robin curtis. an introduction to einfühlung copy

7/26/2019 Robin Curtis. An Introduction to Einfhlung copy

1/24

Article Title 353

Art in Translation, Volume 6, Issue 4, pp. 353376

DOI: 10.2752/175613114X14105155617302

Reprints available directly from the Publishers.

Photocopying permitted by licence only.

2014 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

Robin Curtis

Translated by

Richard George Elliott

First published in German as

Einfhrung in die Einfhlung. In

Robin Curtis and Gertrud Koch

(eds), Einfhlung. Zu Geschichte

und Gegenwart eines sthetischen

Konzepts (Munich: Wilhelm Fink,

2009), 1129.

An Introduction

to EinfhlungAbstract

Robin Curtis is professor of the theory and practice of audio-visual

media at the Heinrich-Heine University in Dsseldorf. In this essay she

delineates the evolution of the aesthetic category ofEinfhlung (empa-

thy) from its earliest stirrings in the mid-eighteenth century to its full

blossoming in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the

writings of such scholars as the psychologist and aesthetician Theodor

Lipps and the architectural and art historians August Schmarsow and

Wilhelm Worringer. Although it fell into disregard for most of the

twentieth century, Curtis argues that Einfhlung still has insights to


2/24

354 Robin Curtis

offer to this day, when reappraised in the light of current neurological

research.

KEYWORDS: Einfhlung, Empathie, empathy, Karsten Stueber,Romanticism, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Robert Vischer, Rudolf

Hermann Lotze, Theodor Lipps, August Schmarsow, Wilhelm

Worringer, Jutta Mller-Tamm

Introduction byIain Boyd Whyte

(University of Edinburgh)

EmpathyEinfhlung in Germanwas enormously influential as an

aesthetic category in the early twentieth century, not least as it carriedstrong echoes of nineteenth-century Romanticism and of pantheism. In

this constellation, our emotional resonance with the artifacts of the world

around us, both natural and man-made, brought us into direct contact

with the universe as divinity. As early as 1917, the Russian Formalist

Viktor Shklovsky challenged this easy emotional resonance between

object and viewer with his theory of ostranenie (:defamil-iarization), according to which the function of art is not to confirm our

emotional identification with the object, but to make it unfamiliar: to

make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception

because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and mustbe prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object:the object is not important.1This position was developed most influen-tially from the mid-1930s on in the Verfremdungseffekt (estrangementeffect) employed in the theater of Bertolt Brecht. Defamiliarization dis-

patched empathy to the rust-belt of aesthetics.

Yet as Robin Curtis argues in this essay, recent neurological research

and the popular desire to feel into other lives, events, and objects

suggest that it is time to reevaluate the significance of empathy in both

its historical and contemporary definitions. In support of this argu-

ment she points to recent work in the area, such as Karsten Stuebers

book, Rediscovering Empathy: Psychology and the Human Sciences(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), and the cognitive brain research

on mirror neurons by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese.

While she notes the relevance of empathy in contemporary studies

of emotion, the main body of Curtiss essay is devoted to a historical

account of the evolution of the notion, dating its first appearance to a

letter from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to Moses Mendelssohn, dated

February 2, 1757. From there, via passing references in Herder and

Novalis, she moves into the mainstream history of empathy as elabo-

rated by father and son philosophers Friedrich Theodor and Robert

Vischer, the medical doctor and philosopher Rudolf Hermann Lotze,

the psychologist and aesthetician Theodor Lipps, and the architectural


3/24

An Introduction to Einfhlung 355

and art historians August Schmarsow and Wilhelm Worringer. In the

process, the correspondences between the various theories of empathy

are outlined and the differences and inconsistencies delineated.

Precisely because of its generous breadth and accessibility, empathytheory found many disciples a century ago. For the same reasons, as

Curtis suggests: The early debates on the phenomenon of Einfhlungopen up discussions across a broad range of aesthetic issues that are still

today germane to so-called visual studies, in other words art history

and theory and film and media studies.

An Introduction toEinfhlung

Robin Curtis

The concept of Einfhlung was elaborated within the context of anoverlap between philosophical aesthetics and psychology, at that timenewly emerging, and continues to bear the traces of these heterogeneousorigins today. In order to reflect both the historical and contemporarydebates concerning the concept of Einfhlung, and at the same time torecord the different orientations of the various theories, the following

concerns itself mainly with the areas of overlap between the differentfields of research. It is precisely in these areas of overlap that promisingstarting points for interdisciplinary research on the affects and on theperception of space are to be found. First of all, however, it is impor-tant to explain why, after a long period of neglect and even disdain,Einfhlungis now once again of scientific relevance.

In an unbroken succession since 1970, no fewer than fifteen totwenty texts per month have been published in the fields of psychologyand sociology which contain the German term Einfhlungor its deriva-tive Empathie.1The term empathy was coined in an early transla-

tion from German to English2and has since become established in theEnglish language. In German, Empathieis widely accepted, above allin the field of psychology, and especially in relation to emotional corre-spondences in interpersonal relations. For the current discussions in thisarea, research into the so-called theory of mind, which denotes theability to accept processes in consciousness both in oneself and in otherliving creatures in order to form suppositions concerning the mentalstate, intentions, and motivation of others, is key. This research focuseson both the ontogenetic steps that facilitate the conceptualizing of suchprocesses in consciousness and the possibility of dysfunction in their

development (as is supposed, for example, in the case of autism).Karsten Stuebers Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology,

and the Human Sciencesis one outstanding example of the work being


4/24

356 Robin Curtis

done in this field. In it, Stueber lends his support to the relevance tocontemporary empathy research of the historical debate over Ein-fhlung by returning to the framework initiated by Theodor Lipps

(18511914) and attempting to corroborate it by means of contempo-rary neurological research. Although it is not uncommon in the socialsciences and in psychological empathy research for Lipps to be namedas the originator,3it is fairly unusual for a study to engage with thehistory of the empathy debate to the extent that Stuebers does. Forhim, Lippss model of Einfhlungis not merely of historical interest, itsets the agenda for our current understanding of the human inclinationto feel into other people and thingswhether living creatures, in-animate objects, or phenomena such as moods, colors, or sounds. Thisbroad approach is authorized by Lippss well-known formulation that

aesthetic enjoyment is to be understood as objectified self-enjoyment.4Stueber states that:

Our aesthetic appreciation of objects is in the end grounded inseeing their form in analogy to the expressive quality of humanvitality in the body. [] For this reason Lipps conceives of empa-thy not merely as an important aesthetic concept but as a basicsociological and psychological category.5

According to Lipps, the fundamental ability to empathize is based on

an involuntary, instinctive mimicry of the Otherin other words on ahuman behavioral pattern that although observed in Lippss day, couldnot be further explained and therefore had to remain a hypothesis. Totake Lippss own examples, this inclination toward mimicry could beobserved in the slight bobbing or swinging motion made when follow-ing dancers or in the sympathetic tension or inner emulation experi-enced when watching an acrobat perform a high-wire act. Although thehuman inclination toward mimicry is frequently socially prohibited, ittakes place in such an involuntary or unconscious and also immediatemanner that it is ultimately experienced as a projection into the Other.

