1
Introduction: Some Historical Preliminaries

‘Empathy’ is one of the catchwords of our time. In the course of his political career, Barack Obama has repeatedly called on people to address what he sees as ‘an empathy deficit’; an inability or an unwillingness to see the world from the perspective of those less fortunate than ourselves. People who are training to be doctors are required to show empathy to patients, or, at least, those playing the role of patients for the purposes of examinations (Jamison 2014: Ch. 1). There are international movements dedicated to the cultivation of empathy, an online empathy library, empathy classes in schools, and a recent book has claimed that empathy is ‘a key to a global and social revolution’ (Krznaric 2014). Furthermore, the range of human endeavour in which empathy features is impressive. It is prominent within philosophy: it features in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of history, ethics and aesthetics. It has a key role in the human sciences, particularly within what is known as ‘the phenomenological tradition’. Within psychology, it has a place in developmental psychology, social psychology and clinical psychology. It also features increasingly in the developing cognitive sciences.

As we shall see, ‘empathy’ is a term used to cover a fascinating range of disparate phenomena. To enable us to set out on our journey around these phenomena I will venture a broad characterization: empathy is using our imaginations as a tool so as to adopt a different perspective in order to grasp how things appear (or feel) from there. Even such a broad characterization as this will be controversial; in particular, it does not include any reference to caring about, or helping, the person who is the object of the empathic engagement. In this, it contrasts with another recent attempt to gesture at the general area: an emotion is empathetic if the person who feels it ‘is aware that it is caused by the perceived, imagined, or inferred emotion or plight of another, or it expresses concern for the welfare of another’ (Maibom 2014: 2). However, if this catches the link to an interest in the welfare of another, it does so at the expense of not covering at least some of the recent debates in the philosophy of mind. We shall examine the similarities and differences between these conceptions of the topic as the book progresses. As we need to start somewhere, for the moment I will let them stand as rough characterizations of what I will be talking about.

It comes as something of a surprise to those who do not know, that the English word ‘empathy’ was coined as late as 1909. It is worth a brief historical digression to discover how this came about. In looking at the historical roots of empathy, we need to distinguish the history of the phenomenon from the history of the specific term. As for the phenomenon, I assume that people have been able to imagine themselves into another perspective (whether the perspective of themselves in a different time and/or space or the perspective of another person) for as long as people have been able to think. The phenomenon surfaced as being of some particular philosophical use in the work of David Hume and (more particularly) Adam Smith in the eighteenth century. Both Hume and Smith used the idea of sharing others' mental states as part of their explanation of morality. Of course, they did not have our term, but their term, ‘sympathy’, clearly describes something in the same area. Here is a famous passage from Hume in the Treatise:

We may begin by considering a-new the nature and force of sympathy. The minds of all men are similar in their feelings and operations, nor can anyone be actuated by any affection, of which all others are not, in some degree, susceptible. As in strings equally wound up, the motion of one communicates itself to the rest; so all the affections readily pass from one person to the other, and beget correspondent movements in every human creature. When I see the effects of passion in the voice and gesture of any person, my mind immediately passes from these effects to their causes, and forms such a lively idea of the passion, as is presently converted to the passion itself. In like manner, when I perceive the causes of any emotion, my mind is convey'd to the effects, and is actuated with a like emotion.

(Hume 1739–40: III.iii.i)

