Art In Translation - Special Issue On Einfühlung, Volume 6, Issue 4, (december 2014) Pp. 349–352 (translation Of Selection Of Texts Drawn From Einfühlung: Zu Geschichte Und Gegenwart Eines ästhetischen Konzepts. Eds. Robin Curtis And Gertrud Koch. München: Fink Verlag, 2009.)

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Volume 6, Issue 4  December 2014 Art in Translation LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY Article Title Page 399 Contents 349 Editorial Iain Boyd Whyte 353  An Introduction to Einfühlung Robin Curtis, Richard George Elliott 377 “Empathy” in Art History Joseph Imorde, Richard George Elliott 399  Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space Kirsten Wagner, Jonathan Blower 437 Museum—School of Alienation Peter Sloterdijk, Iain Boyd Whyte 347 Article Title 349 Art in Translation, Volume 6, Issue 4, pp. 349–352 DOI: 10.2752/175613114X14105155617267 Reprints available directly from the Publishers. Photocopying permitted by licence only. © 2014 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. Editorial The broad theme of this issue of Art in Translation is the relationship between the viewer and the object. It is addressed in three texts on empathy theory and a fourth on the museum. Like “sublime,” which is used to describe anything from sunsets to ladies’ hats, “empathy” is a horribly abused term. In contemporary parlance it has become synonymous with sympathy, sharing, rapport, or identification with the problems of our fellow beings. The rot goes to the top. Back in 2006, in a lecture at Xavier University in New Orleans, the then-Senator Barack Obama described empathy as “the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us—the child who’s hungry, 350 Editorial the s­ teelworker who’s been laid off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town.”1 This redefinition of empathy as an emotional resonance with the difficulties or problems of others has become a journalistic standard. We read in the British press, for example, that “Laudable as it may seem that Ed Miliband is taking empathy lessons from some very learned academics, it’s not guaranteed to make him a better politician – or win him any votes” (Guardian, July 28, 2014); or even more worryingly: “a lack of empathy is a common trait among psychopaths but the complex nature of the emotion has baffled scientists for years” (Daily Mail online, August 5, 2014). As a concept in aesthetics, empathy has a specific meaning and enjoyed great esteem in the early years of the last century, particularly in Germany, where it was known as Einfühlung. With characteristic deftness, contemporary German distinguishes between the definitive use of the term as explicated in the writings of scholars such as Robert Vischer, Theodor Lipps, and Heinrich Wölfflin, and its offshoot, which is favored in the world of contemporary interpersonal relations. The former is still called Einfühlung, while the latter sails under an Anglicizing flag as Empathie. Drawing no distinction between animate and inanimate, Einfühlung refers to the resonance in the inner life of the viewer with external objects like buildings, natural phenomena, or musical tones. Empathie, in contrast, is exclusively concerned with our sympathetic response to our fellow beings and other living creatures. In the English language, in contrast, we muddle through using the same term for two quite different categories of experience. For art and architectural history, however, Einfühlung remains the more interesting side of the equation as it antedates contemporary reception theory, addresses the emotional state engendered by the artwork, and, in the specific realm of architecture, illuminates our physical response to built space. The three essays on the topic included in this issue of Art in Translation cover all of these aspects of traditional empathy theory. They derive from a German-language publication: Robin Curtis and Gertrud Koch (eds), Einfühlung. Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart eines ästhetischen Konzepts (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2009). In her introductory essay, Robin Curtis traces the genealogy of Einfühlung back to Herder, Novalis, and to the late-Romantic identification of beauty with nature, described by Robert Vischer as “the pantheistic urge for union with the world.” For Theodor Lipps, this meant actively and intentionally allowing “all life to resonate within us.” This resonance was seen to have a physiological basis, and both Curtis and Kirsten Wagner refer to the work of Wilhelm Wundt and Hermann Lotze in which the muscular activity that enables us to see, trace, and comprehend an object in space forms the basis of empathy aesthetics. For Wundt, the “direct influence of the will on the locomotive organs” is “the first foundation of the perception of time and space.” More ­simply put by Vischer, “the horizontal line is pleasing Editorial 351 because our eyes are positioned horizontally.” Empathy theory clearly has strong implications for our perception of space, and thus of architectural space. This is the main focus of Wagner’s essay, which traces the strong impact of antecedents like Karl Bötticher’s Tektonik der Hellenen (The tectonics of the Hellenes), published in the mid-nineteenth century, on the subsequent efforts by Lipps and Wölfflin to create a psychological aesthetics. This work in turn found a resonance, albeit grudgingly acknowledged, in August Schmarsow’s exploration of an architectonic understanding of space, as outlined in his 1894 inaugural lecture at the University of Leipzig, “Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung” (The essence of architectural creation). The world of empathy was not limited, however, to the erudite speculations of university professors, and as Joseph Imorde explains in his essay, the enormous success of the theory around 1900 was due in no small part to its appeal to a broad mass of art lovers. Nowhere was this more the case than in Germany, where empathy underpinned an emerging culture industry directed specifically at the booming Bildungs­ bürgertum—the self-consciously educated middle classes. As Imorde explains: “What was being marketed was no longer the artwork itself but the profound feelings that, in the best-case scenario, were supposed to occur during contemplation of even a mediocre reproduction.” More often than not, these reproductions were postcards collected on the obligatory tour of the art treasures of Italy, undertaken with Dehio in one hand and Baedeker in the other. The cards bought in situ were supported back home by illustrations in the new breed of journals that exploited the techniques of relief half-tone printing, which had been perfected in the 1890s. Thanks to the emotional depths that it claimed as uniquely German, the Bildungsbürgertum was predestined, according to Imorde’s very convincing argument, to resonate particularly strongly with the great works of the great artists. He quotes Eduard Wechßler, a Berlin scholar who was still arguing in 1927 that: “We Germans are compelled and enabled on the one hand to empathize through fellow feeling, dedication, or enthusiasm, and on the other to deliberately ward off the alien, the trivial, the disagreeable, and the distressing.” This sentiment leads very neatly to the fourth text in this issue of Art in Translation, namely Peter Sloterdijk’s iconoclastic musings on the role of the museum as the necessary receptacle of otherness. As an extreme example he points to the display of bodies preserved in bogs, mummies, and human skulls: When the heavenly home of objects becomes a graveyard, there is revealed the xenological core of the museum. The dead exhibit communicates the central message of the modern museum: there is an irresolvable other in the world. At the same time, it is in the nature of museum routine to tame that which is scary and nonassimilable, thus giving us a false familiarity with that which is most extreme and most alien. 352 Editorial The urge to bring home postcards of great works of art, amazing sights, and extraordinary objects, and to domesticate the images by perching them on the mantelpiece might even be seen as the antidote to the museum or gallery understood, perhaps unconsciously, as graveyard and charnel house. Iain Boyd Whyte Editor Note 1. http://obamaspeeches.com/087-Xavier-University-CommencementAddress-Obama-Speech.htm Article Title 353 Art in Translation, Volume 6, Issue 4, pp. 353–376 DOI: 10.2752/175613114X14105155617302 Reprints available directly from the Publishers. Photocopying permitted by licence only. © 2014 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. Robin Curtis Translated by Richard George Elliott First published in German as “Einführung in die Einfühlung.” In Robin Curtis and Gertrud Koch (eds), Einfühlung. Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart eines ästhetischen Konzepts (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2009), 11–29. An Introduction to Einfühlung Abstract Robin Curtis is professor of the theory and practice of audio-visual media at the Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf. In this essay she delineates the evolution of the aesthetic category of Einfühlung (empathy) from its earliest stirrings in the mid-eighteenth century to its full blossoming in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the writings of such scholars as the psychologist and aesthetician Theodor Lipps and the architectural and art historians August Schmarsow and Wilhelm Worringer. Although it fell into disregard for most of the twentieth century, Curtis argues that Einfühlung still has insights to 354 Robin Curtis offer to this day, when reappraised in the light of current neurological research. KEYWORDS: Einfühlung, Empathie, empathy, Karsten Stueber, Romanticism, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Robert Vischer, Rudolf Hermann Lotze, Theodor Lipps, August Schmarsow, Wilhelm Worringer, Jutta Müller-Tamm Introduction by Iain Boyd Whyte (University of Edinburgh) Empathy—Einfühlung in German—was enormously influential as an aesthetic category in the early twentieth century, not least as it carried strong echoes of nineteenth-century Romanticism and of pantheism. In this constellation, our emotional resonance with the artifacts of the world around us, both natural and man-made, brought us into direct contact with the universe as divinity. As early as 1917, the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky challenged this easy emotional resonance between object and viewer with his theory of ostranenie (остранение: defamil­ iarization), according to which the function of art is not to confirm our emotional identification with the object, but to make it unfamiliar: “to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important.”1 This position was developed most influen­ tially from the mid-1930s on in the Verfremdungseffekt (estrangement effect) employed in the theater of Bertolt Brecht. Defamiliarization dis­ patched empathy to the rust-belt of aesthetics. Yet as Robin Curtis argues in this essay, recent neurological research and the popular desire to “feel into” other lives, events, and objects suggest that it is time to reevaluate the significance of empathy in both its historical and contemporary definitions. In support of this argu­ ment she points to recent work in the area, such as Karsten Stueber’s book, Rediscovering Empathy: Psychology and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), and the cognitive brain research on mirror neurons by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese. While she notes the relevance of empathy in contemporary studies of emotion, the main body of Curtis’s essay is devoted to a historical account of the evolution of the notion, dating its first appearance to a letter from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to Moses Mendelssohn, dated February 2, 1757. From there, via passing references in Herder and Novalis, she moves into the mainstream history of empathy as elabo­ rated by father and son philosophers Friedrich Theodor and Robert Vischer, the medical doctor and philosopher Rudolf Hermann Lotze, the psychologist and aesthetician Theodor Lipps, and the architectural An Introduction to Einfühlung 355 and art historians August Schmarsow and Wilhelm Worringer. In the process, the correspondences between the various theories of empathy are outlined and the differences and inconsistencies delineated. Precisely because of its generous breadth and accessibility, empathy theory found many disciples a century ago. For the same reasons, as Curtis suggests: “The early debates on the phenomenon of Einfühlung open up discussions across a broad range of aesthetic issues that are still today germane to so-called ‘visual studies,’ in other words art history and theory and film and media studies.” An Introduction to Einfühlung Robin Curtis The concept of Einfühlung was elaborated within the context of an overlap between philosophical aesthetics and psychology, at that time newly emerging, and continues to bear the traces of these heterogeneous origins today. In order to reflect both the historical and contemporary debates concerning the concept of Einfühlung, and at the same time to record the different orientations of the various theories, the following concerns itself mainly with the areas of overlap between the different fields of research. It is precisely in these areas of overlap that promising starting points for interdisciplinary research on the affects and on the perception of space are to be found. First of all, however, it is important to explain why, after a long period of neglect and even disdain, Einfühlung is now once again of scientific relevance. In an unbroken succession since 1970, no fewer than fifteen to twenty texts per month have been published in the fields of psychology and sociology which contain the German term Einfühlung or its derivative Empathie.1 The term “empathy” was coined in an early translation from German to English2 and has since become established in the English language. In German, Empathie is widely accepted, above all in the field of psychology, and especially in relation to emotional correspondences in interpersonal relations. For the current discussions in this area, research into the so-called “theory of mind,” which denotes the ability to accept processes in consciousness both in oneself and in other living creatures in order to form suppositions concerning the mental state, intentions, and motivation of others, is key. This research focuses on both the ontogenetic steps that facilitate the conceptualizing of such processes in consciousness and the possibility of dysfunction in their development (as is supposed, for example, in the case of autism). Karsten Stueber’s Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences is one outstanding example of the work b ­ eing 356 Robin Curtis done in this field. In it, Stueber lends his support to the relevance to contemporary empathy research of the historical debate over Ein­ fühlung by returning to the framework initiated by Theodor Lipps (1851–1914) and attempting to corroborate it by means of contemporary neurological research. Although it is not uncommon in the social sciences and in psychological empathy research for Lipps to be named as the “originator,”3 it is fairly unusual for a study to engage with the history of the empathy debate to the extent that Stueber’s does. For him, Lipps’s model of Einfühlung is not merely of historical interest, it sets the agenda for our current understanding of the human inclination to “feel into” other people and things—whether living creatures, inanimate objects, or phenomena such as moods, colors, or sounds. This broad approach is authorized by Lipps’s well-known formulation that aesthetic enjoyment is to be understood as objectified self-enjoyment.4 Stueber states that: Our aesthetic appreciation of objects is in the end grounded in seeing their form in analogy to the expressive quality of human vitality in the body. […] For this reason Lipps conceives of empathy not merely as an important aesthetic concept but as a basic sociological and psychological category.5 According to Lipps, the fundamental ability to empathize is based on an involuntary, instinctive mimicry of the Other—in other words on a human behavioral pattern that although observed in Lipps’s day, could not be further explained and therefore had to remain a hypothesis. To take Lipps’s own examples, this inclination toward mimicry could be observed in the slight bobbing or swinging motion made when following dancers or in the sympathetic tension or inner emulation experienced when watching an acrobat perform a high-wire act. Although the human inclination toward mimicry is frequently socially prohibited, it takes place in such an involuntary or unconscious and also immediate manner that it is ultimately experienced as a projection into the Other. According to Lipps: I feel this striving of mine within the visually perceived movement. I experience it as something belonging directly to it. Thus I feel myself striving within this movement, striving for the kinesthetic sense of motion that corresponds to the visually perceived movement, and with it for this movement itself. To put it more generally, I feel myself within a thing perceived, striving to execute a movement.6 This automatic co-experiencing can be regarded as the very core of empathy. On the basis of this model of empathy based on mimicry and projection, and with the help of new neurological research results that An Introduction to Einfühlung 357 now empirically underpin this model, Stueber argues for a reevaluation of empathy and thus for a reappraisal of Einfühlung. In order to distinguish simple motor transference from more complex operations, experienced for example during instances of emotional correspondence, Stueber differentiates between “basic” and “reactive” forms of empathy. While “basic” empathy is described as a direct, bodily understanding of observed conditions, “reactive” empathy presupposes a processing that can tell us more about motivations—and therefore at the same time about affective states. “Basic” empathy is regarded as a mechanism that allows us, by means of a direct process of perception, to recognize an Other or an opposite number as “same-minded.” We recognize that the other person is angry or deliberately grasps a cup.7 Yet only by using our cognitive abilities and deliberative capacities in order to reenact or imitate in our own mind the thought processes of the other person are we able to conceive of another person’s more complex social behavior as the behavior of a rational agent who acts for a reason.8 “Reactive” empathy presupposes cognitive processes, such as use of the imagination, in order to enable a more complex processing of data. What is remarkable about Stueber’s model is that he associates the activity of so-called “mirror neurons,” only recently discovered, exclusively with “basic” and not with the more complex “reactive” empathy. The discovery in the mid-1990s of mirror neurons in the brains of macaques9 and the subsequent proof of analogous brain activity in humans was nothing short of revolutionary for empathy research. The Italian scientists who made this discovery recorded how certain neurons in the premotor cortex react both when a monkey picks up a piece of food with its own hand and when it merely observes another monkey picking up a piece of food. Interestingly, the neurons did not react when the observed hand made the same movement without reaching for food. Similar involuntary reactions to actions and movements were recorded in humans by means of nuclear magnetic resonance tomography. These reactions indicated mirror neuron activity both when observing movements and when hearing certain sounds.10 It is nevertheless important to note that the studies carried out to date relate by and large to simple actions (both in humans and animals),11 and therefore it is not yet possible to determine to what extent complex experiences such as emotions can result in an emotional transfer, for example of the type that occurs during the watching of feature films. Accordingly Stueber remains sober in his assessment of mirror neurons: he maintains a distance from the euphoria that has been in evidence since their discovery, above all in social sciences and humanities research with an interdisciplinary focus, which hoped to see in mirror neurons direct proof of all kinds of complex empathetic reactions in humans. Stueber regards mirror neurons 358 Robin Curtis as ­corroborating the type of mimicry previously described by Lipps and sees it as the driving force behind the simple, embodied “basic empathy.” Vittorio Gallese, one of the two leaders of the laboratory in Parma responsible for discovering mirror neurons, has also noticed the analogous relationship between the behavior of mirror neurons and the grounding of empathy theory in mimicry. He regards mirror neurons as components of a complex system consisting, as he sees it, of a sequence of “mirror matching mechanisms” that are capable of executing diverse imitation operations. Under Gallese’s hypothesis, these mechanisms constitute a basic organizational feature of the brain in enabling intersubjective experience. He refers to this intersubjective, intentional space as “the shared manifold of intersubjectivity.”12 Affect transfer is a key function of this system. What is remarkable about this model is that it is the multimodal quality of intersubjective experience that Gallese emphasizes. Whereas mirror neuron research up to now has focused on the observing and mirroring of actions (“action and action imitation”), Gallese stresses that “the self–other analogy […] has a global dimension that encompasses all aspects defining a life form, from its peculiar body to its peculiar affect.”13 At this point he refers to the research conducted by Daniel Stern. With this key reference, Gallese emphasizes the diversity and complexity of affective reactions to the actions of others. Arguably, this goes far beyond both an understanding of perception that conceives of the senses as a separately functioning capability and the “typical” descriptions of the emotions.14 Stern’s research suggests that, thanks to an inclination toward amodal perception, all people are capable of perceiving so-called “vitality affects” from earliest childhood onward. These are affects that, according to Stern, are difficult to define because they cannot be described using the usual taxonomy of affects. They are “better captured by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as ‘surging,’ ‘fading away,’ ‘fleeting,’ ‘explosive,’ ‘crescendo,’ ‘decrescendo,’ ‘bursting,’ ‘drawn out.’”15 This reference to the early affective behavior of humans addresses two important aspects of empathy research, and it is important to note that Gallese firstly concedes a broader understanding of the affects that is not based exclusively on the evaluation and categorization of the emotional state of other people and secondly focuses strongly on atmospheric characteristics, thereby implicitly admitting questions of form as well. Both these aspects were essential to the discussion of Einfühlung in the historical context. Emphasizing them circumvents the otherwise very strict separation of empathy in living beings (and above all in humans) and empathy in forms. This is what Theodor Lipps himself called Natureinfühlung (natural empathy),16 an essential aspect of Einfühlungsästhetik (the aesthetics of empathy) which he discusses in a key text on Einfühlung initially in relation to inanimate objects, only afterward turning his attention to empathy with the “sensory manifestation of human beings.”17 With An Introduction to Einfühlung 359 this he wanted to make it plain that for him both aesthetic experiences and everyday experiences were relevant to the concept of Einfühlung. According to Lipps, living beings on the one hand and objects on the other were of equal importance in relation to the human tendency toward mimicry. We are able to empathize with human gestures, the form of a body, or even a landscape, because “every sensory object demands an activity on my part.”18 At the heart of Lipps’s concept of Einfühlung, which for him and many of his contemporaries constituted “the fundamental concept of contemporary aesthetics,”19 was the dynamism of life: For what I feel is, quite generally, life. And life is energy, inner exertion, striving, and achieving. Life can be summed up with one word: activity, freely flowing or inhibited, easy or effortful, in harmony or in conflict with itself, tensing and relaxing, concentrated on a single point or dissolving into life’s manifold actions and “losing itself” in them.20 In these descriptions, reminiscent of Stern’s vitality affects, Lipps is referring to a life force that can be recognized everywhere in the world but by no means inevitably or automatically results in Einfühlung. For Lipps, Einfühlung is an active, intentional act, an experience of the vitality of the self that can be felt in objectified form in the things of the world. Accordingly, he distinguishes between that which a sensible object “expresses” (presupposing merely a judgment or an act of logic on the part of the subject, which is neither felt nor experienced as activity) and that which is empathized with, because only by feeling activity (or the “striving or desire for movement”21) is objectified self-enjoyment possible: Insofar as I apprehend things rationally, I necessarily permeate them with such striving, such activity, such energy. When apprehended by means of reason, they then bear the like within them as an aspect of their being. It is contained in them, to the extent that they are “my” objects, are a part of me.22 The act of empathizing ultimately means imbuing an object with life, although this is not actually experienced as such. Lipps repeatedly stresses that the striving in