According to Lipps:

I feel this striving of mine within the visually perceived move-ment. I experience it as something belonging directly to it. Thus Ifeel myself striving within this movement, striving for the kines-thetic sense of motion that corresponds to the visually perceivedmovement, and with it for this movement itself. To put it moregenerally, I feel myself within a thing perceived, striving to ex-ecute a movement.6

This automatic co-experiencing can be regarded as the very core ofempathy. On the basis of this model of empathy based on mimicry andprojection, and with the help of new neurological research results that


5/24


now empirically underpin this model, Stueber argues for a reevaluationof empathy and thus for a reappraisal of Einfhlung.

In order to distinguish simple motor transference from more com-

plex operations, experienced for example during instances of emotionalcorrespondence, Stueber differentiates between basic and reactiveforms of empathy. While basic empathy is described as a direct, bodilyunderstanding of observed conditions, reactive empathy presupposesa processing that can tell us more about motivationsand therefore atthe same time about affective states. Basic empathy is regarded as amechanism that allows us, by means of a direct process of perception, torecognize an Other or an opposite number as same-minded. We rec-ognize that the other person is angry or deliberately grasps a cup.7Yet

only by using our cognitive abilities and deliberative capacities inorder to reenact or imitate in our own mind the thought processesof the other person are we able to conceive of another personsmore complex social behavior as the behavior of a rational agentwho acts for a reason.8

Reactive empathy presupposes cognitive processes, such as use of theimagination, in order to enable a more complex processing of data.

What is remarkable about Stuebers model is that he associates theactivity of so-called mirror neurons, only recently discovered, exclu-

sively with basic and not with the more complex reactive empa-thy. The discovery in the mid-1990s of mirror neurons in the brainsof macaques9and the subsequent proof of analogous brain activity inhumans was nothing short of revolutionary for empathy research. TheItalian scientists who made this discovery recorded how certain neuronsin the premotor cortex react both when a monkey picks up a piece offood with its own hand and when it merely observes another monkeypicking up a piece of food. Interestingly, the neurons did not react whenthe observed hand made the same movement without reaching for food.Similar involuntary reactions to actions and movements were recorded

in humans by means of nuclear magnetic resonance tomography. Thesereactions indicated mirror neuron activity both when observing move-ments and when hearing certain sounds.10It is nevertheless importantto note that the studies carried out to date relate by and large to simpleactions (both in humans and animals),11and therefore it is not yet pos-sible to determine to what extent complex experiences such as emotionscan result in an emotional transfer, for example of the type that occursduring the watching of feature films. Accordingly Stueber remains soberin his assessment of mirror neurons: he maintains a distance from theeuphoria that has been in evidence since their discovery, above all in

social sciences and humanities research with an interdisciplinary focus,which hoped to see in mirror neurons direct proof of all kinds of com-plex empathetic reactions in humans. Stueber regards mirror neurons


6/24

358 Robin Curtis

as corroborating the type of mimicry previously described by Lipps andsees it as the driving force behind the simple, embodied basic empathy.

Vittorio Gallese, one of the two leaders of the laboratory in Parma

responsible for discovering mirror neurons, has also noticed the analo-gous relationship between the behavior of mirror neurons and thegrounding of empathy theory in mimicry. He regards mirror neurons ascomponents of a complex system consisting, as he sees it, of a sequenceof mirror matching mechanisms that are capable of executing diverseimitation operations. Under Galleses hypothesis, these mechanismsconstitute a basic organizational feature of the brain in enabling inter-subjective experience. He refers to this intersubjective, intentional spaceas the shared manifold of intersubjectivity.12Affect transfer is a keyfunction of this system. What is remarkable about this model is that

it is the multimodal quality of intersubjective experience that Galleseemphasizes. Whereas mirror neuron research up to now has focused onthe observing and mirroring of actions (action and action imitation),Gallese stresses that the selfother analogy [] has a global dimensionthat encompasses all aspects defining a life form, from its peculiar bodyto its peculiar affect.13At this point he refers to the research conductedby Daniel Stern.

With this key reference, Gallese emphasizes the diversity and com-plexity of affective reactions to the actions of others. Arguably, thisgoes far beyond both an understanding of perception that conceives

of the senses as a separately functioning capability and the typicaldescriptions of the emotions.14 Sterns research suggests that, thanksto an inclination toward amodal perception, all people are capable ofperceiving so-called vitality affects from earliest childhood onward.These are affects that, according to Stern, are difficult to define becausethey cannot be described using the usual taxonomy of affects. Theyare better captured by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as surging, fad-ing away, fleeting, explosive, crescendo, decrescendo, bursting,drawn out.15This reference to the early affective behavior of humansaddresses two important aspects of empathy research, and it is impor-

tant to note that Gallese firstly concedes a broader understanding of theaffects that is not based exclusively on the evaluation and categorizationof the emotional state of other people and secondly focuses stronglyon atmospheric characteristics, thereby implicitly admitting questionsof form as well. Both these aspects were essential to the discussion ofEinfhlungin the historical context. Emphasizing them circumvents theotherwise very strict separation of empathy in living beings (and aboveall in humans) and empathy in forms.

This is what Theodor Lipps himself called Natureinfhlung(naturalempathy),16 an essential aspect of Einfhlungssthetik (the aesthetics

of empathy) which he discusses in a key text on Einfhlung initiallyin relation to inanimate objects, only afterward turning his attentionto empathy with the sensory manifestation of human beings.17With


7/24


this he wanted to make it plain that for him both aesthetic experiencesand everyday experiences were relevant to the concept of Einfhlung.According to Lipps, living beings on the one hand and objects on the

other were of equal importance in relation to the human tendency to-ward mimicry. We are able to empathize with human gestures, the formof a body, or even a landscape, because every sensory object demandsan activity on my part.18At the heart of Lippss concept of Einfhlung,which for him and many of his contemporaries constituted the fun-damental concept of contemporary aesthetics,19was the dynamism oflife:

For what I feel is, quite generally, life. And life is energy, innerexertion, striving, and achieving. Life can be summed up with

one word: activity, freely flowing or inhibited, easy or effortful, inharmony or in conflict with itself, tensing and relaxing, concen-trated on a single point or dissolving into lifes manifold actionsand losing itself in them.20

In these descriptions, reminiscent of Sterns vitality affects, Lipps is re-ferring to a life force that can be recognized everywhere in the world butby no means inevitably or automatically results in Einfhlung.