In this passage, Hume is talking in particular about a passion (an emotion) passing from one person to another. He mentions two different ways in which this might happen. The first way, ‘as in strings equally wound up, the motion of one communicates itself to the rest’, looks to be a simple case of what is called ‘emotional contagion’, our ‘catching’ emotions from other people. For example, being in the company of happy people can make us happy, or being in the company of anxious people can make us anxious. We shall examine this in greater detail in the next chapter. The second way, in which ‘my mind immediately passes from these effects to their causes, and forms such a lively idea of the passion, as is presently converted to the passion itself’, looks slightly more complicated. In the Treatise Hume's account of psychology largely works by association. If, in the world, one thing is causally related to some other thing, then a thought about the first thing will tend to be followed by a thought about the second thing. The same is true if the objects are related by resemblance or contiguity in time and place. These associative links guide our thoughts, which suggests that, as with emotional contagion, the mind ‘passing’ from one mental state to another does not break into our conscious awareness. That is, I do not make conscious inferences from others' appearance and behaviour regarding how they feel, and then consciously get myself to feel the same; rather, it happens automatically. In Hume's later work, the Enquiries, his associationism is largely set to one side in favour of a focus on our actual processes of evaluation, which takes him closer to modern debates.¹ However, it is not Hume but Smith who is most startling in the way that he prefigures current discussion.² The opening few pages of his The Theory of Moral Sentiments cover many of the arguments found in contemporary work on empathy:

As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves would feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our own imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.

(Smith 2002 I.i.i.2)

Neither is it those circumstances only, which create pain and sorrow, that call forth our fellow-feeling. Whatever is the passion which arises from any object in the person principally concerned, an analogous emotion springs up, at the thought of his situation, in the breast of every attentive spectator.

(Smith 2002: I.i.i.4)

Hume was concerned with the passions of other people affecting the passions we feel ourselves. Smith's concern is more complex; in his notion of sympathy, we play a more active part. We imagine ourselves in the circumstances of the other person, imagining enduring what they endure. In some sense we identify with that person, and feel, if not exactly what they feel, at least something commensurate with what they feel. It is in this way that we can move ‘beyond our own person’ and discover what ‘our brother’ is feeling. As we shall see, this is very close to at least some of the standard modern accounts of empathy.

If we put aside the history of the phenomenon and look to the history of the term itself, we are taken into a series of debates in German psychology and aesthetics in the late nineteenth century. A key term in such debates was Einfühlung. This is difficult to translate literally – it is usually rendered as ‘feeling into’. A surprising feature of these debates is that those involved were less interested in sharing mental states with, or projecting mental states into, other people as much as they were interested in projecting mental states into other (inanimate) things.

A good deal of stage-setting took place before the emergence of Einfühlung as a concept. Inasmuch as it broadly concerned the relation between active mental life and the inanimate world, at least part of that stage-setting is the concern with the relation between subject and object prevalent in German thought since Kant and Hegel. A further landmark in the history of the concept, which surely had an influence on the more concrete developments at the end of the nineteenth century, was Romanticism, in particular, German Romanticism. The Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was of such a disparate nature (geographically, politically and in almost every other way) that general claims about it will hardly rise above the banal. However, one characteristic was a yearning for unity against the distinctions characteristic of the time, whether subject and object, mind and body, man and world, or reason and the imagination. Finding a way in which our minds can enter into the world promises one way of approaching such a unity.

One manifestation of this, which took Romanticism closer to the modern use of the term ‘empathy’, occurs in the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder. Herder uses the term Einfühlung in his This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity (Herder 1774). Herder's most notable contemporary commentator, Michael Forster, has argued that Herder was not talking about psychological projection (which would take his use close to one important aspect of the modern use) but was using the term metaphorically as a way of describing ‘an arduous process of historical-philological enquiry’. The cash value of the metaphor has five components, none of which are particularly part of our history. Two of them, however, do take us close to a few elements of at least some of the modern meaning of the term ‘empathy’: ‘in order to interpret a subject's language one must achieve an imaginative reproduction of his perceptual and affective sensations’ and ‘the interpreter should strive to develop his grasp of linguistic usage, contextual facts, and relevant sensations to the point where this achieves something of the same immediate, automatic character that it has for a text's original audience when they understood the text in light of such things (so that it acquires for him, as it had for them, the phenomenology more of a feeling than a cognition)’ (Forster 2002: xvii–xviii). In short, when we read historical texts we should, in the first instance, imagine ourselves occupying the perspective of the producer of the text including imaginatively reproducing his or her mental states, and, in the second instance, we should do the same for the presumed readership of the text. Furthermore, in the second instance, doing so establishes a link to the feelings.

