#theodor lipps

Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame (Dan Zahavi, 2014)

“One perhaps initially slightly surprising claim of his is that empathy involves self-objectification. We shouldn’t forget, however, the aesthetic origin of the notion.

If I experience trees or mountains as animated or besouled, if I hear the wind and experience it as having a melancholy sound, or see a cloud and experience it as threatening, the source of such psychological content is in fact myself.

What is really happening is that I am projecting part of myself into these external objects, and this is for Lipps what empathy more generally is all about.

To feel empathy is to experience a part of one’s own psychological life as belonging to or in an external object; it is to penetrate and suffuse that object with one’s own life.”

(…)

“The fire is not present in the smoke in the way anger is present in the facial expression.

When we perceive the facial expressions of others, we immediately co-apprehend the expressed emotions, say, the joy or fear.

This does not, however, mean that we actually perceive the joy or fear. According to Lipps, joy and fear cannot be perceived, since they are not to be found in the external world.

We only know directly of these emotions through self-experience, or to put it differently, the only emotions we have experiential access to are our own.

So although we apprehend the joyful or fearful face as a unified phenomenon, analysis will show that the perceived gestalt and the co-apprehended emotion arise from two different sources.

The visual gestalt comes to me from the external world, whereas the felt emotion is drawn from myself.

“For Lipps, empathy is “the objectification of myself in an object distinct from myself, no matter whether the thing objectified merits the name ‘feeling’ or not.” (...)

The man with the abstracting attitude finds himself in a frighteningly animated world that seeks to overpower and smother him.

He therefore withdraws into himself, in order to think up a saving formula calculated to enhance his subjective value at least to the point where he can hold his own against the influence of the object.

The man with the empathetic attitude finds himself, on the contrary, in a world that needs his subjective feeling to give it life and soul. He animates it with himself, full of trust;