which one participates is experienced not as something imaginatively added on to the object, but as something emanating from it. According to Lipps: In the actual act of Einfühlung, my feeling of striving and doing is not separate from the striving projected into the things. “Einfühlung” consists precisely in the identity of both things, in other words in the identification of myself with the object. This 360 Robin Curtis means that when empathizing with earth and stone, I feel neither myself striving apart from the stone or the earth, neither the stone or earth separately striving from me. Nor do I feel myself striving, with the stone or earth imagined as striving next to me. No, I feel myself striving in the stone and the earth, or else within the whole state of affairs of the stone floating above the earth. This is how I feel when contemplating such things.23 Although frequently understood as a simple projection onto an object, Lipps regarded this activity as an objectification and thus a fundamental opportunity to allow “all life to resonate within us.”24 Lipps’s position stands out for his interest in empathetic experiences with both living creatures and inanimate objects, but at the same time points to an aspect that was to play a key role in the history of the concept—but which would also later be its undoing. The conviction that the roots of empathy lie in the metaphysical outlook of Romanticism and that it is therefore based on a pantheistic worldview is persistent and goes back a long way. The concept of Einfühlung—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the verb einfühlen—is first encountered in the writings of Herder,25 and soon after in Novalis’s fragment Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, written between 1798 and 1799 and published posthumously in 1802. In Novalis the act of empathizing with something offers an opportunity to finally achieve the closeness to nature that was yearned for during that age: And thus will no one comprehend nature who possesses no organ of nature, no inner nature-generating and nature-isolating organ, who does not as if spontaneously recognize and distinguish nature everywhere in everything, and, with an innate urge to procreate, in a fervent manifold affinity with all things, intermingles, through the medium of feeling, with all natural beings, as it were feels into them [in sie hineinfühlt].26 Whereas Herder’s contribution to the development of the term is generally overlooked by the theoreticians of Einfühlung, Theobald Ziegler identified Novalis as the originator of the concept as early as 1894. In his text “Zur Genesis eines ästhetischen Begriffs” he is also the first to employ the term Einfühlungs-Ästhetik (aesthetics of empathy).27 Nevertheless, the notion that empathetic resonance could be a key element of everyday as well as aesthetic experience was already in the air in the last few decades of the eighteenth century. Different though the authorial intentions and specific contexts may have been, not a few literary utterances of the day bear a resemblance to the phenomenon of Einfühlung, even where the word itself is not used. Thus Martin Fontius believes he has found the very first mention of the empathy concept in a letter dated February 2, 1757 from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to An Introduction to Einfühlung 361 Moses Mendelssohn. In it Lessing distinguishes between the first affect, namely that directly experienced, and the second, which for him plays a subsidiary role: “for this affect is not experienced by the playing persons and we do not experience it simply because they experience it, but rather it arises in us originally as a result of the effect of the objects on us.”28 With this reference to Lessing, Fontius draws attention to a second line of development in the concept of Einfühlung, one that emerged back in the Age of Enlightenment alongside that mentioned above, which can be sited in the Romantic discourse on the symbolism of form and the relationship of man to nature. This second manifestation of Einfühlung is analogous to aesthetic identification, of which Lessing was somewhat disdainful, but which could nevertheless already, by that time, be considered a key principle of ethics and an important aspect of interpersonal experience—for example by Adam Smith, who used the term “fellow-feeling.”29 In the middle of the nineteenth century the idea of natural beauty started to acquire central importance in aesthetic theory, and this same engagement with nature assumed a key role in the work of Friedrich Theodor Vischer. Along with his son Robert Vischer, the philosopher and literary scholar can be regarded as the founding father of Einfühlungstheorie. Although the word Einfühlung appears for the first time in his son’s dissertation, published in 1873 under the title Ueber das optische Formgefühl. Ein Beitrag zur Aesthetik, it is appropriate to talk, as does Wilhelm Perpeet, of a major influence exerted by the elder Vischer on the younger, for: In using the word Einfühlung, the son summarized with unerring accuracy the intentions of the father, who had previously spoken— vaguely enough—of “passing into,” “putting oneself entirely in,” “giving,” “lending,” “conferring contemplation,” “looking in,” “reading into,” “understanding,” “animating,” a “surmising” or “symbolic feeling into,” “carrying over,” “imagining the manifestations,” “immersing oneself in,” “immersion.”30 That Einfühlungstheorie emerged within the context of the aesthetics of nature and not within that of the philosophy of art is, as Perpeet emphasizes, of crucial importance. And yet this fact is readily overlooked because of the tendency to interpret Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s focus on nature as a late result of Romantic speculation. However, the issue here—in Perpeet—is to reinvestigate the origins of the aesthetics of empathy and in doing so to profile the role of Vischer the elder more strongly: Because the word Einfühlung also occurred in the writings of Herder, Novalis, August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Jean Paul, with the exception of their inaugurator Friedrich Theodor Vischer, 362 Robin Curtis they [the developers of the aesthetics of Einfühlung, R.C.] believed themselves to be in league with the Romantics and their zoomorphic concept of nature, which allowed for a cosmic-sympathetic empathy of humankind with the same. Ziegler, Stern, Geiger, and Worringer date the conceptual basis for the aesthetics of Einfühlung to the pronounced Romantic fondness for nature as the quintessence of the great ideal, self-contained, eternally budding organism of the world, to merge with which, and thereby casting off the limitless diversity of individual consciousness, is an existential need of humankind.31 For Friedrich Theodor Vischer, nature was not endowed with a soul. He subscribed to an emphatically enlightened, scientific, and positivistic view of nature which was in no way compatible with the stance of the Romantics. Rather, his interest in natural beauty was born out of the desire to develop the work of Hegel on this precise point, and—unlike Hegel—to recognize the possibility of experiencing beauty in nature. For Vischer, the phenomenon of Einfühlung was the key to the problem of natural beauty, for “beauty is not a thing but an act”;32 accordingly, empathy is not a function of the imagination, but rather an actualization of beauty in a given form, an actualization that contains a symbolic transfer of our emotions into that form. This transfer takes place in two stages—in the first stage the actualization is experienced as a loaning, because we are fully aware that nature, as Vischer formulates it, is the “mute realm of necessity.”33 In the second stage, however, we feel that this phenomenon occurs as a process of loaning and nothing else, and thus is the mental process completed, which is logically a contradiction, but aesthetically of the greatest appeal, as if nature simultaneously concealed within itself a soul connected to or reflecting the dispositions of human nature, and yet in its unalloyed objectivity and conformity to natural laws, knew nothing of the sufferings of subjective life.34 The ascribing of these ideas to a pantheistic paradigm, vehemently rejected by Perpeet, is a matter of dispute in the wider literature concerning the origins of Einfühlungsästhetik. The problem is pertinently formulated by Jutta Müller-Tamm, who makes an important distinction: “In fact,” writes Müller-Tamm, “the early aesthetics of empathy developed entirely within the province of pantheism—or more precisely within the province of a psychology of pantheistic feelings”35—and the latter would seem to be closer to Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s intentions. At roughly the same time as Vischer, Rudolf Hermann Lotze was working on a Theorie des innerlichen Miterlebens (theory of inner cofeeling) that was largely analogous with Einfühlung. Due to his medical training, Lotze, who held a philosophy professorship at Göttingen, An Introduction to Einfühlung 363 turned his attention far more actively than Vischer to the investigation of sense physiology and above all perception of space. Lotze’s concept of so-called Lokalzeichen (local signs) combined the findings of the physiology of perception with those of philosophy.36 In an attempt to explain how three-dimensional impressions originate, Lotze postulated that pieces of information regarding seen forms, gathered by means of a combination of retinal information and muscle movement in the eye and body, are repeatedly remembered and recombined with one another. For example when we contemplate a distant object and need to consciously adjust our eyes in order to make that object the focus of our vision, new Lokalzeichen are created, while the old local signs provide the entire movement with a determining framework. This means that three-dimensional experience comes about as a result of a subject remembering previous muscle movements that were necessary at some point in the past in order to observe specific objects—and furthermore from the most favorable viewing position. Under this concept, spatial experiences are created as the result of a joint action of body and mind through combinations of sensory experiences in a quasi-cognitive process. This emphasizing of the role played by physiological and mental memory in spatial experiences has a significant influence on the way in which we engage with natural forms. In the second volume of his threevolume work, Mikrokosmos. Ideen zur Naturgeschichte und Geschichte der Menschheit, Lotze describes the human tendency to imitate the forms and specifically spatial existence of other beings. He writes: No physical form is so recalcitrant that our imagination is unable to transport itself with co-feeling into it. […] Not only are we able to penetrate the peculiar sense of life of beings close to us in their nature, the joyful flight of a singing bird or the graceful sprightliness of the gazelle; not only do we draw tight the threads of our feelings around the smallest thing, in order to dream our way into the limited existence of a mussel and the monotonous enjoyment of its apertures and closures; not only do we stretch up our minds into the slender forms of a tree, whose delicate branches are animated by the pleasure of graceful bending and wafting; on the contrary, we also transfer these tentative feelings onto inanimate objects, transforming the dead loads and supports of a building into the many limbs of a living body whose inner tensions pass over into us.37 Lotze emphasizes here the importance of the memory of the sensation of gravity and tension to our perception of other phenomena, for “without doubt the generalized memory of the activity of our own bodies contributes to the intensity of these moments of contemplation.”38 Here, projecting one’s own bodily experience onto physical things, in other 364 Robin Curtis words living beings and external forms, constitutes the basis for the specific enjoyment provided by contemplation of the world around us. This applies to an even greater extent, however, to the spatial experience offered by architectural built space. This broaches an issue that was to become increasingly important during the course of the century. The art historian Harry Mallgrave has described Lotze’s treatment of this issue as follows: The pleasure of symmetry is due not so much to the regularity or proportion of members as to the pleasure we take in emulating this movement. This “remembrance” of the concrete world, the self-experience of our own physical condition, altogether pervades our spatial viewing. “For all spatial forms affect us aesthetically only insofar as they are symbols of a weal or a woe personally experienced by us.”39 The inclination described by Lotze to see tendencies toward imitation as the product of the specific form of the human apparatus of perception was then taken up and reinforced by Robert Vischer. And yet in his book Ueber das optische Formgefühl, Robert Vischer at the same time embarks on a scientific underpinning and expansion of the work of his father Friedrich Theodor Vischer. In the very introduction he refers to a formulation of his father’s that underlines the extent to which both Vischers understood Einfühlung as a physiological effect: We will be able to assume that every mental act is executed and at the same time reflected in specific vibrations and—who knows what—modifications of the nerve in such a way that they represent its image, that a symbolic depiction thus takes place within the organism.40 With the help of the term Ähnlichkeit (similarity), borrowed from Wilhelm Wundt, which denotes a correspondence between an observed object and the physiological effect on the observer, Robert Vischer seeks “to explain mental excitement at all times both accurately and with reference to the physical.”41 According to this model, the form of a human body determines whether a form observed in the external world is experienced as enjoyable or disturbing, for (as Robert Vischer cites Wundt): “Where the eye can move freely, when moving in a vertical or horizontal direction it follows a precisely straight line in keeping with its physiological mechanism; the diagonal line it travels in a curved path.” Vischer continues: This sentence can be construed negatively to the effect that the straight line in a diagonal direction and the jagged line in a vertical or horizontal direction are in and of themselves disagreeable, An Introduction to Einfühlung 365 the first because it requires uncomfortable movements and the second because it necessitates unaccustomed and rapid changes of direction.42 In this sense it is therefore the similarity or dissimilarity to the structure of the eye and/or the whole body that determines whether a form will be felt to be enjoyable. The more taxing it is for the body to discern an object, the more unpleasant the impression caused by that object. For example the horizontal positioning of the eyes is held here to be decisive with regard to the pleasant effect caused by horizontal lines. Ultimately, according to Robert Vischer: we [find] enjoyment in all regular forms because our organ and its modes of functioning are regular. Irregular forms disturb us, to borrow Wundt’s apposite expression, like “a thwarted expectation.” Pain ensues whenever the eye fails to discover the laws according to which it itself is formed and moves.43 Also remarkable about Vischer’s discussion of similarity is his interest in the effect of the intermodal aspects of perception, in other words the acting in concert of the different senses. This allows similarity to be regarded as a far more complex phenomenon, for: It is about nothing less than the whole body; the entire human organism is affected. For in reality there is no strict localization within it. Every pronounced sensation therefore leads to either an increase or a decrease in the general Vitalempfindung (sensation of vitality).44 Yet all this is only a preliminary stage in the forming of an emotional connection with an external phenomenon, as is characteristic of empathy. Such a connection only comes about when the observer projects his or her own life onto the inanimate form, an augmentation motivated by nothing other than the distressing cognizance of the lack of life in the inanimate object on the part of the observer, who is then moved to imbue the object with life. According to Robert Vischer: I therefore impute my individual life to the inanimate form, just as I impute it, with reason, to an animate non-I in the form of a person. Only apparently do I hold onto myself, although the object remains an Other. I appear to be merely adapting and adding myself to it, as one hand takes hold of another, and yet in a mysterious way I am transposed and transformed into this non-I.45 This is the basis for Einfühlung in Robert Vischer, although he nevertheless subdivides the phenomenon into various aspects. When confronted 366 Robin Curtis with a “static, fixed object,”46 it is a case of physiognomic Einfühlung or empathy of mood, which can bring about either an expansion of the self (which he denotes as Ausfühlung) or else a constriction of the self (referred to as Zusammenfühlung). When empathy is felt toward a dynamic or apparently dynamic object, this is mimetic or active Einfühlung.47 To explain this inclination to imbue an object with life through Ein­ fühlung, Vischer refers to the “nature of feeling” as the driving force behind the phenomenon: This symbolizing activity can be based on nothing other than the pantheistic urge for union with the world, which is by no means limited to the more readily comprehensible relationship of affinity with humankind, but rather is directed, consciously or unconsciously, toward the entire universe. The same is to be found in a rudimentary way in sensation and sensory imagination.48 Einfühlung enables a simple sensation to be transformed into a feeling and thus into a means of union. “Feeling is more objective than sensation. It leaps with unevenly far greater energy beyond one’s own skin to merge with a non-I.”49 This is a consoling experience, for the more “abstractly” one thinks in this sense, the more easily one will be able to comprehend oneself as part of an “inseparable whole.” This understanding of the pantheistic allows “feeling” to be expanded into “sensibility.”50 Robert Vischer is thus firmly acknowledging the pantheistic and on this point deviates from the views of his father. This was noticed by Theobald Ziegler as early as 1894 when comparing father and son: Friedrich Theodor Vischer refers briefly at the end of this treatise to aesthetic contemplation as a sensory phenomenon and as an attestation of the unity of mind and nature, of the all-encompassing unity—considerably more cautiously, it should be noted, than his son, who sees in the pantheistic urge for union with the world as an indivisible entity the cause of, and reason for, this symbolizing activity.51 Nonetheless, Robert Vischer’s contribution to Einfühlungsästhetik remains important above all because he focused on the significance to the way we experience the world of the specific form of the body and the corporeality of perception. Vischer’s insights, along with those of Rudolf Hermann Lotze, were subsequently to assume a pivotal role in the thinking of the Leipzig professor of art history August Schmarsow. Schmarsow sought to describe the concept of Raumgestaltung (spatial forming) on the basis of the parameters of physical feelings. In doing so he stressed that An Introduction to Einfühlung 367 architecture can only be understood as a dynamic experience of space, because through its specific design it engineers a particular experience of space. At the center of his thinking were the human body and, more specifically, the sense of corporeality, or to use Schmarsow’s terminology the Körpergefühle (feelings of the body), which are determined by Tastregionen (touch regions) and Sehregionen (sight regions). This addressed the problem of depth perception, which for Schmarsow was generated by the kinetic extension of bodily perception through bodily movement. As soon as the result that we shall call our particular form of spatial intuition crystallizes out of the residues of sensory experience, to which our body’s muscular sensations, the sensitivity of our skin, and the structure of our entire body contribute, […] as soon as we have learned to feel ourselves and ourselves alone to be the center of this space, whose directional axes intersect in us, the treasured kernel is in place.52 Key components of spatial perception for Schmarsow are the vertical and horizontal directional axes inscribed into every body; architecture engineers spatial experiences in which these directional axes remain vacant or are factored in so that they can be quasi bodily consummated upon reception. In this sense Schmarsow describes architecture as a Raumgestalterin (creator of space) because it is based on a kinetic act of consummation that is always executed within our perception of space. For Schmarsow this kinesthetic and imaginative involvement in a built space is responsible not only for the formation of three-dimensional impressions, but this corporeal activity also explains the emotional and aesthetic power of architecture. He writes: The very linguistic terms that we use to denote the dimensions of a space, such as “expansion,” “extension,” “direction,” indicate the continuous activity of the subject, who immediately transfers his own feeling of movement to the static spatial form, and is unable to express its relationship with him other than by imagining himself in motion measuring the length, breadth, and depth, or by imputing movement to the inflexible lines, surfaces, and bodies revealed to him by his eyes and muscular sensations, even when observing the dimensions while standing still.53 Schmarsow is here describing imitative activities that always play a part in our perception of space, that can explain our emotional or empathetic involvement in our surroundings, and that may even be responsible for our ability to sense moods. Most importantly, however, Schmarsow stresses that architecture can only be grasped by a dynamic or corporeal recipient. It cannot simply be thought of as a collection of forms and 368 Robin Curtis lines but has to be understood primarily as an engineered interaction between the human body and the world. That the aforementioned aspects of Einfühlungsästhetik for a long time played at best a subordinate role in the handing down of the historical debate is in all probability related to the reception history of Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraktion und Einfühlung. Despite severe criticism from the author’s contemporary art history colleagues, this slender book, which has been through numerous editions,54 exerted an enormous influence on the debates about artistic practice and radiated an inspirational power that can still be felt today. The sensational success of Worringer’s text, accepted as a doctoral dissertation in 1907 and published the following year, continues to dominate the reception of Einfühlungsästhetik. In Worringer’s text, Einfühlung (albeit reduced to Theodor Lipps’s contribution) serves as a figure of contrast, for in Abstraktion und Einfühlung the author introduces an opposition between spatial involvement and Einfühlung that has distorted our understanding of empathy to the current day. Worringer’s hypothesis is as follows: The basic idea behind our essay is to show how modern aesthetics, which are based on the notion of Einfühlung, are inapplicable to large areas of art history. Rather, its Archimedean point is located at one pole of human artistic sensitivity. It can only form a comprehensive aesthetic system once it has united with the lines that emanate from the opposite pole.55 That Einfühlung is not inevitably to be regarded as the opposite pole to abstraction is not further discussed here, although the notion is being vigorously challenged in the latest research. The conflict between the flat space of abstraction and three-dimensional space, which, according to Worringer, is what makes an empathetic attitude on the part of the recipient possible in the first place, nevertheless remains decisive and has shaped understanding of Einfühlung, and the place allocated to it in aesthetic discourse, up to the present day. During the renaissance enjoyed by Abstraktion und Einfühlung—and indeed Worringer’s entire oeuvre—over the last few years,56 the fundamental opposition in his assessment of Einfühlung has seldom been questioned. However, two critics deserve to be mentioned here. An important commentary on Abstraktion und Einfühlung by Geoffrey Waite views Worringer’s oppositional pair at best as a “creative” misreading. Waite identifies two aspects in Lipps that were disregarded by Worringer: First, the description of empathy as an active, intentional participation, not a static state of consciousness; second, the thesis that “abstract figures” (including geometric lines) can be aesthetically significant independent from their appearance in nature. In An Introduction to Einfühlung 369 the light of this suppression, Worringer’s value-charged notion of empathy as “a relationship of confidence between man and the external world,” as “the naïve anthropomorphic pantheism or polytheism,” as “world-revering naturalism” (45[83]), etc., can only be read as a severe, ideologically motivated distortion of emphasis. Even the Vischers regarded the formal aspects of objects as being entirely worthy of Einfühlung, for in their writings empathy by no means, unlike in those of Worringer, had to be associated with a naturalistic aesthetic.58 Although Waite stresses that Worringer did not want to set up a fixed opposition, but simply meant to plead for a synthesis of the two terms, this synthesis has played virtually no role in the reception of