Einfühlung as the breath of art: six modes of embodiment.

Abstract

Robert Vischer's concept of Einfühlung, feeling-into, translated as empathy, serves as the departure point for a proposal about viewing art using the body for a non-imitative form of empathy termed a transomatization and for other embodied operations. A transomatization occurs when viewers reinterpret a component or process of their own bodies to serve as a non-imitative stand-in, or correlate, for something outside of the self, specifically, some quality of an art work or its production. This creates an overlap of the self and other that might be experienced subjectively as a feeling of projection, an operation characteristic of empathy. Transomatizations and other embodied experiences are grounded in empathic, intersubjective modes of engaging others that begin in early life. As applications of the proposed concepts, six different embodiments of the viewer's breathing are explored in regard to Friedrich E. Church's 1848 oil painting Morning, Looking East over the Hudson Valley from the Catskill Mountains. Support for elements of the proposed concepts and applications is drawn from research in the biological and social sciences and from first person, embodied accounts of viewing.