For Lipps, Einfhlungis an active, intentional act, an experience ofthe vitality of the self that can be felt in objectified form in the things of

the world. Accordingly, he distinguishes between that which a sensibleobject expresses (presupposing merely a judgment or an act of logicon the part of the subject, which is neither felt nor experienced as activ-ity) and that which is empathized with, because only by feeling activity(or the striving or desire for movement21) is objectified self-enjoymentpossible:

Insofar as I apprehend things rationally, I necessarily permeatethem with such striving, such activity, such energy. When appre-hended by means of reason, they then bear the like within them

as an aspect of their being. It is contained in them, to the extentthat they are my objects, are a part of me.22

The act of empathizing ultimately means imbuing an object with life,although this is not actually experienced as such. Lipps repeatedlystresses that the striving in which one participates is experienced notas something imaginatively added on to the object, but as somethingemanating from it. According to Lipps:

In the actual act of Einfhlung, my feeling of striving and do-

ing is not separate from the striving projected into the things.Einfhlung consists precisely in the identity of both things, inother words in the identification of myself with the object. This


8/24

360 Robin Curtis

means that when empathizing with earth and stone, I feel neithermyself striving apart from the stone or the earth, neither the stoneor earth separately striving from me. Nor do I feel myself striving,

with the stone or earth imagined as striving next to me. No, I feelmyself striving in the stone and the earth, or else within the wholestate of affairs of the stone floating above the earth. This is how Ifeel when contemplating such things.23

Although frequently understood as a simple projection onto an object,Lipps regarded this activity as an objectification and thus a fundamentalopportunity to allow all life to resonate within us.24Lippss positionstands out for his interest in empathetic experiences with both livingcreatures and inanimate objects, but at the same time points to an aspect

that was to play a key role in the history of the conceptbut whichwould also later be its undoing.

The conviction that the roots of empathy lie in the metaphysicaloutlook of Romanticism and that it is therefore based on a panthe-istic worldview is persistent and goes back a long way. The conceptof Einfhlungor perhaps it would be more accurate to say the verbeinfhlenis first encountered in the writings of Herder,25 and soonafter in Novaliss fragment Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, written between 1798and 1799 and published posthumously in 1802. In Novalis the act ofempathizing with something offers an opportunity to finally achieve the

closeness to nature that was yearned for during that age:

And thus will no one comprehend nature who possesses no organof nature, no inner nature-generating and nature-isolating organ,who does not as if spontaneously recognize and distinguish na-ture everywhere in everything, and, with an innate urge to procre-ate, in a fervent manifold affinity with all things, intermingles,through the medium of feeling, with all natural beings, as it werefeels into them [in sie hineinfhlt].26

Whereas Herders contribution to the development of the term is gener-ally overlooked by the theoreticians of Einfhlung, Theobald Ziegleridentified Novalis as the originator of the concept as early as 1894. Inhis text Zur Genesis eines sthetischen Begriffs he is also the first toemploy the term Einfhlungs-sthetik(aesthetics of empathy).27

Nevertheless, the notion that empathetic resonance could be a keyelement of everyday as well as aesthetic experience was already in theair in the last few decades of the eighteenth century. Different thoughthe authorial intentions and specific contexts may have been, not a fewliterary utterances of the day bear a resemblance to the phenomenon ofEinfhlung, even where the word itself is not used. Thus Martin Fontiusbelieves he has found the very first mention of the empathy conceptin a letter dated February 2, 1757 from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to


9/24


Moses Mendelssohn. In it Lessing distinguishes between the first af-fect, namely that directly experienced, and the second, which for himplays a subsidiary role: for this affect is not experienced by the playing

persons and we do not experience it simply because they experienceit, but rather it arises in us originally as a result of the effect of theobjects on us.28With this reference to Lessing, Fontius draws attentionto a second line of development in the concept of Einfhlung, one thatemerged back in the Age of Enlightenment alongside that mentionedabove, which can be sited in the Romantic discourse on the symbolismof form and the relationship of man to nature. This second manifes-tation of Einfhlungis analogous to aesthetic identification, of whichLessing was somewhat disdainful, but which could nevertheless already,by that time, be considered a key principle of ethics and an important

aspect of interpersonal experiencefor example by Adam Smith, whoused the term fellow-feeling.29

In the middle of the nineteenth century the idea of natural beautystarted to acquire central importance in aesthetic theory, and this sameengagement with nature assumed a key role in the work of FriedrichTheodor Vischer. Along with his son Robert Vischer, the philoso-pher and literary scholar can be regarded as the founding father ofEinfhlungstheorie. Although the word Einfhlungappears for the firsttime in his sons dissertation, published in 1873 under the title Ueberdas optische Formgefhl. Ein Beitrag zur Aesthetik, it is appropriate to

talk, as does Wilhelm Perpeet, of a major influence exerted by the elderVischer on the younger, for:

In using the word Einfhlung, the son summarized with unerringaccuracy the intentions of the father, who had previously spokenvaguely enoughof passing into, putting oneself entirely in,giving, lending, conferring contemplation, looking in,reading into, understanding, animating, a surmising orsymbolic feeling into, carrying over, imagining the manifes-tations, immersing oneself in, immersion.30

That Einfhlungstheorieemerged within the context of the aestheticsof nature and not within that of the philosophy of art is, as Perpeet em-phasizes, of crucial importance. And yet this fact is readily overlookedbecause of the tendency to interpret Friedrich Theodor Vischers focuson nature as a late result of Romantic speculation. However, the is-sue herein Perpeetis to reinvestigate the origins of the aesthetics ofempathy and in doing so to profile the role of Vischer the elder morestrongly:

Because the word Einfhlung also occurred in the writings ofHerder, Novalis, August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Jean Paul, withthe exception of their inaugurator Friedrich Theodor Vischer,


10/24

362 Robin Curtis

they [the developers of the aesthetics of Einfhlung, R.C.] be-lieved themselves to be in league with the Romantics and theirzoomorphic concept of nature, which allowed for a cosmic-sym-

pathetic empathy of humankind with the same. Ziegler, Stern,Geiger, and Worringer date the conceptual basis for the aestheticsof Einfhlungto the pronounced Romantic fondness for nature asthe quintessence of the great ideal, self-contained, eternally bud-ding organism of the world, to merge with which, and therebycasting off the limitless diversity of individual consciousness, is anexistential need of humankind.31

For Friedrich Theodor Vischer, nature was not endowed with a soul.He subscribed to an emphatically enlightened, scientific, and positivistic

view of nature which was in no way compatible with the stance of theRomantics. Rather, his interest in natural beauty was born out of thedesire to develop the work of Hegel on this precise point, andunlikeHegelto recognize the possibility of experiencing beauty in nature.