Worringer to date. Jutta Müller-Tamm, who in her book Abstraktion als Einfühlung undertakes a detailed examination of projection, considering the multifaceted figure of thought from the perspective of psychophysiology and the aesthetic theory of the late nineteenth century, criticizes Worringer’s position from a different angle. She sees in his explanation of, and opposition to, Einfühlung a misinterpretation of the concept which can be explained by his particular notion of the domain in question. While “psychological aesthetics” views Einfühlung as a phenomenon of the aesthetics of reception, Worringer’s emphasis is more on the aesthetics of production, for it is his intention to differentiate between various culture-specific and aesthetic paradigms that will explain differences of taste in production and reception. Whereas in psychological aesthetics Einfühlung denotes the activity of constructing meaning and determining significance within the (aesthetic) perception process as a whole, for Worringer the term stands for a psychic disposition whereby meaning, significance, and order are taken for granted and simply discovered, and for a coherence between trust in the world, the affirmation of this world, an art inclined toward naturalistic, i.e. organic, living forms, and pantheistic-polytheistic religion. The concept of Einfühlung is no longer a psychological-aesthetic term denoting the experience of art or aesthetic behavior prior to any process of particularization, but rather a culture-historical term that relates to a qualitatively defined relationship with the world, a type of worldview. The main aspect of the doctrine of Einfühlung, namely the reception of the artwork, the relationship between the viewer and the viewed (aesthetic) object, is not excluded in Worringer, but is paid little attention. Worringer understands Einfühlung as a fundamental attitude that is adopted toward the world. Because he is interested in the mental attitude 370 Robin Curtis of an entire nation, which is revealed through its aesthetic preferences, the difference between the aesthetics of production and the aesthetics of reception is for him irrelevant. For Einfühlungsästhetik, however, this was a key question. The early debates on the phenomenon of Einfühlung open up discussions across a broad range of aesthetic issues that are still today germane to so-called “visual studies,” in other words art history and theory and film and media studies. These issues include: the parameters of an aesthetics of reception in “visual studies,” the relationship between abstraction and representation, the possibility of cooperation between the different perspectives of the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences in the field of (aesthetic) perception, and not least the complex questions that have been raised all over again over the last few years in the study of the emotions but which had already occupied a central place in Einfühlungsästhetik. The art historian Frank Büttner has correctly drawn attention to the mixed feelings that the aesthetics of empathy continue to evoke. While on the one hand reception research “modestly fails to acknowledge Einfühlungsästhetik as one of its precursors,” on the other, as incomplete and frustratingly interminable as the debates of that time may have been,60 they nevertheless set the agenda for the debates that have become highly topical for us again today. “Einfühlung as described by Robert Vischer,” writes Büttner, pertains to a core problem of our interaction with art. Although the solutions suggested by Vischer and the young Wölfflin no longer have the power to convince us today, the problem of Ein­ fühlung cannot be said to be outmoded. The thorough historical investigation of the issue of aesthetic perception and all its related factors—one of them, of course, being Einfühlung—­remains a task yet to be completed.61 From the perspective of the interdisciplinary research of the last few years, it has become clear that an encounter between Einfühlungsästhetik and the arts of the twentieth and indeed twenty-first centuries, and in particular those of the moving image,62 is highly auspicious, for it is mainly (but not exclusively) here that the crossovers between the naturalistic aesthetic, which Worringer associated with Einfühlung, and abstraction are fluid to an extent that renders a new investigation of the phenomenon overdue. Notes To Introduction 1. Viktor Shklovskij, “Art as Technique,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 18. An Introduction to Einfühlung 371 To Main article 1. This astonishing information is presented by Martin Fontius based on entries in the Social Sciences Index, the Social Sciences and Humanities Index, Sociological Abstracts, and the Humanities Index in an exhaustive entry on the term Einfühlung. See Martin Frontius, “Einfühlung/Empathie/Identifikation,” in Ästhetische Grund­begriffe. Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, vol. 4 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), 84–121. 2. The origin of the word “empathy” is generally considered to be the English translation by Edward Titchener in his Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-processes (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 21, of a text by Theodor Lipps. The latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, however, records as the earliest written reference a diary entry of 1904 by Vernon Lee, another active commentator on the phenomenon of empathy (Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 5, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, 184), but this is often disputed. Gustav Jahoda, for example, writes: “One thing is certain, however: [Titchener] did not borrow the term from Vernon Lee, as might be suspected from the entry on ‘empathy’ in the Oxford English Dictionary. […] What must have happened is that Lee changed the entry retrospectively, since Lee twice (pp. 20 and 46) explicitly attributed the translation to Titchener.” (Gustav Jahoda, “The Shift from ‘Sympathy’ to ‘Empathy,’” Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 41, no. 2 (2005): 151–63, here: 161.) 3. Lipps is frequently—and erroneously—referred to within these fields as the originator of the concept without due reference to its complex history. Presumably, respect is thereby being paid to Lipps’s significance—which should not be underestimated—to Germany’s scientific landscape of the day. Furthermore, Lipps’s contribution to the empathy debate can undoubtedly be regarded as fundamental to the establishing of this issue in the field of psychology, for although Lipps held a philosophy professorship at Munich University, he was interested in a range of issues that we associate more readily today with psychology. 4. See Theodor Lipps, “Einfühlung und ästhetischer Genuß,” Die Zukunft 54 (January 1906): 100–14, for a condensed exposition of his thesis. 5. Karsten R. Stueber, Rediscovering Empathy: Folk Psychology and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 7. (Earlier German-language publications by the same author appeared under the name Karsten R. Stüber.) 6. Theodor Lipps, Grundlegung der Asthetik, part one (Hamburg: Voss, 1903), 120. 7. Stueber, Rediscovering Empathy, 147. 8. Ibid., 21. 372 Robin Curtis  9. The original research results were published by both Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese, the two leaders of the research team in Parma, Italy. See Giacomo Rizzolatti and others, “Premotor Cortex and the Recognition of Motor Actions,” Cognitive Brain Research 3 (1996): 131–41, and Vittorio Gallese and others, “Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex,” Brain 119, no 2 (1996): 593–609. 10. For an overview of the numerous research projects on this subject, see, for example, Maksim Stamenov and Vittorio Gallese, Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002) and Andrew Melzoff and Wolfgang Prinz, The Imitative Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 11. An interesting exception is a study conducted in Great Britain that investigated ballet dancers, capoeiristas, and a group of control subjects who were experts in neither ballet nor capoeira. Each of the three groups viewed video recordings of a ballet dancer and a capoeira dancer each performing a jump movement belonging to the repertoire of their own dance style. The movement lasted barely more than one or two seconds and the two jumps resembled each other in form. It was established in this case that the acquisition of specific motor skills (such as ballet or capoeira) strongly influences the reaction of the mirror neurons. The mirror neurons of the ballet dancers were most strongly stimulated when observing the movement from the ballet repertoire. The same applied to the capoeiristas when watching their “own” jump; each group reacted less strongly to the other group’s movements. The group comprising non-dancers displayed the lowest level of mirror-neuron reaction, irrespective of which dance type they were observing. The study also contested the widespread thesis that the observer and the observed both need to be present for mirror neuron activity to take place. See B. Calvo-Merino, D.E. Glaser, J. Grèzes, R.F. Passingham, and P. Haggard, “Action Observation and Acquired Motor Skills: An fMRI Study with Expert Dancers,” Cerebral Cortex 15 (August 2005): 1243–9. 12. Vittorio Gallese, “The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity,” Psycho­ pathology 35 (2003): 171–80, here 175. 13. Ibid. 14. Stern writes that infants “appear to have an innate general capacity, which can be called amodal perception, to take information received in one sensory modality, and somehow translate it into another sensory modality. […] These abstract representations that the infant experiences are not sights and sounds and touches and nameable objects, but rather shapes, intensities, and temporal patterns—the more ‘global’ qualities of experience” (Daniel N. Stern, An Introduction to Einfühlung 373 The Interpersonal World of the Infant, London: Karnac Books, 1998, 51). 15. Ibid., 54. 16. Theodor Lipps, “Einfühlung und ästhetischer Genuß,” in Aesthetik, ed. Emil Utitz (Berlin: Pan-Verlag Rolf Heise, 1924), 160. 17. Ibid., 161. 18. Ibid., 155. 19. Ibid., 152. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 155. 22. Ibid., 160. 23. Lipps, Grundlegung der Ästhetik, 182. 24. Lipps, “Einfühlung und ästhetischer Genuß,” 167. 25. Herder considered the act of empathizing (sich-Einfühlen) as a way of imaginatively evoking the affective situation and perceptions of people in foreign cultures and past epochs to such an extent that their worlds could be adequately discussed. See Johann Gottfried Herder, “Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit” [1774], in Schriften zu Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Altertum, 1774–1787, ed. Jürgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), 32–3. 26. Novalis, “Die Lehrlinge zu Sais,” in Novalis Schriften, ed. Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich von Schlegel, Karl Eduard von Bülow, and Johann Ludwig Tieck (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1837), 99. 27. Theobald Ziegler, “Zur Genesis eines ästhetischen Begriffs,” Zeit­ schrift für vergleichende Literaturgeschichte 7 (1894): 113–20, here 116. Despite this affinity, Ziegler warns of seeing an unbroken line of development between Romanticism and the science of his own day: “Romanticism is a poeticizing of life and science; to gain sway over nature, as I said above, to procure it for themselves, this is how ‘feeling into’ (Hineinfühlen) was supposed to serve them; to master it—not least for the scientific knowledge; for this is what it was all about for the ‘novices.’ Herein lies the Romantic mischief …” (ibid., 118). This does not mean refraining from “attesting to the unity of mind and nature,” but making “the profound pondering of the symbol and of Einfühlung energetically productive in the area in which it can reveal itself within the given and the tangible, the only place where it can make itself truly productive, in other words in the realm of the aesthetic” (ibid., 119). 28. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “An Moses Mendelssohn” [1757], in Gotthold Ephraim Lessings sämtliche Schriften, ed. Karl Lachmann, vol. 17 (Leipzig: Göschen, 1904), 89–93. 29. See Adam Smith, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” [1759], in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondences, vol. 1, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 9. 374 Robin Curtis 30. Wilhelm Perpeet, “Historisches und Systematisches zur Einfüh­ lungsästhetik,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunst­ wissenschaft 11, no 1 (1966): 193–216, here 201. 31. Ibid., 202. 32. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Kritik meiner Ästhetik” [1866, 1873], in Kritische Gänge, ed. Robert Vischer (Munich: Meyer & Jessen, 1922), vol. 4, 383. 33. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Betrachtung über den Zustand der jetzigen Malerei” [1842], in Kritische Gänge 5, no 45, cited in Wilhelm Perpeet, Vom Schönen und von der Kunst (Bonn: Bouvier, 1997), 96–7. 34. Vischer, “Betrachtung über den Zustand der jetzigen Malerei,” 45f., cited in Perpeet, Vom Schönen und von der Kunst, 102. 35. Jutta Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung. Zur Denkfigur der Projektion in Psychophysiologie, Kulturtheorie, Asthetik und Literatur der frühen Moderne (Freiburg in Breisgau: Rombach, 2005), 217. 36. Lotze’s concept of Lokalzeichen made a significant contribution to Hermann von Helmholtz’s work on a theory of projection. For a detailed discussion of the affinity between the discourses of psychophysiology and aesthetics, see Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung. A brief overview of developments in psychophysiology and aesthetic spatial research in the nineteenth century is given in Mitchell W. Schwarzer, “The Emergence of Architectural Space: August Schmarsow’s Theory of ‘Raumgestaltung,’” Assemblage 15 (August 1991): 48–61. 37. Rudolf Hermann Lotze, Mikrokosmos. Ideen zur Naturgeschichte und Geschichte der Menschheit [1858] (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1885), vol. 2, 201–2. 38. Ibid., 201. 39. Harry Francis Mullgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, “Introduction,” in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, ed. Harry F. Mallgrave (Santa Monica: Getty Center Publication, 1994), 20f. Quotation from Rudolf Hermann Lotze, Geschichte der Ästhetik in Deutschland (Munich: Cotta, 1868), 80. 40. Vischer, “Kritik meiner Ästhetik,” 319–20. 41. Robert Vischer, “Preface,” in Ueber das optische Formgefühl. Ein Beitrag zur Aesthetik (Leipzig: Hermann Credner), 1873, vii. 42. Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefühl, 8. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 11. This reference to Vitalempfindung is strongly reminiscent of Daniel Stern’s vitality affects as already described. 45. Ibid., 20. 46. Ibid., 21. 47. Further aspects of Einfühlungsästhetik in Robert Vischer include Anfühlung, Nachfühlung and Zufühlung, which are not examined further here. An Introduction to Einfühlung 375 48. Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefühl, 28. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 29. 51. Ziegler, “Zur Genesis eines ästhetischen Begriffs,” 119. 52. August Schmarsow, “Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung,” in Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kultur­ wissenschaften, ed. Jörg Dünne and Stephan Günzel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 270. 53. Ibid., 475–6. 54. For an account of the book’s extraordinary success, see the preface by editor Helga Grebing in Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (Munich: Fink, 2007), 7–12. 55. Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 72. 56. In the German language, see above all the works on Worringer published by Hannes Böhringer and Beate Söntgen, in particular Wilhelm Worringers Kunstgeschichte (Munich: Fink, 2002) and Wilhelm Worringer. Schriften, ed. Hannes Böhringer, Helga Grebing, and Beate Söntgen (Munich: Fink, 2002). In the English language, see above all Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Neil H. Donahue (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). 57. Geoffrey C.W. Waite, “Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism,” in Invisible Cathedrals, 13–40, here 24f. 58. This problematic distortion in Worringer is emphasized by Frank Büttner in his extremely useful overview “Das Paradigma ‘Ein­ fühlung’ bei Robert Vischer, Heinrich Wölfflin und Wilhelm Worringer. Die problematische Karriere einer kunsttheoretischen Fragestellung,” in 200 Jahre Kunstgeschichte in München. Posi­ tionen, Perspektiven, Polemik, 1780–1980, ed. Christian Drude and Hubertus Kohle (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2003), 87. 59. Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung, 270. 60. On this subject, Jutta Müller-Tamm, for example, has noted that: “The reader can’t help but […] get the impression that it is here less to do with the empirical analysis of aesthetic pleasure and more about the pleasure in invoking in writing that powerful, proud, and free ‘I.’” Ibid., 240. 61. Büttner, “Das Paradigma ‘Einfühlung,’” 90. 62. To date there have been surprisingly few references to Einfühlungs­ ästhetik in international film studies. Sergei Eisenstein referred to Theodor Lipps in his text “Die Montage der Attraktionen” [1921], Ästhetik und Kommunikation. Beiträge zur politischen Erziehung 4, no 13 (1973), 76–8. Two books on the role of empathy in the influencing of the affects in film refer back to Theodor Lipps but do not deal any further with the historical phenomenon: Emotion and 376 Robin Curtis the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine by Ed Tan (Mawah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996) and Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema by Murray Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). For detailed discussions of Einfühlungsästhetik and film see Robin Curtis, Conscientious Viscerality (Emsdetten/Berlin: Gebrüder Mann/Edition Imorde, 2006); Robin Curtis, “Expanded Empathy: Movement, Mirror Neurons and Einfühlung,” in Narration and Spectatorship in Moving Images: Perception, Imagination, Emotion, ed. Joseph and Barbara Anderson (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), 49–62; and Robin Curtis, “Bewegung, Rhythmus, Immersion. Räumliche Wirkung der Abstraktion,” in Empfindungsräume. Zur synästhetischen Wahrnehmung, ed. Robin Curtis, Marc Glöde, and Gertrud Koch (Munich: Fink, 2009). Article Title 377 Art in Translation, Volume 6, Issue 4, pp. 377–398 DOI: 10.2752/175613114X14105155617348 Reprints available directly from the Publishers. Photocopying permitted by licence only. © 2014 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. Joseph Imorde Translated by Richard George Elliott First published in German as “‘Einfühlung’ in der Kunstgeschichte.” In Robin Curtis and Gertrud Koch (eds), Einfühlung. Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart eines ästhetischen Konzepts (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2009), 127–41. “Empathy” in Art History Abstract Joseph Imorde’s essay places the aesthetics of empathy in the social context of Imperial Germany at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through the psychological responses stimulated by the aesthetics of empathy, the general public, unburdened by any specialist understanding of art history, was empowered to experience the emotions generated by art. In the realm of art appreciation, emotion was to replace reason and knowledge. This opening up of art to a broader audience enhanced, in turn, the development of self-awareness and selfworth within the petit bourgeoisie, whose members were given access 378 Joseph Imorde to the triumphs of such great artists as Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and Grünewald. The success of empathy theory in Germany was linked, argues Imorde, to a particular Gemütsimperialismus (spiritual imperialism), which in contrast to decadent France or mercantile Britain, identified Germany as a land of the spirit; a land of musicians, poets, and philosophers. KEYWORDS: Einfühlung, empathy, cult of personality, Theodor Lipps, Wilhelmine Germany, Georg Dehio, Karl Jaspers, Der Kunstwart, Ferdinand Avenarius, Wilhelm Waetzold, Johannes Volkelt, Richard Hamann, Heinrich Wölfflin, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Grünewald, Julius von Schlosser Introduction by Robin Curtis (Heinrich-Heine University, Düsseldorf) A key feature of empathy aesthetics (or Einfühlungsästhetik) around 1900 was the shift of focus that they implicitly inaugurated away from the aesthetic object, toward the viewing subject and the affective state of that subject. This shift is the point of departure for Joseph Imorde’s overview of the oftentimes strange and surprising reverberations pro­ duced by Einfühlung within German-language aesthetic discourse. The potential to dissolve distinctions between the classes and their respective capacities to partake of aesthetic experience was implicit within empathy aesthetics. However, any gesture of openness or inclu­ siveness that this shift may be understood to suggest was anticipated and preempted by many contemporaneous authors: they sought to contain this popularization of aesthetic enjoyment by suggesting that the viewing subject empathized with the creative personality, the artist, and thus partook of the mood or feeling that had been felt in the act of creation. This was a task, however, to which the uneducated public was deemed inadequate. Julius von Schlosser, for instance, wrote that such an encounter between the uneducated observer and figures such as Rembrandt, Michelangelo, or Grünewald can only be considered “nonsensical and decadent.” Citing a wide range of contemporary authors, many of whom are little known today despite their prominence at the time, Joseph Imorde outlines the intertwined classist and the nationalist responses to Ein­ fühlung around the turn of the twentieth century. The rise of art history both as a discipline and, in particular, as a popular cultural practice (consider, for instance, such high-circulation publications such as Der Kunstwart, or the colour reproductions of artworks mass-produced and popularized during this period) coincided in Germany with the unifica­ tion of the nation and its aftermath. Imorde highlights in particular “Empathy” in Art History 379 the s­ ignificant role played by German nationalist discourse in the field of art history and its increasing imbrication with any discussion of the capacity for strong feelings. Imorde’s text came about in the context of a larger research project that traces both the prevalence and surprising importance of popular art history for early twentieth-century German cultural life and the very curious hypotheses that were entertained there and were thus a part of the popular discourse on aesthetics of that era.1 This research questions the adequacy of the narrow canon of writings on art that have come to be recognized as representative of the early twentieth century while highlighting the potential power of Einfühlung to challenge the param­ eters of the transaction implicit in aesthetic experience. “Empathy” in Art History Joseph Imorde The emergence of the aesthetics of empathy around 1900 presented academic art history with a problem for which to the present day—this much am I prepared to preempt—no proper solution has been found. The reason for this slowly unfolding difficulty lay predominantly in the shift of discursive interest from the object viewed to the viewing subject. The emotions of the public came into the sights of experimental science1 and the clutches of a blossoming “culture industry” that was preparing to make money from an “art for all.” The aesthetics of empathy went hand in hand with commercialization to the extent that the history of art was only rendered fit for mass consumption by the assertion of emotional autonomy on the part of the viewing individual. What was being marketed was no longer the artwork itself but the profound feelings that, in the best-case scenario, were supposed to occur during contemplation of even a mediocre reproduction. In around 1900 political as well as economic interests latched onto this aesthetically legitimized sense of self. The experiencing of art not only acquired commodity status, but it also became the content of choice of the many ideologically slanted public-education initiatives. Every attempt to inoculate the “art-less classes” with an aesthetic sense borrowed openly from the aesthetics of empathy,2 whose ideas provided excellent ammunition for the argument that an interest in art was not a branch of science or the privilege of self-proclaimed experts, but rather a pursuit open to every person of sensibility. To cite Richard Muther (a professor of art history in Breslau and a writer on art), one does not have to be a trained historian to experience strong emotions, and enjoy them for what they are, in front of paintings. All one needs is to have a soul in one’s body and eyes in one’s 380 Joseph Imorde head.3 Given these preconditions, Theodor Lipps’s oft-quoted dictum4 “aesthetic enjoyment is objectified self-enjoyment” (1906)5 must have assumed a thoroughly emancipatory aspect. This pleasure-sensitive selfobsession now enabled the justification of interpretations of art that, rather than insisting on explanations, were oriented simply toward the bringing to life of artworks in a personal way.6 There arose from the bottom up, sociologically too, an aesthetic that was extraordinarily successful in Germany because it was soon claimed as völkisch, as being of the German people. The magic that had been expunged from bygone art as a result of its inevitable decontextualization could now