Empathy Aesthetics: Experimenting Between Psychology and Poetry

Abstract

To contemporary ears, “empathy” denotes the grasp of the feelings and thoughts of others, but this was not always the case. At the turn of the twentieth century, empathy was best known as an aesthetic theory that captured the spectator’s participatory and kinaesthetic engagement with objects of art. The scope of this older view of empathy may be surprising to contemporary literature scholars who see it primarily as a cognitive and/ or emotional identifi cation with others. More than identifi cation, however, this earlier conception of empathy entailed an imagined bodily immersion in the shapes, forms, and lines of objects and the natural world. As one of the most popular aesthetic theories in the growing fi eld of psychological aesthetics in this period, empathy theory gathered more adherents than hedonistic theories of pleasure, art as play, or phenomenological and sociological theories of art.2 Drawing from a dense and complex literature on German Einfuhlung, the late nineteenth-century idea of “aesthetic empathy,” American psychologists June Downey, Herbert Langfeld, and Kate Gordon, among others, sought ways to empirically test empathy’s functions in aesthetic experiments in newly instituted psychological laboratories.