Notes
To Introduction
- Viktor Shklovskij, “Art as Technique,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 18.
To Main Article
- This astonishing information is presented by Martin Fontius based on entries in the Social Sciences Index, the Social Sciences and Humanities Index, Sociological Abstracts, and the Humanities Index in an exhaustive entry on the term Einfühlung. See Martin Frontius, “Einfühlung/Empathie/Identifikation,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, vol. 4 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), 84–121.
- The origin of the word “empathy” is generally considered to be the English translation by Edward Titchener in his Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-processes (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 21, of a text by Theodor Lipps. The latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, however, records as the earliest written reference a diary entry of 1904 by Vernon Lee, another active commentator on the phenomenon of empathy (Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 5, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, 184), but this is often disputed. Gustav Jahoda, for example, writes: “One thing is certain, however: [Titchener] did not borrow the term from Vernon Lee, as might be suspected from the entry on ‘empathy’ in the Oxford English Dictionary. […] What must have happened is that Lee changed the entry retrospectively, since Lee twice (pp. 20 and 46) explicitly attributed the translation to Titchener.” (Gustav Jahoda, “The Shift from ‘Sympathy’ to 'Empathy,'” Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 41, no. 2 (2005): 151–63, here: 161.)
- Lipps is frequently—and erroneously—referred to within these fields as the originator of the concept without due reference to its complex history. Presumably, respect is thereby being paid to Lipps's significance—which should not be underestimated—to Germany's scientific landscape of the day. Furthermore, Lipps's contribution to the empathy debate can undoubtedly be regarded as fundamental to the establishing of this issue in the field of psychology, for although Lipps held a philosophy professorship at Munich University, he was interested in a range of issues that we associate more readily today with psychology.
- See Theodor Lipps, “Einfühlung und ästhetischer Genuß,” Die Zukunft 54 (January 1906): 100–14, for a condensed exposition of his thesis.
- Karsten R. Stueber, Rediscovering Empathy: Folk Psychology and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 7. (Earlier German-language publications by the same author appeared under the name Karsten R. Stüber.)
- Theodor Lipps, Grundlegung der Asthetik, part one (Hamburg: Voss, 1903), 120.
- Stueber, Rediscovering Empathy, 147.
- Ibid., 21.
- The original research results were published by both Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese, the two leaders of the research team in Parma, Italy. See Giacomo Rizzolatti and others, “Premotor Cortex and the Recognition of Motor Actions,” Cognitive Brain Research 3 (1996): 131–41, and Vittorio Gallese and others, “Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex,” Brain 119, no 2 (1996): 593–609.
- For an overview of the numerous research projects on this subject, see, for example, Maksim Stamenov and Vittorio Gallese, Mirror Neurons 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).
- An interesting exception is a study conducted in Great Britain that investigated ballet dancers, capoeiristas, and a group of control subjects who were experts in neither ballet nor capoeira. Each of the three groups viewed video recordings of a ballet dancer and a capoeira dancer each performing a jump movement belonging to the repertoire of their own dance style. The movement lasted barely more than one or two seconds and the two jumps resembled each other in form. It was established in this case that the acquisition of specific motor skills (such as ballet or capoeira) strongly influences the reaction of the mirror neurons. The mirror neurons of the ballet dancers were most strongly stimulated when observing the movement from the ballet repertoire. The same applied to the capoeiristas when watching their “own” jump; each group reacted less strongly to the other group's movements. The group comprising non-dancers displayed the lowest level of mirror-neuron reaction, irrespective of which dance type they were observing. The study also contested the widespread thesis that the observer and the observed both need to be present for mirror neuron activity to take place. See B. Calvo-Merino, D.E. Glaser, J. Grèzes, R.F. Passingham, and P. Haggard, “Action Observation and Acquired Motor Skills: An fMRI Study with Expert Dancers,” Cerebral Cortex 15 (August 2005): 1243–9.
- Vittorio Gallese, “The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity,” Psychopathology 35 (2003): 171–80, here 175.