be restored to it by the viewers through their actual emotions. Edgar Zilsel called this Gefühlseinlegung (overlaying with one’s own feelings).7 With Lipps on their lips, all and sundry could now, with impunity, sidle up to the accumulated treasures of the art of former ages and realize the key principle of the aesthetics of empathy, whereby aesthetic pleasure could only be achieved through the rediscovery of one’s own self in the other.8 The fundamental prerequisite for this experiencing of pleasure was an awakening “self-awareness,” or possibly a keener sense of “self-worth.” There was something timely, I would like to claim, about the autogenic self-affirming techniques of the aesthetics of empathy at the moment of their emergence because in the German Empire the discovery of the self in the other was developing into a power-political and colonial reality in which, naturally enough, art history played a part and wanted to play a part. Not only did the discipline see itself as the engine of a concluding secularization, it also developed increasingly into one of the most fetching branches of German cultural imperialism. The necessary tools for the politically desirable self-discovery in the other were borrowed from the modern techniques of art history.9 Thanks to mobility and the growth of the media, the public at large were able to share in the aesthetic penetration of the world. While the railways opened up foreign artistic landscapes to tourism, which was starting to flourish, photography, according to Georg Dehio,10 lent native and foreign art objects, appropriated either actually or notionally, “a kind of ubiquity.” In around 1900, an inevitable part of any journey to Italy was the acquisition of all sorts of travel literature by way of preparation and follow-up study as well as the purchase of photographic reproductions whose function was to establish the things seen as a part of one’s own history.11 With the help of picture postcards or photographs, travelers could review the art they had encountered on their travels in the comfort of their own homes. In this way Germans in a sense carried the Renaissance back with them to the North and examined the art again, in detail, in their own parlors. Hermann Hesse called this Photographienarbeit (photograph work).12 A fine example of the appropriation of the “Promised Land” through media and the emotions is offered by Karl Jaspers. In 1902, while a student, Jaspers’s father provided him with a handsome sum of money “Empathy” in Art History 381 with which to acquire some “attractive mementoes, especially pictures” of his journey to Italy: “This trip will remain with you for life and I consider it desirable for you bring back some mementoes with which to shore up the memory of it.”13 In Rome Jaspers acquired some 180 photographs, mainly of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel,14 for he saw in the work of this artist something of the “sublime resignation” he had encountered in Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy and now, in Italy, read into the work.15 Due to the increasingly capitalistic relationship between educational opportunities and the demand for entertainment, art and its history were, according to Max Dvorˇak,16 becoming an “El Dorado for dilettantes and littérateurs.” What positivist art history and archaeology had achieved, and were continuing to achieve, in Italy, Greece, and elsewhere, was gradually invading a genre of art writing that empathized with the alien, the other.17 Reviews and cultural journals—such as Der Kunstwart—were in great demand because they adapted “the creations of the greatest artists to the taste of the masses.”18 One focus of this Kunstwartarbeit (art guardianship)19 “lay in the dissemination of reproductions designed to ‘bring good art to the people.’”20 The art reproductions marketed as individual pictures in series or portfolios21 were thus put to the service of a determinedly nationalistic educational program that peddled the highest ideals at the lowest prices. What the editor of Der Kunstwart, Ferdinand Avenarius, wanted to give the viewers of his master paintings was the opportunity to experience profound emotions when confronted by a work of art, whereby he too assumed that aesthetic enjoyment was a matter not so much of reflective thought as of direct feeling.22 The task required of the general public with regard to the reproduced works of art was “to look and to empathize.”23 For the artist Franz Lenbach, for example, the purpose of this looking was “to suspend deliberation, to abandon the thinking apparatus, to dispel rumination and to transport ourselves to a blissful state far removed from any nagging thoughts.”24 According to Wilhelm Waetzold, general director of the Berlin Museums, the “soul” of art could reveal itself only “to those approaching not from the place of reason but from their own soul,” those who with the help of their own feeling take in the artwork and assure themselves of its worth.25 Those proclaimers of “art for all,” who raised feeling to a universal tool of recognition, did not want to train art scholars, they wanted to teach people to be art lovers.26 Their aim was no less than to educate the masses in their own “capacity to enjoy.”27 In the ideology-saturated education campaigns, luxuriant selfimmersion in a work of art now came to be supplemented by a personal dimension: reliving the experience of the great artist, whom the Germans were fond of stylizing into a deeply sensitive and therefore highly creative Übermensch.28 At the heart of the research by Johannes Volkelt,29 a philosopher in Leipzig and probably the most productive exponent of the aesthetics of empathy after Theodor Lipps, into the 382 Joseph Imorde psychology of art was “the inner life of the artist, as objectified in the work of art, and with it the inner life of the viewer, objectified anew with every fresh contemplation of the work.” Every individual, as he saw it, should endow art with life and soul out of his own breast.30 Only by reaching within one’s own self was it possible to invest the artist’s works with feelings and passions. A materialist history of art, as opposed to the purely subjective appropriation of it, seemed to Volkelt to be misguided. He gave precedence to empathy because art, acting as a sedative, made it easier to tolerate the burden of existence. Those who sink their teeth into the drabness of real life are pursuing nothing other than an “unhealthy, fanatical, and moreover Philistine quest for the truth.”31 He recommended the cultivation and practice of a so-called complementary and transporting imagination,32 for this alone offered a “feeling of freedom from things.”33 Volkelt was not interested in trivial art-historical detail; what he wanted was to step before the soul of a great man. Not the works, but rather the artist as an individual was the object of his learned importunacy. What mattered for Volkelt was the salutary experience of establishing himself in the “worlds of feeling, belief, and thought” of great men, of taking up residence there.34 This was empathetic psychologization in the guise of “monumentalizing history.”35 “The brusquer and more idiosyncratic an artist revealed his personality to be” and the more clearly and passionately the character and emotional interior life of such a person was expressed in his exterior, the easier it was for the public to be transported by empathy: “The cult of personality came to replace aesthetic abstraction.”36 Only now is it possible to fully understand why the concept of genius pays so much attention to the lugubrious, titanic, and demonic appearance of its heroes. The more clearly and passionately the character and interior life of a person are expressed in his exterior, the easier it is for us to empathize, the stronger our sense of intimacy with that individual, and the more easily things are intensified to a personality-based experience.37 Not for nothing did intensely empathizing communities congregate, after 1900, around expressive artists such as Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and Grünewald. There was talk in such communities of the “aesthetic enjoyment of the artist’s personality.”38 Only by gaining an insight into the creative personality was form rendered comprehensible and were viewers induced to discover “the same mood and mode of feeling” in themselves.39 Volkelt captured this kind of identificatory impression in the following passage: It is we the viewers who give life and soul to the forms created by the artist. We reach inside our own breast and put our own “Empathy” in Art History 383 feelings and passions into the artist’s figures. When we look at Michelangelo’s David or Moses, everything these two figures seem to possess by way of smoldering anger and heroic strength that can barely be held down—where does it come from if not from the depths of our own breast, which must have experienced echoes, at the very least, of similar sentiments and emotions? If feelings such as those the artist wanted to express through his creations remain utterly alien to us, we will find the work of art incomprehensible to us, it will stand there before us mute and empty.40 However, this also meant that only those who had survived similar battles and experienced similar feelings themselves could begin to understand the depth and emotional expressivity of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, or Grünewald.41 One notion in the art-historical literature of the day on which the greatest possible degree of unanimity reigned was that the judgment of an art object necessarily reflected “the individuality of the person judging.” Artists, art historians, and the art-sensitive could only understand, grasp, or feel those aspects of the object for which they supplied the relevant preconditions. Each individual brought his or her own orientation, his or her own experience to the object to be judged,42 whether in an act of mental projection, animistic attribution of soul,43 or empathetic overlaying of feelings.44 What the observer’s own sensibility put into the objects, the observer pulled out again as the sign of a superior intellect.45 Based on the inevitably time- and culture-bound nature of the results of any given contemplation and judging of a work, Richard Hamann, among others, criticized the empathy theory as a sentimental “anthropomorphization” of art objects (1907).46 However, the grave danger in this theory is that it attaches little importance to the form and fullness of direct perception, which is enriched by emotional experience, and by deflecting to ungrounded feelings, ultimately pushes understanding of the actual content of this perception into the background. What ensues is not merely music for the unmusical and painting for the colorblind and those lacking any awareness of form, but also a situation wherein an observer of untutored taste confidently weighs up difficult works, providing those works have caused him to feel something, even if he has not been able to think anything.47 Hamann saw the rational description of transcendent objects suspended in favor of a self-satisfied evaluation of inner feelings and was not willing to accept that in his day and age a popular taste driven by emotions could assert itself over a strictly intellectual processing of the work. Naturally Hamann was not alone in his elitist suspicion of 384 Joseph Imorde empathy as an art-historical means of apprehension. Of critics of empathy and the emotions there was no shortage. In addition to Heinrich Wölfflin, who after a certain point in time disdained the insistent and emphatic focus on the creative subject as “unpleasant ingratiation and misplaced collegiality,”48 it was above all Julius von Schlosser, thinking exclusively of himself, who denied those of untrained taste any right to judge the “autonomous artist.”49 In his late essay “Stilgeschichte und Sprachgeschichte,” written in 1934, Schlosser, as a declared enemy of the trivial, sought to protect the great artists from the importunacy and willfulness of the rowdy “Gezwerge”50 [dwarf manners]. He was suspicious of the aesthetic approach to works of art.51 He considered “Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and Grünewald for the ordinary man” to be nonsensical and decadent.52 What he wanted to prevent was a historiography of inner appropriation or cheap imitation—in short, self-satisfying research into the effects of higher art. Citing Goethe, Schlosser found nothing worse than to be forced to look on as the layman ventured to authoritatively give his impressions in the place of artistic expression. Such people, he claimed, could be observed treating a work of art “as if it were soft clay”: everything is made to fit their inclinations and opinions and reduced to so-called effect.53 The selfobjectifying self-enjoyment of “aesthetic subjectivism”54 was regarded as obscene by Schlosser, who probably saw the aesthetics of empathy as akin to masturbation.55 Thus the writings of Theodor Lipps lay buried in the darkest corner of Schlosser’s library along with those of Johannes Volkelt and Max Dessoir. That the untutored and importunate individual was irksome to the most elitist sections of academic art history did little to alter the fact that by far the larger part of German writers on art were hard at work leading the aesthetics of empathy down the path of folk psychology and subsequently using racial theory to sharpen its edge—and also profiting from it. Here too the figures they claimed for themselves were the great men of history, the “paragons” and “cultural saviors,” as Friedrich Gundolf called them.56 To cite Wilhelm Waetzold once more, the years after 1900 saw the beginning of that “whole inclination of the German mind toward self-confession, toward self-education,” based on the example of historical and contemporary confessors, self-testifiers, and solitaries.57 In history and the humanities, it was almost common to persuade oneself that more than any other national character, the NordicGermanic was distinguished by depth of Gemüt [soul], a tendency to internalize, a sincere striving for profundity, and an “ability to disregard all outward appearance in favor of what is recognized as the true nature found within.”58 It was in the German’s blood—even Heinrich Wölfflin put it this way—“to go beyond what is tangibly natural.”59 He was the repository of a “Faustian culture”60 and was thus driven by an urge to “raise the individual to the universal.”61 He sought in art the expression of his own essence and yearning.62 “Empathy” in Art History 385 This was nothing other than German jingoistic Gemütsimperialismus. After a certain point, empathy went from being an issue of class to being an issue of race. In Henry Thode’s view, the Teutonic peoples and the Germans in particular lived life inwardly.63 And naturally he believed that German Gemüt was deeper than that of any other inhabitant of the earth. Under this view, the superficial Roman possessed no such introspection, for the word Gemüt was simply alien to him.64 What Thode understood by Gemüt were those psychological processes in which feeling was directed toward the essence and nature of other beings.65 Gemüt led into the depths and enabled the viewer to establish contact with the innermost aspects of a work of art.66 On the basis of this characteristic that had been talked into existence, the German Gemütsmensch [man of soul] was predestined to a greater extent than anyone else to ambush the deeply sensitive expressive artist of any time or country with his objectified sense of self. Eduard Wechßler, a Romance scholar at the University of Berlin, formulated this idea perhaps more unambiguously than any other writer: No word more clearly describes the German manner of taking in and processing impressions than the term Einfühlung (empathy), coined by Theodor Lipps. With this word, already widespread in the Romantic period, the admirable scholar intended to describe a general psychological process but provided us with something of greater import: a fixed hallmark of the very core of our being. We Germans are compelled and enabled on the one hand to empathize through fellow feeling, dedication, or enthusiasm, and on the other to deliberately ward off the alien, the trivial, the disagreeable, and the distressing. In the first case we intensify and enrich the impression from the depth and richness of our own self: the object is, often without us realizing what we are doing, gilded and transfigured with warmth, love, and depth of feeling. The life that flows and surges toward us from the world is our own life and nourishes itself on our own lifeblood. In the other case, the alien without elicits no excitement within. It remains far removed from the core of our being, unnoticed and unheeded, as if incomprehensible, as if our powers of understanding were no match for it.67 What the real German makes his own through empathy comes from the unity of the soul and goes out to the unity of the world: thus is the essence of our comportment.68 Such wide-ranging appropriations demonstrated that the uncritical transferring of one’s own standards, criteria of experience, and horizons of experience onto a differently disposed, foreign reality was, in those days, part of what it meant to be German.69 386 Joseph Imorde The history, merely outlined here, of the ideological decline of the aesthetics of empathy from its position as an advanced branch of psychological aesthetics to that of the dregs of German national art history remains to be written. Notes To Introduction 1. See, in particular, Joseph Imorde, Michelangelo Deutsch! (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009). To Main Article 1. See Paul Ziche, “‘Ästhetik von unten’ von oben. Experimentelle Ästhetik von Gustav Theodor Fechner bis Oswald Külpe,” in Ästhetik von unten. Empirie und ästhetisches Wissen, ed. Marie Guthmüller and Wolfgang Klein (Tübingen: Francke, 2006), 325–50. 2. Oskar Bie, “Ästhetische Kultur,” in Reise um die Kunst (Berlin: Erich Reiss, 1910), 1–25, 5: “Art education has become a watchword. The art-less classes have been virtually reared on art and workers have been copiously inoculated with this remedy through popular theater and suburban exhibitions and lectures for the layman. Not even the children have been left in peace: their beloved picture books of old have been replaced by works of art and their own initial daubs have been acclaimed as revelations; attempts have been made to eradicate the non-graphic from their lessons and even children’s concerts have been instituted.” In his Schauen und Glauben (Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1903), 8, Henry Thode adopts a critical, questioning stance: “Decent men acting on idealistic inclinations conceive of Volkskunst as art made for the people: aesthetic education is thought to endow the poorer, working classes with a higher level of culture and thus a greater enjoyment of life. Without doubt a philanthropic and in itself commendable aim, provided really good, genuine art is conferred on the farmstead, the workers’ hostel, the schoolroom. Does this happen in practice? Do we know, I wish to ask in passing, what is desirable and necessary for these classes? Is there not a danger here of us foisting our own love of artistic luxury on the simple domesticity of these people?” 3. Richard Muther, “Ästhetische Cultur,” in Studien und Kritiken. Band II: 1901 (Vienna: Wiener Verlag, 1901), 1–23, 15. 4. For example in Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung. Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie [1908], ed. Helga Grebing (Munich: Fink, 2007), 73 and 75. 5. Theodor Lipps, “Einfühlung und ästhetischer Genuß,” Die Zukunft 54 (1906): 100–14, 100. Republished in Theodor Lipps, “Einfühl­ ung und ästhetischer Genuß,” in Aesthetik, ed. Emil Utiz (Berlin: “Empathy” in Art History 387 Pan, 1924), 152–67, 152. See also Theodor Lipps, “Ästhetik,” in Systematische Philosophie von W. Dilthey, A. Riehl, W. Wundt, W. Ostwald, H. Ebbinghaus, R. Eucken, Fr. Paulsen, W. Münch, Th. Lipps, ed. Paul Hinneberg (Berlin: B.G. Teubner, 1907), 349–88, 369. Criticism in August Döring, “Über Einfühlung,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 7, no 4 (1912): 568–77, 575–7.  6. Richard Hamann, Der Impressionismus in Leben und Kunst (Cologne: Dumont-Schauberg, 1907), 141: “For empathy theory, however, the explanation of works of art lies in speaking of every line, every luminosity, every space and every object as if an entire person were contained therein. The lines begin to gambol and leap and the shadows and lights to shun or caress one another; the surfaces have their life, and cozy interiors start to lose their reality. Thus empathy theory becomes the justification for art interpretation of the kind that wants not to explain, but rather to translate art into vibrant effects, with the result that the entire work dissolves into strong but sporadic impressions. It is the aesthetic of lyricism.”   7. Edgar Zilsel, Die Geniereligion. Ein kritischer Versuch über das moderne Persönlichkeitsideal, mit einer historischen Begründung, ed. Johann Dvorˇak (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 95.   8. Moritz Geiger, “Über das Wesen und die Bedeutung der Einfühlung,” in Bericht über den IV Kongreß für experimentelle Psychologie in Innsbruck vom 19.–22. April 1910, ed. F. Schumann (Leipzig: Barth, 1911), 29–73, 61.   9. A national comparison of traveling habits is provided by an author known by the initials M. O., “Vom Reisen,” in Neue Deutsche Rundschau 13, no 8 (1902): 889–91, 891: “Traveling does not mean the same thing to the Frenchman and the Englishman that it means to us. For the Frenchman, his own world in all its splendor, diversity, and greatness suffices. His needs are satisfied by a period of recuperation in the countryside or by the sea. The Englishman travels through countries and across oceans in a matter-of-fact way. He collects sights mentally, registers them as additions to his capital and remains just as he was before. We Germans immerse ourselves in the impressions made on us by this rich universe. We grow and develop in the torrent of its magnificence. We dream our way into the souls of foreign lands and people, and even of unfamiliar animals and plants. We seek to submerge ourselves in the waters of creation and decay that everywhere roar and once we have grasped the art of traveling, even a journey from Berlin to Potsdam can be an experience, perhaps an even greater one than a dilettante’s expedition to India and Japan.” 10. Georg Dehio, “Deutsche Kunstgeschichte und deutsche Geschichte,” in Historische Zeitschrift 100 (1908): 473–85, 475. 388 Joseph Imorde 11. Rudolf Borchardt drew attention to the importance to German art history of the “mediatization” of Italy as early as 1927: “The first history of art lecturer at a German university was not a contemporary of the Brothers Grimm but Wilhelm Grimm’s son Herman; before an overview of the subject could gradually be gained, travel needed to become generalized and a new technique of reproduction—photography—invented and developed.” (Rudolf Borchardt, “Mittelalterliche Kunstwissenschaft. Arnault Daniel und Giovanni Pisano als Schöpfer der modernen Seelenform Europas. Rede gehalten in der Aula der Universität Zürich am 2. März 1927,” Neue Schweizer Rundschau 21, no 8 [1928]: 564–80, 567.) 12. Hermann Hesse, Italien. Schilderungen, Tagebücher, Gedichte, Aufsätze, Buchbesprechungen und Erzählungen, ed. Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 60–156 (“Reisetagebuch 1901”), 98 (Saturday April 13, 1901). 13. The sum was 200 marks. See Karl Jaspers, Italienbriefe 1902, ed. Suzanne Kirkbright (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006), 51–3 (Karl Wilhelm Jaspers to Karl Jaspers, Oldenburg, February 25, 1902), 52. 14. Ibid., 85–7 (Karl Jaspers to his parents, Rome, March 25, 1902), 86: “I have already visited photographic shops a number of times and have purchased approximately 180 pictures, covering antique statues and busts, medieval mosaics and churches, and pictures from the early Renaissance to the end of the Renaissance, in particular, as I have already reported, those of Michelangelo.” 15. Ibid., 81–841 (Karl Jaspers to his parents, Rome, March 25, 1902), 82: “The landscape of the Campagna has made a powerful impression on me. It is perhaps as unique as Rome with all its treasures. The mood it evokes strikes me again as being of that sublime resignation one meets in Schopenhauer. It is remarkable that I believe myself to feel this time and again in Rome generally, in the Sistine Chapel and in the Campagna, and it could be regarded as highly subjective; nevertheless I believe I am not mistaken. […] I have already purchased numerous photographs. To select the most suitable is no easy task, given the enormous choice on offer. I have bought many of the Sistine Chapel in particular.” See, from twenty years later, Joseph Maria Baernreither, Römisches Tagebuch (Berlin: Verlag für Kulturpolitik, 1929), 64–8 (Rome, March 10, 1925), 64f.: “I made use of the good light to visit the Sistine Chapel. Baron Pastor has written a small but highly enlightening book on this chapel, the stanze and the loggias, which most importantly sheds light on how these artworks originated and on their religious associations. He is a great and quite uninhibited admirer of Michelangelo. Our understanding of the frescoes, which time has admittedly treated very badly, is assisted by photographic reproductions both large and small, colored or in the natural color “Empathy” in Art History 389 of photographs, and also available in the form of numerous detailed views.” See also the thoughts of Hans Weigert (Die heutigen Aufgaben der Kunstwissenschaft [Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1935], 11), who believed that the photographic reproduction of masterpieces carried the disenchanting of the world a step further, namely into the disenchanting of art. 16. Max Dvorˇak, “Die Denkmäler der deutschen Kunst. Vortrag gehalten an dem zu Ehren des deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft veranstalteten Festabend der Gesellschaft der Kunstfreunde in Wien,” in Vom deutschen Verein für Kunstwissenschaft (Berlin: Reimer, 1913), 1–7, 6. Naturally, in this instance, with negative connotations. 