For Vischer, the phenomenon of Einfhlung was the key to theproblem of natural beauty, for beauty is not a thing but an act;32accordingly, empathy is not a function of the imagination, but rather anactualization of beauty in a given form, an actualization that containsa symbolic transfer of our emotions into that form. This transfer takesplace in two stagesin the first stage the actualization is experienced as

a loaning, because we are fully aware that nature, as Vischer formulatesit, is the mute realm of necessity.33In the second stage, however, wefeel that this phenomenon occurs as a process of loaning and nothingelse, and thus is the mental process completed,

which is logically a contradiction, but aesthetically of the greatestappeal, as if nature simultaneously concealed within itself a soulconnected to or reflecting the dispositions of human nature, andyet in its unalloyed objectivity and conformity to natural laws,knew nothing of the sufferings of subjective life.34

The ascribing of these ideas to a pantheistic paradigm, vehemently re-jected by Perpeet, is a matter of dispute in the wider literature concern-ing the origins of Einfhlungssthetik. The problem is pertinently for-mulated by Jutta Mller-Tamm, who makes an important distinction:In fact, writes Mller-Tamm, the early aesthetics of empathy de-veloped entirely within the province of pantheismor more preciselywithin the province of a psychology of pantheistic feelings35and thelatter would seem to be closer to Friedrich Theodor Vischers intentions.

At roughly the same time as Vischer, Rudolf Hermann Lotze was

working on a Theorie des innerlichen Miterlebens(theory of inner co-feeling) that was largely analogous with Einfhlung. Due to his medi-cal training, Lotze, who held a philosophy professorship at Gttingen,


11/24


turned his attention far more actively than Vischer to the investigationof sense physiology and above all perception of space. Lotzes conceptof so-called Lokalzeichen (local signs) combined the findings of the

physiology of perception with those of philosophy.36 In an attemptto explain how three-dimensional impressions originate, Lotze pos-tulated that pieces of information regarding seen forms, gathered bymeans of a combination of retinal information and muscle movementin the eye and body, are repeatedly remembered and recombined withone another. For example when we contemplate a distant object andneed to consciously adjust our eyes in order to make that object thefocus of our vision, new Lokalzeichenare created, while the old localsigns provide the entire movement with a determining framework. Thismeans that three-dimensional experience comes about as a result of a

subject remembering previous muscle movements that were necessaryat some point in the past in order to observe specific objectsand fur-thermore from the most favorable viewing position. Under this concept,spatial experiences are created as the result of a joint action of body andmind through combinations of sensory experiences in a quasi-cognitiveprocess.

This emphasizing of the role played by physiological and mentalmemory in spatial experiences has a significant influence on the way inwhich we engage with natural forms. In the second volume of his three-volume work, Mikrokosmos. Ideen zur Naturgeschichte und Geschichte

der Menschheit, Lotze describes the human tendency to imitate theforms and specifically spatial existence of other beings. He writes:

No physical form is so recalcitrant that our imagination is unableto transport itself with co-feeling into it. [] Not only are weable to penetrate the peculiar sense of life of beings close to usin their nature, the joyful flight of a singing bird or the gracefulsprightliness of the gazelle; not only do we draw tight the threadsof our feelings around the smallest thing, in order to dream ourway into the limited existence of a mussel and the monotonous

enjoyment of its apertures and closures; not only do we stretchup our minds into the slender forms of a tree, whose delicatebranches are animated by the pleasure of graceful bending andwafting; on the contrary, we also transfer these tentative feelingsonto inanimate objects, transforming the dead loads and supportsof a building into the many limbs of a living body whose innertensions pass over into us.37

Lotze emphasizes here the importance of the memory of the sensation ofgravity and tension to our perception of other phenomena, for without

doubt the generalized memory of the activity of our own bodies con-tributes to the intensity of these moments of contemplation.38Here,projecting ones own bodily experience onto physical things, in other


12/24

364 Robin Curtis

words living beings and external forms, constitutes the basis for thespecific enjoyment provided by contemplation of the world around us.This applies to an even greater extent, however, to the spatial experience

offered by architectural built space. This broaches an issue that was tobecome increasingly important during the course of the century. The arthistorian Harry Mallgrave has described Lotzes treatment of this issueas follows:

The pleasure of symmetry is due not so much to the regularity orproportion of members as to the pleasure we take in emulatingthis movement. This remembrance of the concrete world, theself-experience of our own physical condition, altogether pervadesour spatial viewing. For all spatial forms affect us aesthetically

only insofar as they are symbols of a weal or a woe personallyexperienced by us.39

The inclination described by Lotze to see tendencies toward imitation asthe product of the specific form of the human apparatus of perceptionwas then taken up and reinforced by Robert Vischer.

And yet in his book Ueber das optische Formgefhl, Robert Vischerat the same time embarks on a scientific underpinning and expansion ofthe work of his father Friedrich Theodor Vischer. In the very introduc-tion he refers to a formulation of his fathers that underlines the extent

to which both Vischers understood Einfhlungas a physiological effect:

We will be able to assume that every mental act is executed andat the same time reflected in specific vibrations andwho knowswhatmodifications of the nerve in such a way that they repre-sent its image, that a symbolic depiction thus takes place withinthe organism.40

With the help of the term hnlichkeit (similarity), borrowed fromWilhelm Wundt, which denotes a correspondence between an observed

object and the physiological effect on the observer, Robert Vischer seeksto explain mental excitement at all times both accurately and withreference to the physical.41According to this model, the form of a hu-man body determines whether a form observed in the external worldis experienced as enjoyable or disturbing, for (as Robert Vischer citesWundt): Where the eye can move freely, when moving in a verticalor horizontal direction it follows a precisely straight line in keepingwith its physiological mechanism; the diagonal line it travels in a curvedpath. Vischer continues:

This sentence can be construed negatively to the effect that thestraight line in a diagonal direction and the jagged line in a verti-cal or horizontal direction are in and of themselves disagreeable,


13/24


the first because it requires uncomfortable movements and thesecond because it necessitates unaccustomed and rapid changesof direction.42