- Ibid.
- Stern writes that infants “appear to have an innate general capacity, which can be called amodal perception, to take information received in one sensory modality, and somehow translate it into another sensory modality. […] These abstract representations that the infant experiences are not sights and sounds and touches and nameable objects, but rather shapes, intensities, and temporal patterns—the more ‘global’ qualities of experience” (Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, London: Karnac Books, 1998, 51).
- Ibid., 54.
- Theodor Lipps, “Einfühlung und ästhetischer Genuß,” in Aesthetik, ed. Emil Utitz (Berlin: Pan-Verlag Rolf Heise, 1924), 160.
- Ibid., 161.
- Ibid., 155.
- Ibid., 152.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 155.
- Ibid., 160.
- Lipps, Grundlegung der Ästhetik, 182.
- Lipps, “Einfühlung und ästhetischer Genuß,” 167.
- Herder considered the act of empathizing (sich-Einfühlen) as a way of imaginatively evoking the affective situation and perceptions of people in foreign cultures and past epochs to such an extent that their worlds could be adequately discussed. See Johann Gottfried Herder, “Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit” [1774], in Schriften zu Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Altertum, 1774–1787, ed. Jürgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), 32–3.
- Novalis, “Die Lehrlinge zu Sais,” in Novalis Schriften, ed. Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich von Schlegel, Karl Eduard von Bülow, and Johann Ludwig Tieck (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1837), 99.
- Theobald Ziegler, “Zur Genesis eines ästhetischen Begriffs,” Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturgeschichte 7 (1894): 113–20, here 116. Despite this affinity, Ziegler warns of seeing an unbroken line of development between Romanticism and the science of his own day: “Romanticism is a poeticizing of life and science; to gain sway over nature, as I said above, to procure it for themselves, this is how ‘feeling into’ (Hineinfühlen) was supposed to serve them; to master it—not 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 to the unity of mind and nature,” but making “the profound pondering of the symbol and of Einfühlung energetically productive in the area in which it can reveal itself within the given and the tangible, the only place where it can make itself truly productive, in other words in the realm of the aesthetic” (ibid., 119).
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “An Moses Mendelssohn” [1757], in Gotthold Ephraim Lessings sämtliche Schriften, ed. Karl Lachmann, vol. 17 (Leipzig: Göschen, 1904), 89–93.
- See Adam Smith, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” [1759], in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondences, vol. 1, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 9.
- Wilhelm Perpeet, “Historisches und Systematisches zur Einfühlungsästhetik,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 11, no 1 (1966): 193–216, here 201.
- Ibid., 202.
- Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Kritik meiner Ästhetik” [1866, 1873], in Kritische Gänge, ed. Robert Vischer (Munich: Meyer & Jessen, 1922), vol. 4, 383.
- Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Betrachtung über den Zustand der jetzigen Malerei” [1842], in Kritische Gänge 5, no 45, cited in Wilhelm Perpeet, Vom Schönen und von der Kunst (Bonn: Bouvier, 1997), 96–7.
- Vischer, “Betrachtung über den Zustand der jetzigen Malerei,” 45f., cited in Perpeet, Vom Schönen und von der Kunst, 102.
- Jutta Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung. Zur Denkfigur der Projektion in Psychophysiologie, Kulturtheorie, Asthetik und Literatur der frühen Moderne (Freiburg in Breisgau: Rombach, 2005), 217.
- Lotze's concept of Lokalzeichen made a significant contribution to Hermann von Helmholtz's work on a theory of projection. For a detailed discussion of the affinity between the discourses of psychophysiology and aesthetics, see Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung. A brief overview of developments in psychophysiology and aesthetic spatial research in the nineteenth century is given in Mitchell W. Schwarzer, “The Emergence of Architectural Space: August Schmarsow's Theory of 'Raumgestaltung,'” Assemblage 15 (August 1991): 48–61.