17. See, for example, Ferdinand Avenarius, “Volks- und Gipfelkunst,” Der Kunstwart 12, no 1 (October 1898), 2–4, 3: “The artist of the highest order is a conqueror: from some foothill in the immense empire of humanity, in the land of the word or of sound, of color or plastic form, he sets out for the infinite, and where the eyes of the many are occluded by swirling fog, he peers, he recognizes, and he reveals to those following closest behind what he has discovered, thereby acquiring it for their minds too. The poet who teaches others to feel or see an aspect of human or natural life anew, the composer who, with his music, touches us in new depths of the soul, the painter who opens our eyes and our spirits, teaching us to see as we have never seen before, all these are artists of the highest order, pioneers of our emotions, mentors of our souls, geniuses. The highest art conquers; art for the people colonizes.” 18. Kurt Breysig, Persönlichkeit und Entwicklung (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 1925), 228f.: “Art has seen sufficient examples of the debasing of a master legacy for the dayto-day use of a school, not to mention the humblest possible form to which photography and halftone engraving demean the creations of the greatest artists to suit the taste of the masses.” 19. Samuel Lublinski, “Das Publikum,” in idem., Der Ausgang der Moderne. Ein Buch der Opposition (Dresden: Carl Reissner, 1909), 185–216, 211f.: “Originally, of course, more of the virtue of art guardianship was in evidence, for at the outset the journal contented itself with simply educating young people in art. The editor, Ferdinand Avenarius, displayed an outstanding gift for teaching. He knew how to open people’s eyes in such a way that they learned to see and feel the colors and tones, the plastic lines of sculptures, but he also went further, directing viewers to the works’ spiritual content.” 20. See Karl Ulrich Syndram, Kulturpublizistik und nationales Selbst­ verständnis. Untersuchungen zur Kunst- und Kulturpolitik in den Rundschauzeitschriften des Deutschen Kaiserreichs (1871–1914) (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1989), 87f. 390 Joseph Imorde 21. A list of recommended inexpensive reproductions in Ferdinand Avenarius, “Kunstblätter und Bildwerke,” in Der Kunstwart 16, no 4 (November 1902): 218–28, 221–8. See also Leopold Julius Klotz, “Über Wandschmuck,” in Die Stadwohnung. Wie man sie sich prak­ tisch, schön und preiswert einrichtet und gut erhält. Ein praktischer Ratgeber für alle, die sich in der Großstadt behaglich einrichten wol­ len, ed. Joseph August Lux and Max Warnatsch (Charlottenburg: Schillerbuchhandlung Max Teschner, 1910), 197–9, 197f. 22. “Zu den Michelangelo-Mappen des Kunstwarts,” in Michelangelos Hauptbilder der Sixtinadecke, from the Michelangelo portfolios published by Der Kunstwart (Munich: Georg D.W. Callwey, date not known), accompanying text on the last page of the supplement. 23. See Meier Spanier, “Einleitung,” in idem., Zur Kunst. Ausgewählte Stücke moderner Prosa zur Kunstbetrachtung und zum Kunstgenuß. Mit Einleitung. Anmerkungen und Bilderanhang (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1905), v–x, vii. 24. Wilhelm Wyl (Wilhelm Ritter von Wymetal), Franz von Lenbach, Gespräche und Erinnerungen (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1904), 135. 25. Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Du und die Kunst. Eine Einführung in Kunst­ betrachtung und Kunstgeschichte [1938] (Berlin: Druckhaus Tempelhof, 1948), 19f. 26. Ferdinand Avenarius, “Unsere Sache,” Der Kunstwart 9, no 1 (October 1895), 1–3, 1f. See Edgar Herrenbrück, Literatur­ verständnis im wilhelminischen Bürgertum. Eine Untersuchung konservativer Zeitschriften zwischen 1900 und 1914 (Göttingen: publisher not known, 1970), 12. 27. Johannes Richter, Die Entwicklung des kunsterzieherischen Gedankens als Kulturproblem der Gegenwart nach Hauptgesicht­ spunkten dargestellt, dissertation, University of Leipzig, 1909 (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1909), 120f. 28. “Zu den Michelangelo-Mappen des Kunstwarts,” as detailed above: “For him whose eyes have been opened to the visual arts, the phenomenon that is Michelangelo represents the greatest experience these arts can bestow. Whereas the influence of this great spirit on his contemporaries was as immediate as an earthquake, we of today need to acquire this experience. I speak of experiencing, not of ‘understanding,’ for it is possible to know every fact and circumstance relating to Michelangelo’s artistic creation, to understand all this in an art-historical sense, without feeling the creativity of this soul reverberating even quietly within oneself. Only he who feels it, and only to the extent that he feels it, is able to share in the forces that have created such works. But until today no nation in the world has produced even a single collection of Michelangelo reproductions capable of enabling the educated man to immerse himself, for a reasonable price, in his art. Striving for completeness “Empathy” in Art History 391 is not the way to achieve this. This might serve the needs of the art scholar, ambitious to reproduce and catalog the entire output of an artist even if this means mechanically reproducing, among the thousand tiny images, the important and the unimportant alike. Similarly, a small selection serves little purpose in the case of the Richest of the Rich, the sheer abundance of whose outpourings allows one to truly feel the nature of the forces at work here. Small series of pictures after Michelangelo are, as a makeshift, better than nothing. But our culture needs something more, a comprehensive work covering at least Michelangelo the sculptor and Michelangelo the painter, a work that deliberately sets aside all academic intentions in order to concentrate on serving the artistic enjoyment of Michelangelo’s work, in other words reliving the experience of his creative self.” 29. Johannes Volkelt, Das ästhetische Bewusstsein. Prinzipienfragen der Ästhetik (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1920), 12. By contrast (for example) Konrad Fiedler, Vom Wesen der Kunst. Auswahl aus seinen Schriften, ed. Hans Eckstein (Munich: Piper, 1942), 67: “[…] he who finds a work of art good simply because it flatters his own aesthetic sensibility does not understand the artwork and knows nothing of the nature of art.” 30. Johannes Volkelt, Ästhetische Zeitfragen. Vorträge (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1895), 195–222 (“Sechster Vortrag: Die gegenwärtigen Aufgaben der Ästhetik”), 203. 31. Ibid., 77–109 (“Dritter Vortrag: Die Kunst als Schöpferin einer zweiten Welt”), 108: “Imagination is a redeeming force. To want to sink one’s teeth into the drabness of real existence at any price and time and to shun the magical arts of the imagination along with the black arts of the lie is but an unhealthy, fanatical, and moreover Philistine quest for the truth.” 32. Ibid., 108, see also 97: “The arousal of our emotional life simultaneously brings relief from our burden. When contemplating works of art we feel ourselves to be highly vibrant, emotional individuals but at the same time these movements of the emotions are of an easy, free, and quiet character. The individual ‘I’ with its lead weight, fetters, and barbs is eradicated, allowing us to live, to revel in the less inhibited, clearer, more impersonal sphere of the General-Human […] Accordingly—we say today—both things are present during our aesthetic contemplation. We are present there as intensely and deeply moved human beings, but without the unsettling and oppressive aspects entailed by the emotions and passions of real life. Our feeling and thinking is inspirited, it moves in a freer orbit; the Sunday of the soul has dawned.” 33. Ibid., 107f.: “And how salutary it is that mankind should be blessed with this gift! It bestows a sense of freedom from things, from our possessions, a sense of hovering above them. We believe ourselves 392 Joseph Imorde capable of escaping our bondage to them. And how profitable is this feeling, especially in view of the prodigious multitude of pain, squalor, and triviality! The cultivation of the imagination is conducive to our health. It allows us to breathe more freely and more happily, and to carry the burden of our existence more lightly.” 34. Ibid., 105: “To see how the world is reflected in eminent intellects, how singularly they have pondered and cogitated on mankind and the way of the world is one of the most gratifying experiences in life. I count those hours spent communing with great and original individuals, by immersing ourselves in their works and making ourselves at home in their worlds of feeling, belief, and thought as some of the most solemn and rewarding of all times. In doing so we become more aware than by any other means of the multifarious magnificence and richness of revelation of the world of the mind.” 35. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie fürs Leben,” [1874] in Nietzsches Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 3, vol. 1, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1972), 239–330, 255. 36. Richard Muther, “Arnold Böcklin, zum 70. Geburtstag,” in idem., Studien und Kritiken, vol. I: 1900 (Vienna: Wiener Verlag, 1901), 140–57, 140f.: “Thus art of all times came to be given its due and the great works of art apprehended as expressions of great personalities, from whose minds they gushed with elemental, natural force. The cult of personality replaced aesthetic abstraction. Rembrandt and disorderliness ousted Raphael. The brusquer and more idiosyncratic an artist revealed his personality to be, the dearer he was to us. Devoted communities gathered around Botticelli, Carlo Crivelli, and Grünewald.” 37. Zilsel, Die Geniereligion, 151. 38. Theodor A. Meyer, “Die Persönlichkeit des Künstlers im Kunstwerk und ihre ästhetische Bedeutung,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allge­ meine Kunstwissenschaft 9, no 1 (1914): 47–65, 54. The idols of youth are, according to Max Weber, “personality” and “experience,” see Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf” [1919] in Gesam­ melte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1922), 524–55, 533. 39. Adolf Lasson, “Stilvoll. Eine Studie,” Preußische Jahrbücher 66 (1890): 315–44, 323f. See, for example, Karl von Hase, Erin­ nerungen an Italien in Briefen an die künftige Geliebte (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1891), 186: “I therefore know only one way of discussing works of art which is worth the effort, namely such a one whereby, when confronted with the work or an exact copy of it, the same thing develops in the soul of the observer that occurred in the artist himself when he designed and executed his work, or in the relationship of the individual to the whole, in other words in an art-historical respect, which explains the position of the ­artist “Empathy” in Art History 393 and his work with respect to the artistic worlds that preceded and succeeded him.” Also Max Sauerlandt, Werkformen deutscher Kunst (Königstein im Taunus: Karl Robert Langewiesche, 1926), 10: “Precisely because the whole world so stubbornly resists this realization, it cannot be said often or clearly enough that reflecting on the artistic thinking of the artist, even where this is fully accomplished within the subconscious of resonating feeling, is a precondition for artistic enjoyment.” By contrast, see Max Scheler, “Vorbilder und Führer,” in Schriften aus dem Nachlass, vol. 1: Zur Ethik und Erkenntnislehre, ed. Maria Scheler (Berlin: Francke, 1957), 255–344 (“Der Künstler—ein Schöpfer”), 330: “The work of art does not express a feeling or opinion of the artist. It is a visible, palpable creation and the less it recalls the life of the artist and the more it has freed itself from the umbilical cord of its making and appears as a work of God, the higher it stands.” 40. Volkelt, Ästhetische Zeitfragen, 77–109 (“Dritter Vortrag. Die Kunst als Schöpferin einer zweiten Welt”), 88f. 41. Karl Paul Hasse, Die Italienische Renaissance. Ein Grundriß der Geschichte ihrer Kultur (Leipzig: Alfred Kröner, 1915), 182: “All attempts by those who come later to empathize with, and describe the contest between, the forces that preside over the inner life of this unique individual [Michelangelo] will fall short of their aim. Only those who experience inner struggles of their own and undergo conflicts of life akin to those of a Michelangelo might justifiably, provided they are endowed with sufficient mental ability, hope to come close to the task.” 42. Margarethe Hausenberg, Matthias Grünewald im Wandel der deutschen Kunstanschauung (Leipzig: J.J. Weber, 1927), 4. 43. Hamann, Der Impressionismus in Leben und Kunst, 140f. 44. Zilsel, Die Geniereligion, 95. 45. Otto Pächt, “Das Ende der Abbildtheorie,” Kritische Berichte zur kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur, nos 3–4 (1930/32): 1–9, 9, containing a reference to Benedetto Croce, Zur Theorie und Kritik der Geschichte der bildenden Kunst, translated by Julius Schlosser (Augsburg: Filser, 1926), 38. Heinrich Wölfflin, “Italien und das deutsche Formgefühl” [1920/21] in idem., Gedanken zur Kunstgeschichte. Gedrucktes und Ungedrucktes (Basel: Benno Schabe & Co., 1941), 119–26, 125: “There seems to be no way around it: in revering Italian values, the German renounces his god and commits idolatry. But what if we were not seeing Italy as an ‘Italian’ sees it? If we were taking something out of Italian art that we ourselves had put into it in the first place? It is clear that on the basis of the background of the Nordic sense of form, this southern beauty would have a completely new impact.” 46. Hamann, Der Impressionismus in Leben und Kunst, 140f. See Döring, “Über Einfühlung” (note 5), 570: “What the expression 394 Joseph Imorde ‘empathy’ is supposed, in its ‘harmless’ sense, to denote is a longfamiliar group of psychological processes. These are the procedures which, in the form of ‘aesthetic contemplation,’ perform the aesthetic task that was used in all earnest by primitive man to explain every natural phenomenon: imbuing with life, anthropomorphization, personalization. In all innocence, primitive man, with his animistic way of thinking, explained every occurrence by analogy with the exercising of the human will.” 47. Richard Hamann, Ästhetik (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1919), 51. 48. Statement reported in Michael Stettler, Über Heinrich Wölfflin (Bern: Hans Huber, 1970), 14: “When one has experienced how difficult it is to be correctly understood, even to a limited extent, by contemporaries and initiates, there is something ludicrous about the idea that the Dutchman Rembrandt, from the seventeenth century, could be interpreted by Heinrich Wölfflin of Winterthur, resident in Waldhof. Furthermore, I also see it as unpleasant ingratiation and misplaced collegiality when one of us tries to get close to such a great. I will never write about people, only about objective issues. This is why I find the natural sciences so appealing.” 49. Julius von Schlosser, “Zur Einführung,” in Croce, Zur Theorie und Kritik der Geschichte der bildenden Kunst, 1f., 2. 50. To quote a word used by Nietzsche. Nietzsche, “Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie fürs Leben,” 239–330, 313. 51. Julius von Schlosser, Künstlerprobleme der Frührenaissance, no III, part V: Lorenzo Ghiberti (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1934), 8. 52. Julius von Schlosser, “Stilgeschichte” und “Sprachgeschichte” der bildenden Kunst. Ein Rückblick (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie für Wissenschaften, 1935), 30f. 53. Ibid., 16 (the “words of the Abbé from Goethe’s Wanderjahre”): “How difficult it is, though apparently so natural, to look at nature or a splendid painting simply for itself, to listen to a song for the sake of the singing, to admire the actor in the actor, or to take pleasure in a building for the sake of its own harmony and durability. Now, by contrast, people can be seen treating unquestionable works of art as if they were lumps of soft clay. The shaped marble is expected to refashion itself, the solidly constructed building to expand or contract, a painting to instruct, and a play to improve, in accordance with their inclinations, opinions, and fancies, and everything is to become everything else. The reason being, in fact, that most people are themselves formless, that they are incapable of modeling themselves from their being, so that all may become free and loose stuff of which they too are a part. They reduce everything in the end to so-called effect. Everything is to be relative and thus indeed becomes relative, other than nonsense, or vulgarity, which then shall reign supreme.” “Empathy” in Art History 395 54. Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 72f. 55. Schlosser, “Stilgeschichte” und “Sprachgeschichte” der bildenden Kunst, 5. 56. Friedrich Gundolf, “Vorbilder,” Jahrbuch für die geistige Bewegung 3 (1912), 1–20, 5 and 8f. 57. Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker, vol. 2: Von Pass­ avant bis Justi (Leipzig: E.A. Seemann, 1921), 213. 58. Henry Thode, Kunst, Religion und Kultur. Ansprache an die Heidelberger Studentenschaft gehalten bei der anlässlich seiner Ablehnung des Rufes an die Berliner Universität veranstalteten Feier (Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1901), 5: “What, then, is this Germanness, which has at last assumed the outward form of political unity, making us a large, indeed a mighty people? And wherein lies the power of its essence? It is nothing other than that aptitude, that need to internalize, which no other nation possesses to the same degree. It is that compulsion and ability to disregard all outward appearance in favor of what is recognized as the true nature found within; it is that sincere striving for profundity. Thus can it not be otherwise than that our mission stands clear and bright before us: to immerse ourselves, far removed from mere appearances, in the depths!” 59. Heinrich Wölfflin, Italien und das deutsche Formgefühl (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1931), 206: “In point of fact, reverent of nature though the German may be, it is also in his blood to go beyond the tangibly natural. He develops notions of beauty which no longer coincide with any reality.” And earlier in Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1915), 113: “Italy has always possessed a stronger feel for the superficial than the Germanic north, in whose blood it is to delve around in the depths.” 60. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1931), II, 513f. See Klaus von See, “Das ‘Nordische’ in der deutschen Wissenschaft des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik 15, no 2 (1983), 8–38, 25. See also Hans Schwerte, Faust und das Faustische. Ein Kapitel deutscher Ideologie (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1962), 148–90. 61. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, “Die Überschätzung französischer Kunst in Deutschland,” Der Kunstwart 18, no 22 (August 1905), 501–8, 501: “To be German is to be universal. No people has, since time immemorial, gone further in escaping itself, breaking through the bounds of self and inner being, venturing into the outside, alien world and incorporating into its own ambit all the patterns of living and intellectual and artistic milieux it has come into contact with there than ours. It is the Faustian in us that does not content 396 Joseph Imorde itself with humanity but desires the world as well. And it is no doubt to the Faustian, that eternal urge to raise the individual to the universal, that we owe our richness and beauty as a people. Our entire history, heroic to the point of adventurousness, regardless of whether we consider it from its political or its intellectual side, derives from this.” 62. Rudolf Kautzsch, Der Begriff der Entwicklung in der Kunst­ geschichte. Rede zur Kaisergeburtstagfeier am 27. Januar 1917 (Frankfurt am Main: Werner und Winter, 1917), 22. Max Nordau, “Die gesellschaftliche Aufgabe der Kunst,” in idem., Von Kunst und Künstlern. Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte (Leipzig: B. Elischer Nachfolger, date not known), 1–26, 25: “Like the art patrons of yesteryear, the people, turned art sponsor, are only interested in art for their own sake. The source of the emotions they experience in art are the emotions they experience in their own lives. What they look for in a work of art is to find themselves reflected there, only, like a priest or king in days of yore, magnified and ennobled.” 63. Henry Thode, Das Wesen der deutschen bildenden Kunst (Leipzig and Berlin: B.G. Teubner, 1918), 16. 64. Joseph August Lux, Deutschland als Welterzieher. Ein Buch über deutsche Charakterkultur (Stuttgart/Berlin/Leipzig: Union Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1915), 93. 65. Thode, Das Wesen der deutschen bildenden Kunst, 17. 66. Ibid. 67. Eduard Wechßler, Esprit und Geist. Versuch einer Wesenskunde des Deutschen und des Franzosen (Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1927), 51. 68. Ibid., 52. See also 54: “It is not by chance that this painting [German Expressionism, J.I.], appreciated by few today, emerged at the same time as the first critical essays by the science of phenomenology. Only here does a meticulous description of the intrinsic replace the mere concept, which never quite does justice to the intellectual essences. Edmund Husserl and his students undertook to explain the meaning of this method of thinking and representation in all its novelty: since 1913 the Jahrbuch für Phänomenologie has provided a summary of their endeavors. But the whole movement is too deeply grounded within the development of German thinking for it not also to have asserted itself outside this philosophical school. Rudolf Otto’s book on the concept of the holy and Richard Hamann’s phenomenological explanation of aesthetics, along with other works both old and new, reveal a striving to fathom the depth of mental phenomena in a manner in keeping with the German way of thinking.” 69. Jens Petersen, “Das deutsche politische Italienbild in der Zeit der nationalen Einigung,” in Imagini a confronto. Italia e Germania. Deutsche Italienbilder und Italienische Deutschlandbilder, ed. “Empathy” in Art History 397 Angelo Ara (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991), 169–204, 202. Relating here to Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s achievements in the field of projection. See Weigert, Die heutigen Aufgaben der Kunstwissenschaft, 61: “The Germanic race, however, wants to ‘reach out into the world.’ As a combative race, it needs an enemy, and if that enemy does not enter its territory, it seeks it out. This is as true of intellectual combat as it is of armed combat.” Article Title 399 Art in Translation, Volume 6, Issue 4, pp. 399–436 DOI: 10.2752/175613114X14105155617384 Reprints available directly from the Publishers. Photocopying permitted by licence only. © 2014 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. Kirsten Wagner Translated by Jonathan Blower First published in German as “Die Beseelung der Architektur. Empathie und architektonischer Raum.” In Robin Curtis and Gertrud Koch (eds), Einfühlung. Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart eines ästhetischen Konzepts (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2009), 49–78. Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space Abstract Kirsten Wagner’s essay focuses on the psychological and physiological perception of space and the inflection of both by empathy theory. She traces the development of empathy aesthetics and spatial perception in the early investigations of Hermann von Helmholtz, Hermann Lotze, and Wilhelm Wundt, and explicates how spatial representations, both visual and tactile, are traced by bodily movements. This subject–object union was understood by Robert Vischer as a symbolizing activity derived from “the pantheistic urge for union with the world.” Vischer’s theory was further systemized by Theodor Lipps, who proposed three 400 Kirsten Wagner pairings of opposing forces as the psychological armature within which we understand and resonate with external objects. Lipps’s debt to Karl Bötticher relates empathy theory very directly to architectural form, a theme subsequently taken up in Heinrich Wölfflin’s “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture,” 1886. In the process, the classical concept of rules and proportion was reinterpreted as a scientific, psychological concept of emotional projection. An extreme version of the empathetic understanding of architectural space was reached by August Schmarsow, who saw it as a space projected by the axial body and shaped by the body’s visual and tactile faculties. KEYWORDS: empathy, architectural space, phenomenology, physiological psychology, corporeal projection, Heinrich Wölfflin, Theodor Lipps, Immanuel Kant, Hermann Lotze, Wilhelm Wundt, Hermann von Helmholtz, Robert Vischer, Karl Bötticher, August Schmarsow Introduction by Robin Curtis (Heinrich-Heine University, Düsseldorf) One of the most remarkable aspects of the debates around the notion of Einfühlung through the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century in Germany was the broad range of disciplines and method­ ologies that ultimately came to play a part in the development of what today is primarily viewed as an aesthetic discourse. In her meticulous historical overview, Kirsten Wagner traces the central significance of the fields of experimental physiology and psychology (and in particular the contributions made by Hermann Lotze, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Wilhelm Wundt among others) to the development of empathy aes­ thetics. Taking up the challenge implied by Kant’s designation of space and spatial experience as a priori representations (and thus contingent upon the particulars of the human apparatus’s engagement with space), experimental physiology and aesthetic theory had many common con­ cerns throughout this period, a collaboration that proved to be particu­ larly fruitful for the investigation of the anthropomorphic implications of architecture. Wagner focuses on the varied reasons why Einfühlung has continued to be relevant for architectural theory, and its concern with spatial ex­ perience in particular, despite several caveats regarding the conceptual basis for empathy aesthetics: the first being the irreducible natural body as its fundamental point of reference and the second located in the sol­ ipsistic act of the projection of the ego, both of which are key to the notion of Einfühlung. And yet, while not being entirely discounted, each of these objections are scrutinized and historicized and thus made more useful in their complexity by Wagner by means of recontextualizations Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space 401 of them in various permutations within the work of authors ranging from Robert Vischer to Theodor Lipps, Heinrich Wölfflin, and espe­ cially August Schmarsow, whose significant contribution to this debate is otherwise often overlooked. For at the heart of these authors’ commentaries on aesthetic experi­ ence and Einfühlung’s role in it is a fundamental questioning of the relationship between the observer and the world. That this questioning frequently suggested an amalgamation of mechanistic and Romantic tendencies is disconcertingly often a central feature of the Einfühlung discourse. In this vein Jutta Müller-Tamm’s own recent intervention into the historical reevaluation of Einfühlung,1 which is noted in passing in Wagner’s text, highlights the overarching importance of the projection metaphor for a range of discourses in the nineteenth century, and in particular for Einfühlung, and as such, deserves mention here. Arguing that empathy aesthetics should be understood to be analogous to the projection theory of nineteenth-century sensory physiology, MüllerTamm’s book represents one contribution to a still-vital field of research in the German language that seeks to reconsider the singular role that empathy aesthetics played in its historical context. Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space Kirsten Wagner Empathy aesthetics presents a challenge to any systematic, historical anthropology of architecture, for it describes an attempt to trace both aesthetic effect and the meaning of spatial form—insofar as the latter is also a theory of symbols—back to the human body and its sensations. Fundamental though this approach is to the consideration of architecture, the theoretical presuppositions of empathy aesthetics are by no means unproblematic. For one, it implicitly asserts the irreducibility of a quasi-natural body. Nevertheless, anthropology itself has already pointed out the extent to which certain cultural practices—including architecture—conspire to affect, historicize, and medialize both the organic and the symbolic constitution of the body.1 Secondly, the phenomenon of “central empathy,”2 whereby the perceiving ego is thought to be projected or transposed onto the perceived object—and to the point of complete coalescence—represents a radicalization of subjectivist epistemology: the act of perception not only involves the creation of a world; the world is “animated” by the ego as the latter is projected, that is, life is “breathed into it” in the full demiurgical sense of that phrase.3 And this “merger of subject and object in the sentient imagination”4 is not 402 (a) Figures 1a–c [From left to right:] “The bigness which the building actually has. The bigness which it appears to have. The feeling of bigness which it gives” [sic]. Source: Kent C. Bloomer and Charles W. Moore, Body, Memory, and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 28. Kirsten Wagner (b) (c) so much the overcoming of the corresponding dualism; the latter is the first presupposition of the former.5 Despite various criticisms, some of them fundamental, the aesthetics of empathy has continued to influence architectural theory until relatively recently. For instance: Heinrich Wölfflin’s doctoral dissertation, Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture,6 which refers to Johannes Volkelt, Hermann Lotze, and Robert Vischer in expounding the anthropological causes of the expressiveness of architecture, has been taken up time and again. The same goes for the gestalt psychology of Rudolf Arnheim’s theory of architectonic form7 or, more recently, the corporal phenomenology of Wolfgang Meisenheimer’s attempt to explain built space.8 The architectural theory of Kent Bloomer and Charles Moore, based on bodily experience, was also affiliated with empathy aesthetics, especially that of Robert Vischer and Theodor Lipps.9 Clearly, what they describe as bodily sensation—the perception of form and space or, in other words, the corporeal and spatial phenomenology furnished by empathy aesthetics—interested them as a possible alternative: to modern functionalism on the one hand and to the semiotic theory of poststructuralism on the other. The latter is also typical of how empathy aesthetics was received in the field of literary theory, where Georg Braungart deployed “corporeally present” and “experiential meaning” against the “linguistic crisis” and “semantic pessimism” of poststructuralist theorizing.10 The theoretical and historical interest in empathy aesthetics and its significance for modern art and architectural theory can be traced back to a volume published by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou: Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893.11 Though this publication focused on space and form as concepts that were central to the fledgling discipline of scientific art history (Kunstwissenschaft) in the late nineteenth century, it also became clear that these concepts had already played a major role in the aesthetics of empathy and had acquired new connotations in the process. The historical connection between empathy aesthetics and scientific art Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space 403 history will be a central focus of this paper. But besides considering the influence of empathy aesthetics in the architectural theory of the likes of Heinrich Wölfflin and August Schmarsow, it will also consider the hitherto-neglected function of space and architecture in writings on empathy aesthetics. To this end it will first be necessary to survey the history of empathy aesthetics and its close ties to the sensory physiology of the nineteenth century, where, particularly after Immanuel Kant, the question of spatial perception was very much on the experimental agenda.12 Spatial Perception in Physiological Psychology In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant gave what would become the working definition of space for the whole of the nineteenth century: both space and time are a priori representations, the pure forms of the intuition upon which all sensory perception of external phenomena is based.13 Space, then, is not a property of things; for Kant it is elaborated by the perceiving, sentient subject: We can speak […] only from the human standpoint. If we depart from the subjective condition under which alone we can acquire outer intuition […] then the representation of space signifies nothing at all. This predicate is attributed to things only insofar as they appear to us, i.e., are objects of sensibility.14 Working on the dual assumption that, on the one hand, our perception of the external world of objects is structured by these pure forms of intuition and, on the other, that sensory perception is privileged as the only realm in which spatiality is manifested at all, Kant forcibly brought about a shift on the question of space: away from “logic and metaphysics”15 and toward psychology and physiology.16 Even before the field of spatial perception came to be occupied by physiological psychology, though, considerable advances had already been made by the English empiricists.17 Their principal contribution was to have demonstrated the involvement of muscular sensations in spatial perception, an approach that was then taken up by Alexander Bain.18 He introduced the “Muscular Sense”—feelings of movement, pressure, and contraction—as a distinct class of sensations that preceded all other sensory perceptions and worked in conjunction with them.19 Visual perception of spatial determinants—extension, form, magnitude, distance, location, and direction—only occurs when sensations of color and light are accompanied by eye and body movements or their corresponding muscular sensations.20 Physiological psychology may have recognized the multimodality of spatial perception, but the primacy, theorization, and experimental 404 Kirsten Wagner c­ onfigurations of spatial perception had mainly drawn on the sense of sight, just as the eye had become the sole subject and object of knowledge for all early nineteenth-century psychology.21 That visual perception was often investigated using geometric figures, and was thus conceived by analogy with geometric space, is also evident from Theodor Lipps’s studies of geometric optical illusions in spatial intuition.22 And while Kant’s intuited space had been based on Euclidean geometry, Hermann von Helmholtz had already begun to work on the assumption of non-Euclidean geometries.23 Opinions on Kant remained divided along a number of lines. On the one hand, physiology took up his exposition of the subjectivity of sensory perception and cognition, substantiating it materially with reference to the anatomical structure of man: at least since Johannes Müller’s theory of specific nerve energies, according to which the “quality of our sensations depends not on the perceived external object but on the sensory nerves that transmit the sensation,” physiology began to assume an “autonomy of the senses.”24 It was found that the various sensory organs, with nerve fibers attuned respectively to sensations of light, sound, heat, etc., were media for the very production of what they transmitted. So, unlike the camera obscura, the early modern model of perception, they were not passive agencies for admitting images of the outside world into the space of the soul but active participants in the process of perception.26 On the other hand, the hierarchy between primary and secondary sensory qualities was inverted. In the physiology of the nineteenth century, the perception of the outside world was constituted by these secondary qualities, that is, by direct sensations of light, color, and heat: Knowledge of a phenomenological world begins with the excited condition of the retina and develops according to the constitution of this organ. The positing of external objects, as well as concepts of shape, extension, and solidity come only after this founding experience.27 The major controversy in sensory physiology concerned the extent to which spatial representations, now relegated to the status of secondary qualities, are determined by the structural conditions of the sensory organs, or rather, whether it is only through experience that they are constituted on that basis. This has gone down in the history of science as a dispute between nativists and empiricists, although the somewhat artificial distinction between them was often difficult to maintain. Helmholtz, whose investigations into (spatial) perception, along with those of Hermann Lotze and Wilhelm Wundt, established the foundations of empathy aesthetics, represented the empiricist approach. According to him, perception describes a complex learning process: sensations produced by external objects and simultaneously defined Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space 405 by the peculiarities of the given sensory organ are now no more than “symbols of external conditions,”28 symbols that lack any similarity to their related referents and whose significance has to be learnt. They only become perceptions and representations through a psychological act of interpretation, which Helmholtz described as “subconscious” or “inductive inference” based on prior experience.29 Hence “experience, training, and habit” play an essential part in perception.30 Specifically spatial representations, for Helmholtz, result from the movements of the eye and the body, and from local signals,31 which, since Lotze, had been understood as those tactile or visual sensations that are specific to each part of the skin or retina. The empiricist approach held that the spatial significance of these signals was not fixed. Rather, it was learnt, and for Helmholtz this primarily meant hand–eye coordination: the kinesthetic interaction of tactile and visual sensations. Perception of spatial variables such as direction, location, and magnitude will only occur when the connection between bodily movements and tactile and visual sensations has been established and stabilized through practical actions.32 Wilhelm Wundt, who made his name with a book on muscular sensations in physiology, and served as Helmholtz’s assistant in Heidelberg from 1858 to 1865, also had to assume an “unconscious process of inference” in order to give a plausible explanation of the “formation of visual representations.”34 But, unlike Helmholtz, Wundt sought to mediate between nativism and empiricism. His answer to the central problem of how one could explain spatial perception without falling into the epistemological traps of either approach35 was to synthesize tactile, optical, and kinesthetic sensations while acknowledging the intrinsic characteristics of the sensory organs. For Wundt, both kinesthetic and optical space were fundamentally dependent on sensations of movement, which were again divided up into sensations of pressure, contraction, and innervation. In physiological psychology, motor innervation designated a centrally controlled movement independent of external stimuli, that is, an excitement of muscle tissue proceeding from interior to exterior and evidently also activating past patterns of movement.36 For Wundt, motor innervation, or the “direct influence of the will on the locomotive organs,” is the “first foundation of the perception of time and space.”37 In particular, the sensation of innervation conveys a sense of the force of a movement.38 Together with local signals from the retina and the skin, sensations of movement, which are characterized by pressure, tension, and force, generate a scale or pattern39 against which tactile and visual space is gauged and measured on the basis of experience. And what Wundt shows to be representative of visual space can be extrapolated to tactile space merely by including the movements of the whole body: “The form we give to the field of vision, the direction and location we attribute to individual objects within the same, and the measurement of its dimensions are 406 Kirsten Wagner dependent on the movements of the eye.”40 In short, the elaboration of spatial representation is the result of a tactile and visual tracing of external objects by a body that both performs and senses movements. The conception of spatial perception in physiological psychology is fundamental to empathy aesthetics. It touches on subjectivity and the somatic substantiation of space as well as the notion that spatiality can only be conveyed through movement and the sensation of movement. Given the many connections, which even extend to the split-projection thesis, Müller-Tamm has spoken of empathy aesthetics as a “branch of aesthetics that paralleled the projection theory of late nineteenthcentury sensory physiology.”41 Whether or not one can justifiably speak of a parallelism in the mutual influences, frequent intersections, and new syntheses between physiological, psychological, and aesthetic discourses need not concern us here. But as the leading science of the nineteenth century, there is no doubt that physiology, with its objects, methods, and concepts, penetrated many other areas of life and science and contributed to the emergence of new pictures of space and the body.42 Empathy Aesthetics between Physiological Psychology and Symbol Theory Robert Vischer’s dissertation, Ueber das optische Formgefühl (On the optical sense of form),43 already shows clear evidence of the influence of physiological psychology.44 Drawing on a number of results from that field, and “with the help of some generally known features of our physical life,” Vischer ventured “to undertake a preliminary and simple analysis of the structure of our imagination.”45 If all imaginative representation was based on “certain vibrations” of the nerves—whereby Vischer was by no means convinced of the existing explanations of the relationship between physiological nerve excitation and psychological processes—he still accepted the distinction between “sensory and kinesthetic stimuli,”47 or nerve and muscle sensations.48 From this distinction he developed a classification of physical and aesthetic behavior, the latter built on the former: Vischer differentiated between an “immediate sensory sensibility” (sensitive Zuempfindung), which, along with sensory stimuli, included sensations of light and color, and a “responsive motor sensibility” (motorische Nachempfindung). The latter corresponds to muscular sensations. At the same time, it is also the source of the spatial determinants of external phenomena. Both types of sensation are capable of becoming “immediate feelings” or “responsive feelings” if, in the act of perception, the immediate sensations are supplemented by perceptions that are clearly triggered by them, particularly such perceptions as derive from the subject’s own corporeal form and the sense of his own body and movement: Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space 407 The apparent movement of form is thus unconsciously accompanied by a concrete emotional element of feeling that is inseparably bound up with the concept of human wholeness. When I, for instance, look at the undulations and curves in a road, my thoughts also trace them—sometimes with dreamy hesitation, sometimes at a bounding speed […]. The direction and tempo of this motion are related to the perceived form and thus emulate human impulses and passions. Thus the responsive sensation intensifies into a responsive feeling … The […] immediate sensation experiences a similar intensification, which … affects the whole mood of the person […] Accordingly, we can also speak of an immediate feeling (Zufühlung) […] Thus we find here (in the sensory stimuli and perceived qualities of light, color, warmth, K.W.), again, that peculiar confusion of our own stimulation with the thing that produces the stimulus: light and color in themselves appear to be angry, to jubilate, to mourn, and so on.49 Immediate and responsive feeling already constitute an objectification of the self, i.e., a preliminary stage of empathy. But this stage is different from that of the “central projection” of the ego into the “interior of the phenomenon.” It is only with empathy, which feels for “the object from the inside (the object’s center) to the outside (the object’s form),” that there is an actual “merger of subject and object in the sentient imagination.”50 The subject therefore no longer perceives its own feelings in the perceived object; its ego lives in it. When Robert Vischer designates this merger of subject and object as a “symbolizing activity” based on nothing less “than the pantheistic urge for union with the world,”51 on the one hand he locates empathy theory within the tradition of Romanticism. Meanwhile, research has repeatedly shown that empathy theory, quite contrary to Romanticism’s animate nature, evinces a mechanical conception of nature precisely because it is with an inanimate nature that the subject empathizes.52 What Robert Vischer calls “symbolizing activity”—the projection of (a soul’s) content onto form—leads, on the other hand, to the aesthetic theory of symbols.53 Friedrich Theodor Vischer before him had already spoken of those “intuitive investments” and the “unconscious attribution of emotions”54 that his son Robert would take as points of departure for his own observations on empathy theory.55 Unlike Hegel and some of his own earlier efforts, Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s critique of his own aesthetics56 no longer confined the symbol to its historical, religious form. However, he did distinguish three main types of relation between image and meaning, relations that underlie symbols and are themselves based on “points of comparison”: firstly, that vague, involuntary relation that engenders a confusion of image and meaning. This relation is characteristic of religious consciousness, whose nature is imbued with magical powers. 408 Kirsten Wagner Vischer’s second main form is the “animation of nature: involuntary but still free, unconscious and yet in a certain sense also conscious; an act of conferral whereby we subordinate our soul and moods to the unconscious.”57 Image and meaning are confounded here too, but the consciousness, which is now an aesthetic consciousness, is wise to the illusion. Vischer speaks of a “freedom from illusion that sustains the illusion” and refers to the corresponding conscious act as a “proviso.”58 This intermediate form of symbolism, of which “Hegel was not yet aware,”59 becomes an “inevitable characteristic of man” for Vischer.60 And with that it also becomes an anthropological constant and the key to an aesthetics of content that opposes formalist aesthetics. Under this banner Vischer subsumed that “conferral of soul” which had been described if not systematized in his earlier writings.61 Following on from his son and Johannes Volkelt, it was then directly formulated as empathy. This intermediate form of symbolism is therefore a “symbolism of ‘empathy’”:62 This psychical act is actually already mentioned in my Aesthetics at the point where I discuss how the observer is able to see his own emotional moods and passions reflected in natural phenomena and atmospheric movements. All I had failed to recognize was that this ought to have been treated as a specific form, in the section on symbolism. As a result, that section wrongly restricted the significance of the symbol to the vague, contingent form […] It must be in the nature of the human soul that it should thus project itself and its moods onto and into existential forms which in themselves have nothing to do with it.”63 Finally, the third main form of the symbol is “simply lucid and free” […] “The fact that image and meaning are only connected by a tertium comparationis is now more than just a proviso; it is known.”64 Robert Vischer’s theory of empathy incorporates the aesthetic concept of the symbol. As concepts, empathy and symbolism share a process of signification that proceeds from the body. Meaning results when emotional states and corporeal feelings are transferred to a perceived object. Even the mere structure of the body has a significant effect on how things appear. Things ought to be perceived as pleasant and exciting under corresponding physical conditions. And this is how Robert Vischer was able to explain the diversity of immediate sensations (Zuempfindungen): with reference to the “similarity or dissimilarity of the object, first with regard to the structure of the eye and second with regard to the structure of the whole body. The horizontal line is pleasing because our eyes are positioned horizontally”65—just as empathy theory in turn would derive qualities such as regularity, rhythm, symmetry, and proportion from the structure of the body and would come to see them as “subjective laws of the normal human body.”66 Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space 409 The difference between this new anthropomorphism and earlier analogical corporeal thinking was its scientific grounding in physiology and psychology. On the basis of experimental research in these fields, bodily projection was presented as an involuntary mechanism67 caused by bodily sensations of sensory impressions that are then transferred to the perceived object. Of particular importance were those sensations that had already taken on fundamental significance in the physiological psychology of spatial perception: tactile and kinesthetic sensations. Spatial perception had become a paradigm of empathy theory and could be used to show that “aesthetic-symbolic animation” presupposed the “corporeal projection of the self.” Following on from Theodor Lipps’s studies on geometric optical illusions, Johannes Volkelt was able to establish the following: By contrast, in the aesthetic apprehension of spatial forms, sensory impressions are coupled […] with the process of our corporeal experience of the extensions, boundaries, and movements of the spatial formation, and these bodily perceptions are then translated and intensified into spirit.68 The Symbolic Animation of Spatial Forms The prominence accorded to spatial forms and the spatial art of architecture in empathy aesthetics is likewise already announced in Robert Vischer’s dissertation.69 In his introductory section on “forms of spatial perception” Vischer describes how spatial objects, when actively “looked at” rather than “merely seen,”70 are apprehended in two different ways: firstly, by a linear behavior that follows the lines and contours of the object with the tips of the fingers; and secondly, by a plastic, painterly behavior that traces the “planes, projections, and recessions” with a “broad hand.”71 Unlike visual impressions, which tend to be passive in Vischer’s characterization of mere seeing, more