From Absorption to Judgment: Empathy in Aesthetic Response

Abstract

What I seek to emphasize in this article the vicissitudes and potentials of a form of perception and understanding that is prior to cognition. My aim is to foreground the ways in which sight leads to identification with rather than identification of the body of the other—empathy in its pure corporeal sense. Empathy is above all a visual phenomenon, however much we may wish to think of it as an imaginative state. It is true that empathy occasionally arises from the imagination, but it does not primarily do so. It is easy enough to delude oneself into thinking that one's sympathy is empathetic. Empathy, in such cases, is spurious, a form of feeling-in in name only. Empathy remains fundamentally a physical condition. It entails feeling with the body; it is neither sympathy for the narratives of others, nor even the assertion of sympathetic or allegedly empathetic feeling. The basis of empathy, like the empathetic basis of aesthetics, is always precognitive. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)