In ‘On the Cognition and Sensation of the Soul’, Herder describes the process that becomes central for the later writers we will be considering: ‘The more a limb signifies what it is supposed to signify, the more beautiful it is; and only inner sympathy, i.e., feeling and transposition of our whole human self into the form that has been explored by touch, is teacher and indicator of beauty’ (Herder 1778, quoted in Jahoda 2005: 154). Herder does not use the term Einfühlung (‘feeling into’) here, but rather ‘inner sympathy’. This is symptomatic of things to come; although Einfühlung emerges as the favoured term, plenty of other terms flourish in the same hedgerow to indicate either the same or some very similar concept.

The first signs of aesthetics taking up the term in a significant way is in the writings of Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Karl Köstlin and Hermann Lotze (Mallgrave and Ikonomou 1994: 20).³ However, it was in the doctoral dissertation of Vischer's son, Robert, that Einfühlung was first given a technical definition. From the welter of Vischer's theorizing, we can identify three claims that, even if they did not originate with Vischer, were brought together under the concept Einfühlung. First, he distinguishes between passive processes – bodily reactions to the world that involve no conscious involvement – and more active processes. He characterizes this distinction in several ways, including sensation versus feeling, sensory empathy versus kinaesthetic empathy and seeing versus scanning. Here is one characterization of whatever it is that is on the first side of the divide: ‘By sensation I mean the sensory process only and, more particularly, the sensory response to an observed object’ (Vischer 1873: 95). In their discussion of Vischer's work, Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou list, along with Einfühlung, various other terms which characterize the second part of the divide: ‘Anfühlung, Ineinsfühlung, Nachfühlung, Zufühlung, and Zusammenfühlung’ (Mallgrave and Ikonomou 1994: 22). Whatever the details, all these involve the active involvement of the mind and imagination. Second, Vischer claims that a large part of the passive process lies in a similarity between the outward forms and the inner processes: ‘This is not so much a harmony within an object as a harmony between the object and the subject, which arises because the object has a harmonious form and the formal effect corresponding to subjective harmony’ (Vischer 1873: 95). Finally, Vischer introduces the notion of projection. In this, he was influenced by a book by Karl Albert Scherner, Das Leben des Traums (The Life of the Dream), which had been published in 1861 (Scherner 1861). The passage in which Vischer describes this influence, culminating in his definition of Einfühlung, is worth quoting in full:

The longer I concerned myself with this concept of a pure symbolism of form, the more it seemed to me possible to distinguish between ideal associations and a direct merger of the imagination with objective form. This latter possibility became clear to me with the help of Karl Albert Scherner's book Das Leben des Traums (The life of the dream). This profound work, feverishly probing hidden depths, contains a veritable wealth of highly instructive examples that make it possible for any reader who finds himself unsympathetic with the mystical form of the generally abstract passages to arrive at an independent conclusion. Particularly valuable in an aesthetic sense is the section on ‘Die symbolische Grundformation für die Leibreize’ (Symbolic basic formation for bodily stimuli). Here it was shown how the body, in responding to certain stimuli in dreams, objectifies itself in spatial forms. Thus it unconsciously projects its own bodily form – and with this also the soul – into the form of the object. From this I derived the notion that I call ‘empathy’ [Einfühlung].

(Vischer 1873: 92)

There is at least one puzzle here: what Vischer means when he says that the body ‘objectifies itself in spatial forms’. He approaches, but never clearly says, that we identify ourselves with the object. The simile he uses to make his point – ‘we have the wonderful ability to project our own physical form into an objective form in much the same way as wild fowlers gain access to their quarry by concealing themselves in a blind’ – is evocative, but hardly perspicuous (Vischer 1873: 100).