active looking presupposes a movement of hand and eye, a movement that simultaneously enlivens the object. The direct point of reference here is physiological psychology, which had traced spatial and formal perception back to the touch of the hand and the movement of the eye. Above all, though, it is the writings of Theodor Lipps that demonstrate the extent to which empathy theory was anchored in the psychophysics of spatial perception. Although Lipps was the main representative of empathy theory, adopting the concept of empathy from Robert Vischer and developing it in aesthetics and psychology,72 there has been very little investigation into how much his initial studies on spatial aesthetics were rooted in sensory physiology.73 His intensive engagement with this field is evident from his early work on the Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens (Fundamentals of the life of the soul), where he ­demonstrates intimate 410 Kirsten Wagner Figure 2 Optical illusions after Wundt, exemplifying the overestimation of acute angles and the underestimation of obtuse angles. Source: Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie 2: 104. Figure 3 Geometric optical illusions after Lipps. Overestimation of the divergence of the sides of an acute angle and underestimation of the divergence of an obtuse angle at its vertex. Source: Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrischoptische Täuschungen (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1897), 293. knowledge of the various theories of perception, dealing at length with tactile and visual perception as well as with optical illusions of orientation and proportions in space.74 If physiological psychology had traced optical illusions back to either the “laws of eye movement” and “modifications of vision or visual images” or to “deceptive judgments,”76 Lipps followed Helmholtz in declaring them to be illusory judgments based on experience and habit.77 Lipps substantiated this experimentally based assertion in a number of articles78 and an 1897 monograph on Raumästhetik und geometrischoptische Täuschungen (Spatial aesthetics and geometric optical illusions).79 Here he concretized Helmholtz’s conception of experience by saying that the manner in which previous experiences affect present perception has to do with mechanical forces felt by the body of the perceiving subject: These experiences include the direction of gravitational force; linear movements that produce simple movement impulses; the action of combinations of movement impulses; the constant deflection of linear movements by the permanent influence of deflecting forces; the natural tendency for an existing movement to continue unchanged; movements inhibited or halted by opposing forces; resistances to movement that increase in the course of a Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space 411 movement and bring about an ever-greater inclination to move in the opposite direction; or, in short, mechanical actions and reactions. All these experiences are quite definite and their content is regular. They are governed by universal mechanical laws. These laws are also at work in us and they determine our judgment of spatial forms.80 According to Lipps’s classification, three pairings of mutually antagonistic forces can be distinguished: (1) confinement and expansion, (2) gravity and vertical extension, (3) identity of direction and change of direction.81 All natural events are based on these interactions, which produce “resting form”82 once a state of equilibrium has been established between opposing forces. The picture of the world upon which these assumptions are based is that of classical mechanics: physical bodies are constantly subjected to forces that influence their states of movement, the direction of their movements, and their forms. In transferring these mechanical laws into the field of aesthetics, Lipps carried out at least two operations that set his aesthetic mechan­ ics apart from any physical theory.83 Firstly, as Maria Rosaria de Rosa has shown, he adapted mechanical procedures to suit the concept of empathy. Secondly, the movement of the object became a movement on the part of the subject.84 It follows that a spatial form is never perceived as such; it is not simply given. Rather, the observing subject sees in it the operation of mechanical forces that are familiar from the very first day of bodily experience: “The movements of forms and the forces that set objects in motion are therefore nothing other than the intensities, effects, and mutual equilibrium of the subject’s own inclinations and impulses.”85 This principle of aesthetic mechanics, once identified, could be used to explain both geometric optical illusions and even aesthetic beauty itself as enjoyment of or pleasure in a perceived object. The “mental representation of those forces, actions, and tendencies which (to the perceiving subject, K.W.) appear to be at work in spatial formations”86 therefore holds the key to geometric optical illusions. By contrast, the beauty of spatial forms is based on the freedom with which the forces manifest themselves.87 To perceive an object aesthetically and thus to empathize with it is to comprehend the mechanical forces that give the object its specific form. These forces can only be perceived by a body that is itself subject to them. And yet this elemental body is negated. Ultimately it is turned into a medium which, in the act of empathy, becomes invisible and must become invisible in order to sustain the very basis of empathy: the illusion of an absolute self-projection into the perceived object. The aesthetic consciousness can know nothing of the muscular contractions and kinesthetic sensations that are induced in its own body when observing spatial form: any muscular sensation that rises to consciousness throws 412 Kirsten Wagner the aesthetic ego back upon its corporeal limits and releases it from the illusion. Or, in the jargon of communication technology, as soon as the body—channel of ego transmission—begins to produce white noise, empathy is disrupted and the aesthetic appearance evaporates. Accordingly, Lipps would go on to criticize all approaches that sought to explain empathy already at the level of these kinesthetic sensations.88 The spatial forms or geometric figures Lipps used in developing his theory of empathy89 point not only to physiology and its laboratory experiments on spatial perception but also to aesthetics itself. If formalist aesthetics took lines, planes, and solids as fundamental forms whose beauty could be traced back to mathematically definable proportions,90 Friedrich Theodor Vischer had also sought to establish “harmonics” on the basis of “(symbolic) mimesis.”91 And if empathy theory wanted to prove itself as a theory of symbolism, it would have to do so for abstract “pure forms” without any apparent expressive value.92 Lipps achieved this using a number of simple and compound spatial forms in an attempt to show the extent to which they “‘symbolize’ something in themselves,” namely those mutually antagonistic mechanical forces that generate forms and are directly accessible to the observer by virtue of his own corporeality. The significance of a form is therefore not something extrinsic; it is always already there within the form—in the way it “straightens out, bends, distends.”93 This led to that universal symbolism of form94 that Lipps differentiated sharply from the “mystical and arbitrary aesthetic interpretation of forms”95 that he sensed in the likes of Karl Bötticher’s Tektonik der Hellenen (The tectonics of the Hellenes).96 Architecture as the Art of Designing and Animating Space in the Abstract It would be hard to overestimate the importance of Bötticher’s work97 for Lipps’s analysis of architecture. While empathy aesthetics could concede that the Tektonik der Hellenen had “at last (removed) architectural aesthetics from religious and historical-philosophical approaches” and prepared it for the “transition to the new psychological aesthetics” by “converting it to empirical method,”98 it was criticized principally on account of Bötticher’s concept of the symbol. These criticisms mainly addressed the visual symbolism of what Bötticher had called the ar­ tistic form (Kunstform) of the individual architectural member: unlike its active form (Werkform)—which is “responsible exclusively for the material and static performance of the architectural component”—the external dressing of artistic form is modeled on “the creations of primordial nature and the products of human activity,”99 which it imitates.100 Artistic form is the structurally unnecessary formal element that completes the architectural component aesthetically by giving visual Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space 413 expression to the static-tectonic idea that the active form embodies. Bötticher writes: Active forms, as moments of static force, were able to dispense with models: they were invented purely on the basis of the spatial characteristics implicit in their static effort, hence by way of mathematical construction alone. Artistic forms, by contrast, as purely allegorical visual similes or symbolic expressions of this effort, were quite impossible without appropriate models for such similes. And therefore the active forms and the whole system of static members to which they belonged could not yet constitute an artistic work: they would only assume this character through their artistic forms.101 If the conceptual, active form appears to have a certain priority over visual, artistic form, this is not the case as far as the historical development of Greek tectonics is concerned. Both are equally original because active form had always been given visual representation.102 Artistic form, in which the static, tectonic idea seeks its adequate image, was characterized by Bötticher as allegorical or symbolic. Hence the link between artistic and active form, between image and meaning, is not arbitrary. Only that which shares fundamental qualities with active form can become artistic form, or a model of artistic form. Hellenic art not only produced tectonic-symbolic artistic forms in its temple buildings; it is a timeless ideal because it also found similes that were particularly well suited to visualizing the interaction of static forces: leaves visibly bending (the cyma) under the load of the entablature;103 the swelling (entasis) and fluting of column shafts as a visualization—derived from the umbellate stalk of the giant hogweed—of the “reactive strength of an unbending prop.”104 Figure 4 Section through the cella of the Temple of Neptune. Source: Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen als ästhetische und kunstgeschichtliche Theorie. Eine Kritik (Hamburg: Leopold Voss, 1896), plate 23. 414 Kirsten Wagner Figure 5 Ornamentation of the column base. Source: Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen als ästhetische und kunstgeschichtliche Theorie. Eine Kritik (Hamburg: Leopold Voss, 1896), plate 7. Bötticher drew directly on Hegel’s symbolism and his reflections on architecture. But for Bötticher the ideas represented in architecture were no longer metaphysical. Rather, architectonic forms were the expression of a constructive idea; they seemed to be determined by material and function. This modernity on Bötticher’s part was also acknowledged by Richard Streiter, a student of Lipps. In contrast to “earlier aesthetics,” Bötticher had taken “necessity and convenience as the points of departure for the development of artistic form” and had established an “intimate relationship between ornamental forms as ‘symbols’ and the structural ‘function’ of the members.”105 But taking artistic forms as the symbolic expression of structural ideas was unsatisfactory from the point of view of empathy aesthetics: the “mathematical construction” of active form in Bötticher’s theory leaves behind a residue that has no expressive value in itself. Empathy aesthetics did not make this distinction. As Lipps had shown, even the geometric solids that comprise the active forms have an expressive value. Furthermore, “aesthetic pleasure” is not determined by “a reflective apprehension of an agreement between ‘simile’ and ‘intrinsic concept.’”106 Expressive value and aesthetic quality do not appertain to the (artistic) form as such; they are only acquired by it when a perceiving subject empathizes with and animates that form. Citing the two Vischers, Lipps, Lotze, and even Wölfflin’s recent Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur, Richard Streiter goes on to say: The new approach to aesthetics sees all visible forms, even inorganic forms, as “symbols” insofar as “they do not simply exist; they constitute themselves, that is, they contain forces and represent their own internal movements.” In short, they engender Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space 415 a certain feeling of vitality. For Bötticher, though, the tectonic symbol is a “visual simile” which, being given to the intrinsically inexpressive active form “from the outside so to speak, as a sort of supplement or illustration,” is supposed to clarify the analogy between form and concept. This overly superficial, overly indigent […] symbolism of Bötticher’s is a fatal flaw in his tectonic theory, and a flaw that proceeds from the erroneous fundamental notion that inorganic matter is not capable of expressing anything that might be immediately comprehensible to us. Had Bötticher been aware of the considerable significance of anthropomorphism and the association of ideas for aesthetics, he would have seen quite clearly that a large part of our aesthetic interest depends on our animating the world around us with our own souls […] that we empathize with all forms, even the simplest of forms, interpolating into them movement and manifestations of force. […] Indeed, this inorganic “language of forms” can be understood directly and without interpretive “visual similes” because that which the forms say to us is not something we read off so much as read into them by empathy.107 Lipps’s analysis of architecture was indebted to the architectural theory of Bötticher and certainly also that of Gottfried Semper. Unlike Bötticher, though, Lipps did not take material and function as his points of departure. Both for him were aspects of the utility of architecture and thus beyond the ideal ends of aesthetics. His approach to architecture was via the geometric forms and “spatial formations” upon which the individual structural elements are based. They are the core that remains when all corporeal mass is stripped away, and it is these, not the matter, that are subject to mechanical forces. This is why Lipps referred to these geometric figures as the “bearers of aesthetic behavior.”108 The object he used for his demonstration of the mechanical aesthetics of architec­ ture was the Doric column, its form being emblematic of the mutually antagonistic forces of gravity and vertical extension, containment and expansion. It was not just in his choice of examples that Lipps remained conventional. His interpretation of the column took its orientation from Bötticher and from a philosophical theory of architecture that had defined the essence of architecture as the conflict between load and support in the columns and entablature of the Greek temple.109 But Lipps also went beyond earlier approaches, not so much by assuming that mechanical forces generate form as by identifying what it is that these forces act upon: abstract geometric form rather than massive corporeal form. And by crediting abstract form with significant content—content related to the bodily sensations of the subject and conveyed in the act of empathetic perception—Lipps advanced even further into modernity.110 416 Figures 6a–b Aesthetic aspects of spatial perception in the example of the Doric column and its geometric forms. Source: Theodor Lipps, “Ästhetische Faktoren der Raumanschauung,” in Beiträge zur Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane. Hermann von Helmholtz als Festgruss zu seinem siebzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Arthur König (Hamburg: Leopold Voss, 1891), 242 and 246. Kirsten Wagner (a) (b) Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space 417 Via the spatial forms in which force is expressed Lipps ultimately also arrived at a definition of architecture as a “spatial art,” that is, an “abstract art of designing and animating space.”111 He would later go on to refine this definition further, distinguishing between a “mass spatial art” and a “pure spatial art.” While ornament came under the latter, the former included all the technical arts that employ mass in the shaping of space: tectonics, ceramics, and architecture. Lipps repeatedly claimed that a space that derives its shape and form from architecture is different to the measurable space of the geometer regardless of whether its individual architectural members can be traced back to geometric figures. By virtue of the forces it engenders and their comprehension by a perceiving subject, architectonic space is an animated space.112 Architecture as Corporeal Projection Heinrich Wölfflin, who had been working on the psychological effect of architecture quite independently of Lipps,113 saw the latter’s investigations as a systematization of what had been suggested more than demonstrated in Lotze’s Mikrokosmos: an “aesthetic apprehension of spatial forms”114 that could be traced back to the corporeal comprehension of mutually antagonistic formative forces. The fact that Lipps was able to use this result as a basis for his explanation of geometric optical illusions appeared less important to Wölfflin than the principle of aesthetic mechanics, which seemed to contain the preliminary “foundations for the aesthetic understanding of beautiful form itself.”115 If art theory was to evolve, Wölfflin would quote Lipps as saying,116 from “kitchen botany” to a “botany of plant physiology,” then it would require a nomenclature, a taxonomy, and a system of forms. Aesthetic mechanics, with its physiological foundations and psychological laws, presented Wölfflin with the necessary prerequisites to attaining this end. Wölfflin’s highly enthusiastic reaction to Lipps’s investigations can clearly be put down to shared interests. Both were concerned with the expression of architectural form, which was to be deciphered, so to speak, with the apparatus of empathy theory.117 At the prompting of Johannes Volkelt, Wölfflin had already broached the subject of architectural expression in his dissertation, Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur. In this work Wölfflin acknowledged the structure of the body as the fundamental basis of aesthetic architectural experience, but he also disputed the Wundtian theory of eye movements being the cause of aesthetic pleasure and displeasure.118 In his view, the judgment of form could not be traced back to a qualitative, light-sensitive organ such as the eye.119 Such judgments would require the involvement of the whole body. Or, as Wölfflin puts it: “Physical forms possess a character only because we ourselves possess a body. If we were purely visual beings, we would always be denied an aesthetic 418 Kirsten Wagner judgment of the physical world.” And he closes with a reflection that bears comparison to Lipps: As human beings with a body that teaches us the nature of gravity, contraction, strength, and so on, we gather the experience that enables us to identify with the conditions of other forms. […] We have carried loads and experienced pressure and counterpressure, we have collapsed to the ground when we no longer had the strength to resist the downward pull of our bodies, and that is why we can appreciate the noble serenity of a column and understand the tendency of all matter to spread out formlessly on the ground.120 Hence the process of perception also reads “mechanical significance” into “all relationships”: geometric-linear and planimetric relationships as well as the corporeal relationships that determine the massive forms of the architecture.121 It is no longer the geometric figures that are subject to the action of mutually antagonistic mechanical forces, as they were for Lipps. These forces now act upon physical, material bodies. For Wölfflin, too, they move between a gravitational force that bears down on matter and an opposing formal force of verticality. This formal force is not only a “vertically acting force”; it is “that which creates life—a vis plastica”122 or the “immanent will” that “works its way out of matter.”123 In this way Wölfflin arrived not only at a reformulation of the traditional opposition between form and matter, but also at his “principal theme of architecture.”124 As to the question of whether the self-projection of the subject into the perceived object was an act of the imagination or something that could be designated as a concrete “experience of corporeal sympathy,” empathy theory had not come down either way. Wölfflin assumed the latter. As proof he cited the then-current theory of expression and emotion, which added a physiological aspect to the anthropomorphic conception of architecture.125 According to this theory, every expres­ sion is the “physical manifestation of (a) mental process.” Reproducing the expression of an emotion would also bring about a recurrence of the emotion itself. Beyond that, developmental observation had shown that a child’s behavior was marked by the involuntary reenactment of the expressions and emotions of an interlocutor, even if such mimetic submission fell off noticeably with education and intellectual development.126 For Wölfflin this all went to show that self-projection involved both mind and body. Finally, Wölfflin also used empathy theory to infer classical formal laws from the structure of the human body, an undertaking that was now psychologically founded. While the law of regularity suggested the regular functioning of a body that breathes and walks in “periodic sequence,” the demand for symmetry could be explained with reference to Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space 419 the well-balanced, mirror-like organization of the body. Proportion for Wölfflin, as a “relationship of different parts to one another,” could be referred to the relation between “verticals and horizontals” or “ascent and repose,” with the predominance of the one or the other determining the specific expressive value in each case.128 Harmony results when the organic system of a body comprises a unity of various parts.129 Physiological psychology and empathy aesthetics also found their way into the writings of August Schmarsow, who shared with Wölfflin a particular methodical interest in architecture. In his inaugural lecture at Leipzig, “Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung” (The essence of architectural creation),130 Schmarsow took the example of architecture—historically and systematically the first art—as the basis for elaborating a programmatic conception of scientific art history, locating it between the natural and historical sciences. In this he was able to draw on both Wilhelm Wundt and Wilhelm Dilthey,131 who had already identified the central position of psychology between the natural sciences and the humanities, that is, they regarded psychology as the basis of every historical science. Accordingly, the discipline of art history would need to shore up its “genetic explanation”132 of architecture— and indeed all the arts—with the anthropological knowledge supplied by physiological psychology. Schmarsow fulfilled this epistemological requirement by basing his science of art history on the “psychological understanding of Homo sapiens,” the “innermost organization of human nature.”133 The meaning of this was made clear in the inaugural lecture at Leipzig: the production and reception of architecture are traced back to a body that grapples with the “world in which it is set down”134 according to the limits of its sensomotoric capabilities. The “intuited form of three-dimensional space” and “our sense of space and spatial imagination” are prerequisite to “spatial creation” and are determined by “the residues of sensory experience to which the muscular sensations of our body, the sensitivity of our skin, and the structure of our body all contribute.”135 On the one hand Schmarsow was following physiological psychology here by underlining the point that spatial perception involves muscular feelings, kinesthetic feelings, and the sense of touch. On the other hand, though, he also emphasized corporeal axiality as the schema of threedimensional space.136 The axial body with its above and below, front and back, its left and right is therefore also fundamental to spatial creation as a system of reference and orientation. But the medium of spatial creation is architecture, which first encompasses man on the vertical axis. As the “most important direction for the … spatial construct,” depth recedes in the direction of movement, action, and vision, whereas the dimension of breadth originates in the “span of our arms from left to right.”137 By giving the dimension of depth particular significance for architecture, while also following physiological psychology in presupposing ­movement as 420 Kirsten Wagner essential to the perception of the third dimension, Schmarsow too makes movement and the sensation of movement necessary conditions for the architectonic perception of space. “Space” for Schmarsow would go on to become a “time-bound concept.”138 Not the least important target of this line of argument was Alois Riegl’s conception of the (as yet still) static observer. In later writings Schmarsow also derived the aesthetic categories or “design principles” of symmetry, proportion, and rhythm from a meticulous description of the anatomical structure and vegetal functions of the body. On this basis he undertook a systematic classification of the arts according to the following categories: (1) vertical