In this sense it is therefore the similarity or dissimilarity to the structureof the eye and/or the whole body that determines whether a form willbe felt to be enjoyable. The more taxing it is for the body to discern anobject, the more unpleasant the impression caused by that object. Forexample the horizontal positioning of the eyes is held here to be decisivewith regard to the pleasant effect caused by horizontal lines. Ultimately,according to Robert Vischer:

we [find] enjoyment in all regular forms because our organ and

its modes of functioning are regular. Irregular forms disturb us, toborrow Wundts apposite expression, like a thwarted expecta-tion. Pain ensues whenever the eye fails to discover the lawsaccording to which it itself is formed and moves.43

Also remarkable about Vischers discussion of similarity is his interestin the effect of the intermodal aspects of perception, in other words theacting in concert of the different senses. This allows similarity to beregarded as a far more complex phenomenon, for:

It is about nothing less than the whole body; the entire humanorganism is affected. For in reality there is no strict localizationwithin it. Every pronounced sensation therefore leads to either anincrease or a decrease in the general Vitalempfindung(sensationof vitality).44

Yet all this is only a preliminary stage in the forming of an emotionalconnection with an external phenomenon, as is characteristic of empa-thy. Such a connection only comes about when the observer projects hisor her own life onto the inanimate form, an augmentation motivated

by nothing other than the distressing cognizance of the lack of life inthe inanimate object on the part of the observer, who is then moved toimbue the object with life. According to Robert Vischer:

I therefore impute my individual life to the inanimate form, justas I impute it, with reason, to an animate non-I in the form of aperson. Only apparently do I hold onto myself, although the ob-ject remains an Other. I appear to be merely adapting and addingmyself to it, as one hand takes hold of another, and yet in a mys-terious way I am transposed and transformed into this non-I.45

This is the basis for Einfhlungin Robert Vischer, although he neverthe-less subdivides the phenomenon into various aspects. When confronted


14/24

366 Robin Curtis

with a static, fixed object,46it is a case of physiognomic Einfhlungor empathy of mood, which can bring about either an expansion ofthe self (which he denotes as Ausfhlung) or else a constriction of the

self (referred to as Zusammenfhlung). When empathy is felt towarda dynamic or apparently dynamic object, this is mimetic or activeEinfhlung.47

To explain this inclination to imbue an object with life through Ein-fhlung, Vischer refers to the nature of feeling as the driving forcebehind the phenomenon:

This symbolizing activity can be based on nothing other than thepantheistic urge for union with the world, which is by no meanslimited to the more readily comprehensible relationship of affinity

with humankind, but rather is directed, consciously or uncon-sciously, toward the entire universe. The same is to be found in arudimentary way in sensation and sensory imagination.48

Einfhlung enables a simple sensation to be transformed into a feel-ing and thus into a means of union. Feeling is more objective thansensation. It leaps with unevenly far greater energy beyond ones ownskin to merge with a non-I.49This is a consoling experience, for themore abstractly one thinks in this sense, the more easily one will beable to comprehend oneself as part of an inseparable whole. This

understanding of the pantheistic allows feeling to be expanded intosensibility.50Robert Vischer is thus firmly acknowledging the panthe-istic and on this point deviates from the views of his father. This wasnoticed by Theobald Ziegler as early as 1894 when comparing fatherand son:

Friedrich Theodor Vischer refers briefly at the end of this treatiseto aesthetic contemplation as a sensory phenomenon and as an at-testation of the unity of mind and nature, of the all-encompassingunityconsiderably more cautiously, it should be noted, than his

son, who sees in the pantheistic urge for union with the world asan indivisible entity the cause of, and reason for, this symbolizingactivity.51

Nonetheless, Robert Vischers contribution to Einfhlungssthetik re-mains important above all because he focused on the significance to theway we experience the world of the specific form of the body and thecorporeality of perception.

Vischers insights, along with those of Rudolf Hermann Lotze, weresubsequently to assume a pivotal role in the thinking of the Leipzig

professor of art history August Schmarsow. Schmarsow sought todescribe the concept of Raumgestaltung (spatial forming) on the ba-sis of the parameters of physical feelings. In doing so he stressed that


15/24


architecture can only be understood as a dynamic experience of space,because through its specific design it engineers a particular experienceof space. At the center of his thinking were the human body and, more

specifically, the sense of corporeality, or to use Schmarsows terminol-ogy the Krpergefhle(feelings of the body), which are determined byTastregionen(touch regions) and Sehregionen(sight regions). This ad-dressed the problem of depth perception, which for Schmarsow wasgenerated by the kinetic extension of bodily perception through bodilymovement.

As soon as the result that we shall call our particular form ofspatial intuition crystallizes out of the residues of sensory experi-ence, to which our bodys muscular sensations, the sensitivity of

our skin, and the structure of our entire body contribute, [] assoon as we have learned to feel ourselves and ourselves alone tobe the center of this space, whose directional axes intersect in us,the treasured kernel is in place.52

Key components of spatial perception for Schmarsow are the verticaland horizontal directional axes inscribed into every body; architectureengineers spatial experiences in which these directional axes remainvacant or are factored in so that they can be quasi bodily consummatedupon reception. In this sense Schmarsow describes architecture as a

Raumgestalterin(creator of space) because it is based on a kinetic act ofconsummation that is always executed within our perception of space.For Schmarsow this kinesthetic and imaginative involvement in a builtspace is responsible not only for the formation of three-dimensionalimpressions, but this corporeal activity also explains the emotional andaesthetic power of architecture. He writes:

The very linguistic terms that we use to denote the dimensions ofa space, such as expansion, extension, direction, indicatethe continuous activity of the subject, who immediately transfers

his own feeling of movement to the static spatial form, and is un-able to express its relationship with him other than by imagininghimself in motion measuring the length, breadth, and depth, orby imputing movement to the inflexible lines, surfaces, and bodiesrevealed to him by his eyes and muscular sensations, even whenobserving the dimensions while standing still.53

Schmarsow is here describing imitative activities that always play a partin our perception of space, that can explain our emotional or empathet-ic involvement in our surroundings, and that may even be responsible

for our ability to sense moods. Most importantly, however, Schmarsowstresses that architecture can only be grasped by a dynamic or corporealrecipient. It cannot simply be thought of as a collection of forms and


16/24

368 Robin Curtis

lines but has to be understood primarily as an engineered interactionbetween the human body and the world.