In short, in Vischer's work, we see the outline of the contemporary concept of empathy coming together. The three claims distinguished above foreshadow three elements of the contemporary concept. First, his distinction between passive and active processes is in some ways akin to the distinction between (as we would put it) the sub-personal and the personal. Second, he has the notion of a process whereby the inner mental states mirror outer forms. Finally, he has the notion of our projecting selves into an object and in that way imbuing the form of that object with content. However, quite what ‘imbuing’ covers here is unclear.

If Vischer perhaps deserves to be relegated to being a footnote in this history, the same should not be said of the man who picked up and developed his ideas: Theodor Lipps. Lipps has rather faded into obscurity, but, in his time, he was a major intellectual figure. Had T. E. Hulme⁴ lived to complete his planned work on ‘Modern Theories of Art’, two and a half of the projected nine chapters would have been devoted to Lipps (Hulme 1924: 261–4). This would, no doubt, have led to more of Lipps's work being translated into English, which could have shored up his reputation in anglophone countries. As it is, it is rare to find him mentioned anywhere apart from accounts of the genesis of ‘empathy’.

At any particular time Lipps seems to have meant various things by Einfühlung, and he also shifted his view so that he meant different things at different times. The principal statement of his view is in his 1903 article, ‘ “Empathy”, Inward Imitation, and Sense Feelings’ (Lipps 1903).⁵ A contemporary review of his work puts it in a recognizably Vischerean context:

Of late the question, or rather group of questions, which has excited most debate among German aestheticians has to do with the distinction between the object immediately presented to sense-perception – say a rose with its characteristic form and colouring – and the meaning which this has for our imagination, say full vitality and pride of life.

(Anonymous 1908: 459)

Lipps distinguishes ‘aesthetic’ imitation from what he calls ‘voluntary’ imitation (Lipps 1903: 254). His account of the first is radical. Faced with an aesthetic object, I feel various powerful and active emotions: ‘I feel myself strong, light, sure, resilient, perhaps proud and the like’. Furthermore, ‘It is myself’ that I feel as having these emotions. So far, so good. The radical element is how he gets those felt emotions ‘into’ the object. He does so by identification: ‘I do not so feel myself in relation to the thing or over against it, but in it…This is what I mean by Empathy: that the distinction between the self and the object disappears or rather does not yet exist’ (Lipps 1903: 253). Lipps gives various other formulations of a similar sort (‘I am even spatially in its position, so far as the self has a spatial position; I am transported into it’ (Lipps 1903: 254)), although the idea does not become less obscure. There is some degree of backtracking which at least makes clear that Lipps is not claiming any straightforward identity between the observer and the object:

In unimitative movement the activity belongs to my real self, my whole personality endowed as it actually is, with all its sensations, ideas, thoughts, feelings, and especially with the motive or inner occasion from which the movement springs. In aesthetic imitation, on the other hand, the self is an ideal self. But this must not be misunderstood. The ideal self too is real, but it is not the practical self. It is the contemplative self which only exists in the lingering contemplation of the object.

(Lipps 1903: 255)

In common with other commentators, both those contemporary with Lipps and those writing more recently, I find his account of ‘aesthetic empathy’ obscure. However, it was the non-aesthetic use Lipps made of the concept that arguably has had the greater effect on contemporary thought. This is a significant step in the history of the concept; the move from empathy with objects to empathy with people.

Lipps moves seamlessly between talk of an object of beauty to talk of broader properties of – specifically – human beings. His example of something ‘strong, proud, and free’ is in fact ‘a human figure’:

I see a man making powerful, free, light, perhaps courageous motions of some kind, which are objects of my full attention. I feel a sense of effort. I may carry this out in real imitative movements. If so, I feel myself active. I do not merely imagine but feel the endeavour, the resistance of obstacles, the overcoming, the achievement.

