrote his books with the belief that if you understand people it will make human interactions easier,” says Gray. “But his critics at that time already understood the dangerous potential of his theory.”

Gray, who is completing a book on the evolution of physiognomic theory, adds, “Intellectual traditions are important. People rely on them. They go back to them. And they manipulate and use them in the ways they want to. Physiognomics, with its dangerous combination of ‘science’ and intuition, was an intellectual tradition that unfortunately invited such manipulation.”

[Summer 2001 - Table of Contents]