That the aforementioned aspects of Einfhlungssthetik for a long

time played at best a subordinate role in the handing down of thehistorical debate is in all probability related to the reception historyof Wilhelm Worringers Abstraktion und Einfhlung. Despite severecriticism from the authors contemporary art history colleagues, thisslender book, which has been through numerous editions,54exerted anenormous influence on the debates about artistic practice and radiatedan inspirational power that can still be felt today. The sensational suc-cess of Worringers text, accepted as a doctoral dissertation in 1907and published the following year, continues to dominate the receptionof Einfhlungssthetik. In Worringers text, Einfhlung(albeit reduced

to Theodor Lippss contribution) serves as a figure of contrast, for inAbstraktion undEinfhlung the author introduces an opposition be-tween spatial involvement and Einfhlung that has distorted our un-derstanding of empathy to the current day. Worringers hypothesis isas follows:

The basic idea behind our essay is to show how modern aesthet-ics, which are based on the notion of Einfhlung, are inapplicableto large areas of art history. Rather, its Archimedean point is lo-cated at onepole of human artistic sensitivity. It can only form a

comprehensive aesthetic system once it has united with the linesthat emanate from the opposite pole.55

That Einfhlungis not inevitably to be regarded as the opposite pole toabstraction is not further discussed here, although the notion is beingvigorously challenged in the latest research. The conflict between theflat space of abstraction and three-dimensional space, which, accordingto Worringer, is what makes an empathetic attitude on the part of therecipient possible in the first place, nevertheless remains decisive andhas shaped understanding of Einfhlung, and the place allocated to it

in aesthetic discourse, up to the present day. During the renaissanceenjoyed by Abstraktion und Einfhlungand indeed Worringers entireoeuvreover the last few years,56 the fundamental opposition in hisassessment of Einfhlunghas seldom been questioned.

However, two critics deserve to be mentioned here. An importantcommentary on Abstraktion und Einfhlungby Geoffrey Waite viewsWorringers oppositional pair at best as a creative misreading. Waiteidentifies two aspects in Lipps that were disregarded by Worringer:

First, the description of empathy as an active, intentional par-

ticipation, not a static state of consciousness; second, the thesisthat abstract figures (including geometric lines) can be aestheti-cally significant independentfrom their appearance in nature. In


17/24


the light of this suppression, Worringers value-charged notionof empathy as a relationship of confidence between man andthe external world, as the nave anthropomorphic pantheism

or polytheism, as world-revering naturalism (45[83]), etc.,can only be read as a severe, ideologically motivated distortionof emphasis.

Even the Vischers regarded the formal aspects of objects as being en-tirely worthy of Einfhlung, for in their writings empathy by no means,unlike in those of Worringer, had to be associated with a naturalisticaesthetic.58Although Waite stresses that Worringer did not want to setup a fixed opposition, but simply meant to plead for a synthesis of thetwo terms, this synthesis has played virtually no role in the reception of

Worringer to date.Jutta Mller-Tamm, who in her book Abstraktion als Einfhlung

undertakes a detailed examination of projection, considering the multi-faceted figure of thought from the perspective of psychophysiology andthe aesthetic theory of the late nineteenth century, criticizes Worringersposition from a different angle. She sees in his explanation of, and op-position to, Einfhlunga misinterpretation of the concept which canbe explained by his particular notion of the domain in question. Whilepsychological aesthetics views Einfhlungas a phenomenon of theaesthetics of reception, Worringers emphasis is more on the aesthetics

of production, for it is his intention to differentiate between variousculture-specific and aesthetic paradigms that will explain differences oftaste in production and reception.

Whereas in psychological aesthetics Einfhlungdenotes the activ-ity of constructing meaning and determining significance withinthe (aesthetic) perception process as a whole, for Worringer theterm stands for a psychic disposition whereby meaning, signifi-cance, and order are taken for granted and simply discovered,and for a coherence between trust in the world, the affirmation

of this world, an art inclined toward naturalistic, i.e. organic, liv-ing forms, and pantheistic-polytheistic religion. The concept ofEinfhlungis no longer a psychological-aesthetic term denotingthe experience of art or aesthetic behavior prior to any processof particularization, but rather a culture-historical term thatrelates to a qualitatively defined relationship with the world, atype of worldview. The main aspect of the doctrine of Einfhlung,namely the reception of the artwork, the relationship betweenthe viewer and the viewed (aesthetic) object, is not excluded inWorringer, but is paid little attention.

Worringer understands Einfhlung as a fundamental attitude that isadopted toward the world. Because he is interested in the mental attitude


18/24

370 Robin Curtis

of an entire nation, which is revealed through its aesthetic preferences,the difference between the aesthetics of production and the aesthetics ofreception is for him irrelevant. For Einfhlungssthetik, however, this

was a key question.The early debates on the phenomenon of Einfhlungopen up dis-

cussions across a broad range of aesthetic issues that are still todaygermane to so-called visual studies, in other words art history andtheory and film and media studies. These issues include: the param-eters of an aesthetics of reception in visual studies, the relationshipbetween abstraction and representation, the possibility of cooperationbetween the different perspectives of the humanities, the social sciences,and the natural sciences in the field of (aesthetic) perception, and notleast the complex questions that have been raised all over again over

the last few years in the study of the emotions but which had alreadyoccupied a central place in Einfhlungssthetik. The art historian FrankBttner has correctly drawn attention to the mixed feelings that the aes-thetics of empathy continue to evoke. While on the one hand receptionresearch modestly fails to acknowledge Einfhlungssthetikas one ofits precursors, on the other, as incomplete and frustratingly intermi-nable as the debates of that time may have been,60they nevertheless setthe agenda for the debates that have become highly topical for us againtoday. Einfhlungas described by Robert Vischer, writes Bttner,

pertains to a core problem of our interaction with art. Althoughthe solutions suggested by Vischer and the young Wlfflin nolonger have the power to convince us today, the problem of Ein-fhlungcannot be said to be outmoded. The thorough historicalinvestigation of the issue of aesthetic perception and all its relatedfactorsone of them, of course, being Einfhlungremains atask yet to be completed.61

From the perspective of the interdisciplinary research of the last fewyears, it has become clear that an encounter between Einfhlungssthetik

and the arts of the twentieth and indeed twenty-first centuries, and inparticular those of the moving image,62 is highly auspicious, for it ismainly (but not exclusively) here that the crossovers between the natu-ralistic aesthetic, which Worringer associated with Einfhlung, and ab-straction are fluid to an extent that renders a new investigation of thephenomenon overdue.

Notes

To Introduction

1. Viktor Shklovskij, Art as Technique, in Literary Theory: AnAnthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA:Blackwell, 1998), 18.