(Lipps 1903: 253–4)

In this passage, we have the familiar idea of ourselves undergoing various perturbations, in this case including motor perturbations, and feel what it is that the person in front of me is undergoing. We know from work produced by Lipps in 1907 that he put his concept of Einfühlung to work in thinking about the so-called ‘problem of other minds’. In fact, the problem of other minds is really two problems: how we can know that others have minds at all, and how (once we are content they do have minds) we can know what goes on in those minds. I shall refer to these as the ‘whether’ problem and the ‘how’ problem. The ‘whether’ problem arises because, although each of us is acquainted with our own mind, we are not acquainted with the minds of others. Without such acquaintance, what justification do we have for thinking others have minds? Descartes had posed the problem vividly in the seventeenth century: ‘I chanced, however, to look out of the window, and see men walking in the street; now I say in ordinary language that I “see” them…but what can I “see” besides hats and coats, which may cover automata?’ (Descartes 1970: 73). A venerable solution to the ‘whether’ problem is ‘the argument from analogy’. I know, in my own case, that certain mental states come between certain inputs and certain outputs. For example, I know that between the input of my hitting my thumb with a hammer and the output of my crying out there is the sensation of pain. Other people are similar to me in all kinds of ways, so I infer that, between similar inputs and similar outputs, other people have mental states similar to the ones with which I am acquainted in my own case. An almost equally venerable rebuttal of this argument is that it is methodologically suspect. As I am only acquainted with a single case (my own), it would be irresponsible for me to make an inference regarding how other people feel; there are no grounds for thinking others are like me in this respect (Ryle 1963: 52).

Lipps, rightly unconvinced by the argument from analogy, sought to replace it with an ‘instinct’ which gives us knowledge of other minds without involving an inference:⁶

In the perception and comprehension of certain sensory objects, namely, those that we afterward represent as the body of another individual (or generally as the sensory appearance of such), is immediately grasped by us. This applies particularly to the perception and comprehension of occurrences or changes in this sensory appearance, which we name, for example, friendliness or sadness. This grasp happens immediately and simultaneously with the perception, and that does not mean that we see it or apprehend it by means of the senses. We cannot do that, since anger, friendliness, or sadness cannot be perceived through the senses. We can only experience this kind of thing in ourselves.

(Lipps 1907: 713; quoted in Jahoda 2005: 156; translated by Jahoda)

Lipps proposed that our grasp of other minds is a result of two processes. In the words of Gustave Jahoda, ‘the object of sensory perception comes from the external world, while the inner excitation comes from within ourselves’ (Jahoda 2005: 156). I witness another person's gesture of, for example, anger, and this raises a feeling within my consciousness. It is unclear how this could be a solution to the problem of whether other people have minds – we would simply be acquainted with more of our own mental states. However, if we put the ‘whether’ problem to one side (or assume it is solved), we do look to have a solution to the ‘how’ problem. We manage to ‘read’ the minds of others by re-experiencing their mental states for ourselves.

This leads naturally to the term's original introduction into English (at least as ‘empathy’ – in 1908 the term had been translated as ‘infeeling’ (Anonymous 1908: 466)). Here is the passage in which the psychologist Edward Titchener coined the term:

Not only do I see gravity and modesty and pride and courtesy and stateliness, but I feel or act them in the mind's muscles. This is, I suppose, a simple case of empathy, if we may coin that term as a rendering of Einfühlung; there is nothing curious or idiosyncratic about it; but it is a fact that must be mentioned.

(Titchener 1909: 21–2; quoted in Jahoda 2005: 161)

‘The mind's muscles’ is an inspired description. In the same way as a frustrated football manager finds himself exercising his leg muscles by mimicking on the sidelines his players’ kicks in the field, so our minds’ muscles mimic in our minds what is going on in the minds of others. The non-aesthetic developments of Lipps's thoughts, the empathy with people and the subsequent broadening into the notion of other minds, are what take us closer to the modern conceptions of empathy.

emotional

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Chapters 34Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6chapter 7Chapter 8

Series page

Dedication

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

1
Introduction: Some Historical Preliminaries

Notes