- Rudolf Hermann Lotze, Mikrokosmos. Ideen zur Naturgeschichte und Geschichte der Menschheit [1858] (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1885), vol. 2, 201–2.
- Ibid., 201.
- Harry Francis Mullgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, “Introduction,” in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, ed. Harry F. Mallgrave (Santa Monica: Getty Center Publication, 1994), 20f. Quotation from Rudolf Hermann Lotze, Geschichte der Ästhetik in Deutschland (Munich: Cotta, 1868), 80.
- Vischer, “Kritik meiner Ästhetik,” 319–20.
- Robert Vischer, “Preface,” in Ueber das optische Formgefühl. Ein Beitrag zur Aesthetik (Leipzig: Hermann Credner), 1873, vii.
- Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefühl, 8.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 11. This reference to Vitalempfindung is strongly reminiscent of Daniel Stern's vitality affects as already described.
- Ibid., 20.
- Ibid., 21.
- Further aspects of Einfühlungsästhetik in Robert Vischer include Anfühlung, Nachfühlung and Zufühlung, which are not examined further here.
- Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefühl, 28.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 29.
- Ziegler, “Zur Genesis eines ästhetischen Begriffs,” 119.
- August Schmarsow, “Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung,” in Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Jörg Dünne and Stephan Günzel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 270.
- Ibid., 475–6.
- For an account of the book's extraordinary success, see the preface by editor Helga Grebing in Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (Munich: Fink, 2007), 7–12.
- Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 72.
- In the German language, see above all the works on Worringer published by Hannes Böhringer and Beate Söntgen, in particular Wilhelm Worringers Kunstgeschichte (Munich: Fink, 2002) and Wilhelm Worringer. Schriften, ed. Hannes Böhringer, Helga Grebing, and Beate Söntgen (Munich: Fink, 2002). In the English language, see above all Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Neil H. Donahue (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).
- Geoffrey C.W. Waite, “Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism,” in Invisible Cathedrals, 13–40, here 24f.
- This problematic distortion in Worringer is emphasized by Frank Büttner in his extremely useful overview “Das Paradigma ‘Einfühlung’ bei Robert Vischer, Heinrich Wölfflin und Wilhelm Worringer. Die problematische Karriere einer kunsttheoretischen Fragestellung,” in 200 Jahre Kunstgeschichte in München. Positionen, Perspektiven, Polemik, 1780–1980, ed. Christian Drude and Hubertus Kohle (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2003), 87.
- Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung, 270.
- On this subject, Jutta Müller-Tamm, for example, has noted that: “The reader can't help but […] get the impression that it is here less to do with the empirical analysis of aesthetic pleasure and more about the pleasure in invoking in writing that powerful, proud, and free 'I.'” Ibid., 240.
- Büttner, “Das Paradigma 'Einfühlung,'” 90.
- To date there have been surprisingly few references to Einfühlungsästhetik in international film studies. Sergei Eisenstein referred to Theodor Lipps in his text “Die Montage der Attraktionen” [1921], Ästhetik und Kommunikation. Beiträge zur politischen Erziehung 4, no 13 (1973), 76–8. Two books on the role of empathy in the influencing of the affects in film refer back to Theodor Lipps but do not deal any further with the historical phenomenon: Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine by Ed Tan (Mawah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996) and Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema by Murray Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). For detailed discussions of Einfühlungsästhetik and film see Robin Curtis, Conscientious Viscerality (Emsdetten/Berlin: Gebrüder Mann/Edition Imorde, 2006); Robin Curtis, “Expanded Empathy: Movement, Mirror Neurons and Einfühlung,” in Narration and Spectatorship in Moving Images: Perception, Imagination, Emotion, ed. Joseph and Barbara Anderson (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), 49–62; and Robin Curtis, “Bewegung, Rhythmus, Immersion. Räumliche Wirkung der Abstraktion,” in Empfindungsräume. Zur synästhetischen Wahrnehmung, ed. Robin Curtis, Marc Glöde, and Gertrud Koch (Munich: Fink, 2009).