19/24


To Main article

1. This astonishing information is presented by Martin Fontiusbased on entries in the Social Sciences Index, the Social Sciences

and Humanities Index, Sociological Abstracts, and the HumanitiesIndex in an exhaustive entry on the term Einfhlung. See MartinFrontius, Einfhlung/Empathie/Identifikation, in sthetischeGrundbegriffe. Historisches Wrterbuch in sieben Bnden, vol. 4(Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), 84121.

2. The origin of the word empathy is generally considered to bethe English translation by Edward Titchener in his Lectures on theExperimental Psychology of the Thought-processes (New York:Macmillan, 1909), 21, of a text by Theodor Lipps. The latest editionof the Oxford English Dictionary, however, records as the earliest

written reference a diary entry of 1904 by Vernon Lee, another ac-tive commentator on the phenomenon of empathy (Oxford EnglishDictionary, vol. 5, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, 184),but this is often disputed. Gustav Jahoda, for example, writes: Onething is certain, however: [Titchener] did not borrow the term fromVernon Lee, as might be suspected from the entry on empathy inthe Oxford English Dictionary. [] What must have happened isthat Lee changed the entry retrospectively, since Lee twice (pp. 20and 46) explicitly attributed the translation to Titchener. (Gustav

Jahoda, The Shift from Sympathy to Empathy,Journal of the

History of the Behavioural Sciences41, no. 2 (2005): 15163, here:161.)

3. Lipps is frequentlyand erroneouslyreferred to within thesefields as the originator of the concept without due reference to itscomplex history. Presumably, respect is thereby being paid to Lippsssignificancewhich should not be underestimatedto Germanysscientific landscape of the day. Furthermore, Lippss contribution tothe empathy debate can undoubtedly be regarded as fundamental tothe establishing of this issue in the field of psychology, for althoughLipps held a philosophy professorship at Munich University, he was

interested in a range of issues that we associate more readily todaywith psychology.

4. See Theodor Lipps, Einfhlung und sthetischer Genu, DieZukunft54 (January 1906): 10014, for a condensed exposition ofhis thesis.

5. Karsten R. Stueber, Rediscovering Empathy: Folk Psychology andthe Human Sciences(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 7. (EarlierGerman-language publications by the same author appeared underthe name Karsten R. Stber.)

6. Theodor Lipps, Grundlegung der Asthetik, part one (Hamburg:

Voss, 1903), 120.7. Stueber, Rediscovering Empathy, 147.8. Ibid., 21.


20/24

372 Robin Curtis

9. The original research results were published by both GiacomoRizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese, the two leaders of the research teamin Parma, Italy. See Giacomo Rizzolatti and others, Premotor

Cortex and the Recognition of Motor Actions, Cognitive BrainResearch 3 (1996): 13141, and Vittorio Gallese and others,Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex, Brain 119, no 2(1996): 593609.

10. For an overview of the numerous research projects on this subject,see, for example, Maksim Stamenov and Vittorio Gallese, MirrorNeurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language(Amsterdam:

John Benjamins, 2002) and Andrew Melzoff and Wolfgang Prinz,The Imitative Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2002).

11. An interesting exception is a study conducted in Great Britain thatinvestigated ballet dancers, capoeiristas, and a group of controlsubjects who were experts in neither ballet nor capoeira. Each ofthe three groups viewed video recordings of a ballet dancer and acapoeira dancer each performing a jump movement belonging tothe repertoire of their own dance style. The movement lasted barelymore than one or two seconds and the two jumps resembled eachother in form. It was established in this case that the acquisition ofspecific motor skills (such as ballet or capoeira) strongly influencesthe reaction of the mirror neurons. The mirror neurons of the ballet

dancers were most strongly stimulated when observing the move-ment from the ballet repertoire. The same applied to the capoe-iristas when watching their own jump; each group reacted lessstrongly to the other groups movements. The group comprisingnon-dancers displayed the lowest level of mirror-neuron reaction,irrespective of which dance type they were observing. The study alsocontested the widespread thesis that the observer and the observedboth need to be present for mirror neuron activity to take place.See B. Calvo-Merino, D.E. Glaser, J. Grzes, R.F. Passingham, andP. Haggard, Action Observation and Acquired Motor Skills: An

fMRI Study with Expert Dancers, Cerebral Cortex 15 (August2005): 12439.

12. Vittorio Gallese, The Roots of Empathy: The Shared ManifoldHypothesis and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity, Psycho-

pathology35 (2003): 17180, here 175.13. Ibid.14. Stern writes that infants appear to have an innate general capac-

ity, which can be called amodal perception, to take informationreceived in one sensory modality, and somehow translate it intoanother sensory modality. [] These abstract representations that

the infant experiences are not sights and sounds and touches andnameable objects, but rather shapes, intensities, and temporal pat-ternsthe more global qualities of experience (Daniel N. Stern,


21/24


The Interpersonal World of the Infant, London: Karnac Books,1998, 51).

15. Ibid., 54.

16. Theodor Lipps, Einfhlung und sthetischer Genu, in Aesthetik,ed. Emil Utitz (Berlin: Pan-Verlag Rolf Heise, 1924), 160.

17. Ibid., 161.18. Ibid., 155.19. Ibid., 152.20. Ibid.21. Ibid., 155.22. Ibid., 160.23. Lipps, Grundlegung der sthetik, 182.24. Lipps, Einfhlung und sthetischer Genu, 167.

25. Herder considered the act of empathizing (sich-Einfhlen) as a wayof imaginatively evoking the affective situation and perceptions ofpeople in foreign cultures and past epochs to such an extent thattheir worlds could be adequately discussed. See Johann GottfriedHerder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung derMenschheit [1774], in Schriften zu Philosophie, Literatur, Kunstund Altertum, 17741787, ed. Jrgen Brummack and MartinBollacher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994),323.

26. Novalis, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, in Novalis Schriften, ed. Ludwig

Tieck, Friedrich von Schlegel, Karl Eduard von Blow, and JohannLudwig Tieck (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1837), 99.

27. Theobald Ziegler, Zur Genesis eines sthetischen Begriffs, Zeit-schrift fr vergleichende Literaturgeschichte 7 (1894): 11320,here 116. Despite this affinity, Ziegler warns of seeing an unbrokenline of development between Romanticism and the science of hisown day: Romanticism is a poeticizing of life and science; to gainsway over nature, as I said above, to procure it for themselves, thisis how feeling into (Hineinfhlen) was supposed to serve them; tomaster itnot least for the scientific knowledge; for this is what it

was all about for the novices. Herein lies the Romantic mischief (ibid., 118). This does not mean refraining from attesting tothe unity of mind and nature, but making the profound ponder-ing of the symbol and of Einfhlungenergetically productive in thearea in which it can reveal itself within the given and the tangible,the only place where it can make itself truly productive, in otherwords in the realm of the aesthetic (ibid., 119).

28. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, An Moses Mendelssohn [1757],in Gotthold Ephraim Lessings smtliche Schriften, ed. KarlLachmann, vol. 17 (Leipzig: Gschen, 1904), 8993.

29. See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759], in TheGlasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondences, vol. 1, ed.D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1976), 9.


22/24

374 Robin Curtis

30. Wilhelm Perpeet, Historisches und Systematisches zur Einfh-lungssthetik, Zeitschrift fr sthetik und Allgemeine Kunst-wissenschaft11, no 1 (1966): 193216, here 201.

31. Ibid., 202.32. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Kritik meiner sthetik [1866, 1873],

in Kritische Gnge, ed. Robert Vischer (Munich: Meyer & Jessen,1922), vol. 4, 383.

33. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Betrachtung ber den Zustand derjetzigen Malerei [1842], in Kritische Gnge 5, no 45, cited inWilhelm Perpeet, Vom Schnen und von der Kunst(Bonn: Bouvier,1997), 967.

34. Vischer, Betrachtung ber den Zustand der jetzigen Malerei,45f., cited in Perpeet, Vom Schnen und von der Kunst, 102.

35. Jutta Mller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfhlung. Zur Denkfigurder Projektion in Psychophysiologie, Kulturtheorie, Asthetik und

Literatur der frhen Moderne (Freiburg in Breisgau: Rombach,2005), 217.

36. Lotzes concept of Lokalzeichenmade a significant contribution toHermann von Helmholtzs work on a theory of projection. For adetailed discussion of the affinity between the discourses of psy-chophysiology and aesthetics, see Mller-Tamm, Abstraktion alsEinfhlung. A brief overview of developments in psychophysiologyand aesthetic spatial research in the nineteenth century is given in

Mitchell W. Schwarzer, The Emergence of Architectural Space:August Schmarsows Theory of Raumgestaltung, Assemblage15(August 1991): 4861.

37. Rudolf Hermann Lotze, Mikrokosmos. Ideen zur Naturgeschichteund Geschichte der Menschheit[1858] (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1885),vol. 2, 2012.

38. Ibid., 201.39. Harry Francis Mullgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, Introduction,

in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics,18731893, ed. Harry F. Mallgrave (Santa Monica: Getty Center

Publication, 1994), 20f. Quotation from Rudolf Hermann Lotze,Geschichte der sthetik in Deutschland(Munich: Cotta, 1868), 80.

40. Vischer, Kritik meiner sthetik, 31920.41. Robert Vischer, Preface, in Ueber das optische Formgefhl. Ein

Beitrag zur Aesthetik(Leipzig: Hermann Credner), 1873, vii.42. Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefhl, 8.43. Ibid.44. Ibid., 11. This reference to Vitalempfindungis strongly reminiscent

of Daniel Sterns vitality affects as already described.45. Ibid., 20.

46. Ibid., 21.47. Further aspects of Einfhlungssthetik in Robert Vischer include

Anfhlung, Nachfhlungand Zufhlung, which are not examinedfurther here.


23/24


48. Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefhl, 28.49. Ibid.50. Ibid., 29.

51. Ziegler, Zur Genesis eines sthetischen Begriffs, 119.52. August Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schpfung,

in Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kultur-wissenschaften, ed. Jrg Dnne and Stephan Gnzel (Frankfurt amMain: Suhrkamp, 2006), 270.

53. Ibid., 4756.54. For an account of the books extraordinary success, see the preface

by editor Helga Grebing in Wilhelm Worringer,Abstraktion undEinfhlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (Munich: Fink, 2007),712.

55. Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfhlung, 72.56. In the German language, see above all the works on Worringer

published by Hannes Bhringer and Beate Sntgen, in particu-lar Wilhelm Worringers Kunstgeschichte (Munich: Fink, 2002)and Wilhelm Worringer. Schriften, ed. Hannes Bhringer, HelgaGrebing, and Beate Sntgen (Munich: Fink, 2002). In the Englishlanguage, see above all Invisible Cathedrals:The Expressionist ArtHistory of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Neil H. Donahue (UniversityPark: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).

57. Geoffrey C.W. Waite, Worringers Abstraction and Empathy:

Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism, inInvisible Cathedrals, 1340, here 24f.

58. This problematic distortion in Worringer is emphasized by FrankBttner in his extremely useful overview Das Paradigma Ein-fhlung bei Robert Vischer, Heinrich Wlfflin und WilhelmWorringer. Die problematische Karriere einer kunsttheoretischenFragestellung, in 200 Jahre Kunstgeschichte in Mnchen. Posi-tionen, Perspektiven, Polemik, 17801980, ed. Christian Drudeand Hubertus Kohle (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2003), 87.

59. Mller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfhlung, 270.

60. On this subject, Jutta Mller-Tamm, for example, has noted that:The reader cant help but [] get the impression that it is here lessto do with the empirical analysis of aesthetic pleasure and moreabout the pleasure in invoking in writing that powerful, proud, andfree I. Ibid., 240.

61. Bttner, Das Paradigma Einfhlung, 90.62. To date there have been surprisingly few references to Einfhlungs-

sthetikin international film studies. Sergei Eisenstein referred toTheodor Lipps in his text Die Montage der Attraktionen [1921],sthetik und Kommunikation. Beitrge zur politischen Erziehung

4, no 13 (1973), 768. Two books on the role of empathy in theinfluencing of the affects in film refer back to Theodor Lipps but donot deal any further with the historical phenomenon: Emotion and


24/24

376 Robin Curtis

the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machineby EdTan (Mawah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996) and EngagingCharacters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema by Murray Smith

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). For detailed discussionsof Einfhlungssthetik and film see Robin Curtis, ConscientiousViscerality (Emsdetten/Berlin: Gebrder Mann/Edition Imorde,2006); Robin Curtis, Expanded Empathy: Movement, MirrorNeurons and Einfhlung, in Narration and Spectatorship inMoving Images: Perception, Imagination, Emotion, ed. Joseph andBarbara Anderson (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007),4962; and Robin Curtis, Bewegung, Rhythmus, Immersion.Rumliche Wirkung der Abstraktion, in Empfindungsrume. Zursynsthetischen Wahrnehmung, ed. Robin Curtis, Marc Glde, and

Gertrud Koch (Munich: Fink, 2009).

robin curtis. an introduction to einfühlung copy

Documents