axis, proportion, the formation of bodies, sculpture; (2) horizontal axis, symmetry, the formation of planes, painting; (3) depth axis, rhythm, the shaping of space, architecture.139 By defining architecture as an art that shapes space Schmarsow isolated himself from the historicism and materialism of the architecture of the nineteenth century. This realignment of architectural problematics toward questions of space, which had never occurred before Schmarsow,140 distinguishes his approach even from Wölfflin’s conception of architecture as massive form.141 Mitchell Schwarzer has summarized the influence of physiological psychology on the nascent discipline of scientific art history and Schmarsow’s importance for the architectonic conception of space as follows: This epistemological tension (between nature and human history, K.W.) within general historical studies was also present in the history of art and architecture, which was in certain circles reconstituted under the imprint of the natural sciences. The study of the sense organs, in particular sight, proved especially influential for the visual arts. […] As perceptual empiricism took hold within art history, its application to architecture took the form of a new concept of space based on perceptual dynamics. Like other perceptual notions, the idea of dynamic space was transcribed from nineteenth-century scientific theories of vision concerned with how the mind and senses grasp three-dimensional forms and space. But while optical theorists hinted indirectly at the implications for a spatial conception of architecture, art historians began to look at space as essential to architectural creation. Among art historians, the writings of August Schmarsow played a compelling role in the overall formation of a spatial paradigm […]. Schmarsow was the first to formulate a comprehensive theory of architecture as a spatial creation at the frontiers of the paradigm of perceptual empiricism. He differed most from other theorists in his insistence that bodily movement through space rather than stationary perception of form was the essence of architecture.142 Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space 421 Though they were equally instrumental in facilitating the shift to space, Schmarsow’s links to empathy aesthetics have been largely neglected. Their influence was either played down in favor of Schmarsow’s own originality143 or not mentioned at all.144 Schmarsow’s critique of Lipps and Wölfflin may have served to exaggerate the differences between empathy aesthetics and his own approach.145 But these definitions of architecture—as corporeal, massive form on the one hand and a creatress of space on the other—are actually just as different as the very disparate conceptions of spatial creation in Lipps and Schmarsow. For Lipps’s conception of architecture was derived from geometric spatial forms that are subject to the same mechanical forces as the human body, whereas Schmarsow understood spatial creation, the very essence of architecture, as a space that is projected by the axial body and shaped in accordance with its sensomotoric faculties. This corresponds to the fact that whereas Lipps and Wölfflin were primarily concerned with the sympathetic and responsive experience of forces that act upon spatial forms or massive forms, Schmarsow’s main intention had been to explain the laws governing the formation of architectonic space with reference to the physical and mental organization of man. Nevertheless, these differences do nothing to diminish the fact that Schmarsow did adopt key aspects of empathy theory. He was fundamentally indebted to physiological psychology—as Wölfflin had been— for its insights into spatial perception in the fields of aesthetics and especially architectonics. Furthermore, he was bound to empathy theory by the supposition of an involuntary “anthropism” that was impervious to any form of scientific knowledge: Man in his naivety will always assume a similar soul, a similar structure, a similar capacity for movement […] this intuitive and primal apprehension on the part of our senses and temperament, the interpretation that seems most natural and satisfactory to man, is ultimately aesthetic.146 Schmarsow then goes on to describe aesthetic perception as an active process involving both the tracking of objects by the “tactile organ of the eye”—the comprehension of extension and volumes—and the projection of the whole body into a movement, be it actual or merely imaginary.147 The projection thesis presents another point of overlap with empathy aesthetics. Schmarsow has the body setting its system of coordinates and its central vertical axis outside itself, becoming the virtual center of the spatial construct in order to find enclosure within the architecture: “The spatial construct is, so to speak, an emanation of the human being present, a projection from within the subject, irrespective of whether we physically place ourselves inside the space or mentally project ourselves into it.”148 As a crucial factor in the representation of space, and 422 Kirsten Wagner above all in the definition of location and direction,149 the axial body for Schmarsow became a determinant of architectonic space. It would soon make an appearance in linguistics as the origo, the center of a schema according to which the symbolic world is organized around the body.150 Finally, the foregoing can be summarized by saying that Schmarsow’s architectonic conception of space was part of an anthropological turn that had been prepared by Kant, was implemented by physiological psychology and empathy aesthetics, then consummated in the phenomenology of the twentieth century. Even so, this turn and Schmarsow’s conception of space were both based on a view of the body that has yet to be historicized.151 Notes To Introduction 1. Jutta Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2005). To Main Article Where there is an English translation or English original for the cited source, the full details of the English-language text, including the relevant page number(s), have been added in square brackets after the cited source. When this same source is cited in abbreviated form in subsequent notes, any given page reference is followed by the corresponding English page reference in square brackets. Where there is no existing English translation of the source cited, a translation of the title has been added in square brackets. 1. André Leroi-Gourhan, Hand und Wort. Die Evolution von Tech­ nik, Sprache und Kunst, trans. M. Bischoff (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988) [Gesture and Speech, trans. A.B. Berger (Cam­ bridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993)]. 2. Robert Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefühl. Ein Beitrag zur Aesthetik (Leipzig: Credner, 1873) [“On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics,” in Empathy, Form, and Space: Prob­ lems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, ed. and trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 89–123]. 3. This becomes particularly clear where Vischer calls empathy “the natural mother of religious personification” and goes on to speak of how it “functions symbolically to animate a plant and to anthropomorphize an animal,” acting as “a doubling of self … toward other human beings.” He cites the “spontaneous resuscitation of a corpse” as one of his examples. Ibid., 22 [106]. 4. Ibid., 28 [109]. Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space 423   5. For an early work on this subject see Wilhelm Perpeet, “Historisches und Systematisches zur Einfühlungsästhetik” [Historical and systematic considerations on the aesthetics of empathy], in Zeit­ schrift für Asthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 11, no 2 (1966): 193–216, esp. 210f.; Jutta Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung. Zur Denkfigur der Projektion in Psychophysio­ logie, Kulturtheorie, Asthetik und Literatur der frühen Moderne [Abstraction as empathy: On projection as a mental trope in the psychophysiology, cultural theory, aesthetics, and literature of early modernism] (Freiburg: Rombach, 2005), 214–16.   6. Heinrich Wölfflin, “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Arch­ itektur” [1886], in idem, Kleine Schriften (1886–1933), ed. Joseph Gantner (Basel: Schwabe, 1946), 13–47 [“Prolegomena to a Psych­ ology of Architecture,” in Empathy, Form, and Space, ed. and trans. Mallgrave and Ikonomou, 149–90].  7. Rudolf Arnheim, Die Dynamik der architektonischen Form. Gestützt auf die 1975 an der Cooper Union in New York gehalt­ enen “Mary Duke Biddle Lectures,” trans. H. Hermann (Cologne: DuMont, 1980) [The Dynamics of Architectural Form: Based on the 1975 Mary Duke Biddle Lectures at the Cooper Union (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1977)].   8. Wolfgang Meisenheimer, Das Denken des Leibes und der architek­ tonische Raum [Bodily thinking and architectonic space] (Cologne: Walther König, 2004).  9. Kent C. Bloomer and Charles W. Moore, Architektur für den “Einprägsamen Ort,” trans. G.R. Blomeyer and B. Tietze (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980) [Kent C. Bloomer and Charles W. Moore, Body, Memory and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)]. 10. Georg Braungart, Leibhafter Sinn. Der andere Diskurs der Moderne [The corporeal sense: Modernity’s other discourse] (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1995), 1–3. 11. Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space. 12. Researchers had long been looking for the roots of empathy aesthetics in Romanticism, subjective philosophy, and psychological aesthetics before Jonathan Crary’s epoch-making study, Techniken des Betrachters. Sehen und Moderne im 19. Jahrhundert, trans. A. Vonderstein (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1996) [Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990)] shifted the view toward physiology and physiological psychology as the essential foundations of empathy aesthetics. Müller-Tamm’s postdoctoral dissertation, Abstraktion als Einfühlung, was pioneering in this respect. 13. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1. Werkausgabe, vol. 3, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), A24, B38, 72 [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 424 Kirsten Wagner ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, in “The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A24, B38, 157–8]. 14. Ibid., A26f., B42f., 75 [A26, B42, 159–60]. 15. Kant’s engagement with the problem of space, as characterized by Carl Stumpf, Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raum­ vorstellung [1873] [On the psychological origins of the representation of space] (Amsterdam: Bonset, 1965), 13. 16. For this shift in the problem of space, see also Gary Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). 17. George Berkeley in particular. 18. For summaries of Bain see Stumpf, Ursprung der Raumvorstellung, 36–8; and Alexander Gosztonyi, Der Raum. Geschichte seiner Probleme in Philosophie und Wissenschaften [Space: A history of its problems in philosophy and the sciences], vol. 2 (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1976), 728–30. 19. Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect [1855] (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1868), 59: “movement precedes sensation, and is at the outset independent of any stimulus from without; and … action is a more intimate and inseparable property of our constitution than any of our sensations, and in fact enters as a component part into every one of the senses, giving them the character of compounds while itself [sic] is a simple and elementary property.” 20. Bain, The Senses, 230–2. So according to Bain, spatial perception— the perception of extensive, adjacent bodies—can also be grasped through the duration of a sensation of movement, whereby he provides an early definition of space in terms of time. 21. On this see Crary, Techniken des Betrachters. 22. For Theodor Lipps see the following section of the present article, “The Symbolic Animation of Spatial Forms.” 23. Hermann von Helmholtz, “Über den Ursprung und die Bedeutung der geometrischen Axiome” [On the origins and significance of geometric axioms], in idem, Abhandlungen zur Philosophie und Geometrie, ed. Sabine S. Gehlhaar (Cuxhaven: Traude Junghans, 1987), 113–32. 24. Hermann von Helmholtz, “Über das Sehen des Menschen” [1855] [On human vision], in Abhandlungen zur Philosophie und Geometrie, ed. Gehlhaar, 13–34, esp. 21. 25. Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung, 32. 26. Crary, Techniken des Betrachters. 27. Ibid., 82 [74]. 28. Hermann von Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1867), 442 [Helmholtz’s Treatise on Physiological Optics, ed. James P.C. Southall, 3 vols (Ithaca, NY: Optical Society of America, 1924–5), vol. 3: 18]. Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space 425 29. Helmholtz compared and contrasted this subconscious inference to conscious analogical inferences in the natural sciences. Ibid., 430 [vol. 3: 4]. 30. Ibid., 431 [vol. 3: 5]. 31. See also Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative, 176. 32. For a more detailed discussion of this, see Hermann von Helmholtz, “Die neueren Fortschritte in der Theorie des Sehens” [1868] [Recent advances in the theory of vision], in idem, Abhandlungen zur Philosophie und Geometrie, ed. Gehlhaar, esp. 83–5 and 99. 33. Wilhelm Wundt, Die Lehre von der Muskelbewegung, nach eigenen Untersuchungen bearbeitet [Treatise on muscular movement, prepared after the author’s own experiments] (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1858). 34 Wilhelm Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie [Principles of physiological psychology], vol. 2 (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1880), 174. 35 For Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 176, the problem with the empirical approach was that “perception, as the basis of experience, cannot itself rest on experience.” 36. On this see the lengthy entry on “Muskelsinn” [Muscular sensation] in Meyers Konversationslexikon, 4th ed., vol. 19, annual supplement for 1891–2 (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1892), 653–6; and the remarks on Wundt’s notion of innervation in Edward B. Titchener, “The Innervationsempfindung in Wundt’s Psychology,” Mind 2, no 5 (January 1893): 143f. 37. Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 3. 38. The “even distribution of local signals” across the sense organs and the “regulatory sources of motor innervation” in the “facilities of the central organs” are among the systemic conditions of organic sensory perception. They are present in each individual as a “fully developed capacity for the immediate spatial organization of light sensations.” Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 177, 164. 39. Ibid., 162. 40. Ibid., 161. 41. Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung, 219. 42. On this see Philipp Sarasin and Jakob Tanner, eds, Physiologie und industrielle Gesellschaft. Studien zur Verwissenschaftlichung des Körpers im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert [Physiology and industrial society: Studies on the scientification of the body in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998). 43. Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefühl. For Vischer’s notion of empathy and effect cf. Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, 17–19. 44. Friedrich Theodor Vischer had already noted that his son was differentiating the concept of empathy with regard to the 426 Kirsten Wagner “­physiological difference between sensory and kinesthetic neural stimuli.” Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Das Symbol” [1887] [The symbol], in Kritische Gänge, ed. Robert Vischer (Munich: Meyer & Jessen, 1922), vol. 4: 420–56, esp. 439. 45. Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefühl, viii [93]. 46. Ibid., iv [90]. 47. Ibid., vii [92]. 48. And as with physiological psychology, for Vischer the perception of space is the result of a combination of tactile, visual, and kinesthetic sensations. 49. Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefühl, 24–6 [107–8]. 50. Ibid., 27–8 [108–9]. 51. Ibid., 28 [109]. 52. According to Perpeet, “Romanticism is intrinsically animated with being, being animate it also has a soul, having a soul is also expressive of a life mood. Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s conception of nature in 1842 was already radically scientific and positivistic. For him, nature was a toponym for that ‘mute’ realm of necessity that knows nothing of the emotions of subjective life. For him, nature could never be the self-revelation of some ingenious world soul that pervades the innermost depths of man, leaving him native and at home there. The thesis of empathy aesthetics is conceived in astonishment, not at man’s conciliation with nature, but at his estrangement from it.” Perpeet, “Einfühlungsästhetik,” 203f.; cf. also Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung, 217f. 53. For an overview, cf. Götz Pochat, Der Symbolbegriff in der Asthetik und Kunstwissenschaft [The concept of the symbol in aesthetics and art history] (Cologne: DuMont, 1983), 32–4. 54. Friedrich Theodor Vischer cited in Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefühl, iii [90]. 55. The terms symbol and empathy were used virtually synonymously by Friedrich Theodor Vischer and Johannes Volkelt and were introduced into aesthetics as its core concepts. For the aesthetic theory of the symbol see also Johannes Volkelt, Der Symbol-Begriff in der neuesten Aesthetik [The concept of the symbol in recent aesthetics] (Jena: Hermann Dufft, 1876). 56. Cf. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Kritik meiner Asthetik” [1866/ 1873] [Critique of my aesthetics], in idem, Kritische Gänge, 222– 419; Vischer, “Das Symbol.” 57. Vischer, “Das Symbol,” 431f. 58. Ibid., 434. 59. Ibid., 437. 60. “Even though we have long since outgrown it, the conferral of soul is still an inevitable characteristic of man, only now it has what we have called reservation. Hence the ego is no longer deified even when it is interpolated into impersonal nature. This is precisely why Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space 427 it is no longer versified or mythologized. There may be something similar, but it is of no relevance in the current context; it only becomes relevant in the case of ingenuous, lucid symbolism.” Ibid., 435. 61. Ibid., 435. 62. Ibid., 437. 63. Ibid., 432. 64. Ibid., 453. 65. Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefühl, 8 [97]. 66. Ibid., 9 [98]. Related explanatory models had already been proposed by Wundt. Robert Vischer draws on them explicitly here, as noted in Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung, 233. Cf. also Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 182–7. 67. Fritz Neumeyer says much the same thing: “A deeper understanding of this evidently indelible aspect of human behavior (making oneself the measure of perfection in all things, K.W.) was first procured by the ‘empathy theory’ of the nineteenth century when it epistemologically acknowledged this supposed defect as a necessary psychological process involving the projection of internal forms of perception onto given external reality and saw all human artistic activity as a manifestation of self-objectification. The classical, metaphysical concept of proportion was thus reinterpreted as a scientific, psychological concept of projection.” Fritz Neumeyer, “Nachdenken über Architektur. Eine kurze Geschichte ihrer Theorie” [Reflections on architecture: A brief history of its theory], in Quellentexte zur Architekturtheorie. Nachdenken über Architektur, ed. Fritz Neumeyer (Munich: Prestel, 2002), 9–79, esp. 17. 68. Johannes Volkelt, “Zur Psychologie der ästhetischen Beseelung” [On the psychology of aesthetic animation], Zeitschrift für Phil­ osophie und philosophische Kritik 113 (1898): 161–79, esp. 169. 69. Here we should also refer to Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s treatment of architecture, which, on the one hand, follows Hegel and Karl Bötticher’s conception of architecture as a “symbolic artform” and, on the other, anticipates aspects of empathy theory where Vischer speaks of moving masses and lines in flight, of a “gaze that tracks the lines” and appears to be crossed by the lines themselves. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Aesthetik oder Wissen­ schaft vom Schönen [Aesthetics; or, the science of the beautiful], part 3: “Die Kunstlehre,” section 2: “Die Künste,” no 1: “Die Baukunst” (Stuttgart: Carl Mäcken, 1852): § 557. The consideration of architecture in Hermann Lotze, Mikrokosmos. Ideen zur Naturgeschichte und Geschichte der Menschheit. Versuch einer Anthropologie [Microcosmos: Ideas on the history and natural history of mankind; An attempt at an anthropology], 3 vols (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1856–64), and idem, Geschichte der Aesthetik 428 Kirsten Wagner in Deutschland [History of aesthetics in Germany] (Munich: J.G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1868), was also pioneering for empathy aesthetics. 70. This being the basis of the artistic gaze. 71. The evident links between Vischer’s forms of seeing and Wölfflin’s later concepts of the linear and the painterly have been pointed out by Frank Büttner, “Das Paradigma ‘Einfühlung’ bei Robert Vischer, Heinrich Wölfflin und Wilhelm Worringer. Die problematische Karriere einer kunsttheoretischen Fragestellung” [The paradigm of ‘empathy’ in Robert Vischer, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Wilhelm Worringer: The problematic career of a question in art theory], in 200 Jahre Kunstgeschichte in München. Positionen – Perspektiven – Polemik, 1780–1980, ed. Christian Drude (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2003), 82–93. 72. Cf. Gustav Jahoda, “Theodor Lipps and the Shift from ‘Sympathy’ to ‘Empathy,’” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 41, no 2 (2005): 151–63. 73. The close links to sensory physiology go unnoticed even in the relatively recent study by Maria Rosaria de Rosa, Theodor Lipps. Estetica e critica delle arti [Theodor Lipps: Aesthetics and art criticism] (Naples: Guida, 1990). They are first indicated, in the context of empathy aesthetics in general, by Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung. 74. Theodor Lipps, Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens [Fundamentals of the life of the soul] (Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1883), 496–8. 75. Cf. also Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 85–7, 166. 76. This was Lipps’s summary of the opposing positions of Wundt and Helmholtz. Theodor Lipps, “Ästhetische Faktoren der Rauman­ schauung” [Aesthetic factors in the perception of space], in Beiträge zur Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane. Hermann von Helmholtz als Festgruss zu seinem siebzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Arthur König (Hamburg: Leopold Voss, 1891), 219–307, esp. 219. 77. Lipps, Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, 531. 78. Of these experiments Lipps says the following: “In my free time I drew and cut out all manner of figures, made or had models made, and imposed upon countless relatives and acquaintances, children and adults, experts and laymen, by asking them to judge this or that dimension, direction, or form in comparison to others.” Theodor Lipps, “Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen” [Spatial aesthetics and geometric optical illusions], Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 18, no 5–6 (November 1898): 405–41, esp. 409. 79. Lipps, “Ästhetische Faktoren der Raumanschauung”; Lipps, “Die geometrisch-optischen Täuschungen” [Geometric optical illusions], Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 12, Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space 429 no 1 (July 1896): 39–59; Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrischoptische Täuschungen [Spatial aesthetics and geometric optical illusions], (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1897); Lipps, “Raum­ ästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen” (1898). 80. Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen (1897), 38f. 81. Ibid., 51–3. 82. Ibid., 51. 83. Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung, arrives at the same result. 84. “In order to advance the project of establishing a psychology of spatial form, Lipps introduces a further theoretical shift: the approximation of mechanical procedures to empathy, and the transformation of the movement of the object into an objectified movement of the subject. Along these lines, the main assertion of the study is that mechanics animates its objects by movement and therefore aligns itself with the ends and aims of empathy in aesthetic perception.” De Rosa, Theodor Lipps, 74. 85. Ibid., 76. 86. Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen (1897), 61. 87. “A spatial form is beautiful when the forces within it operate freely, that is, according to their own laws; when the forms, by virtue of these forces, seem to call themselves into existence and maintain their own existence. A beautiful line is one that freely and perpetually creates itself anew and maintains its form through the forces that are active within it; it is therefore at every moment the analogon of a willing and active being, and in this will and action its inner essence is that of a freely operating personality.” Theodor Lipps, “Zur ‘ästhetischen Mechanik’” [On ‘aesthetic mechanics’], Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 1, no 1 [1906]: 1–29, esp. 1. 88. Theodor Lipps, “Einfühlung, innere Nachahmung, und Organ­ empfindung” [Empathy, internal imitation, and organ perception], Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie 1, no 2 (May 1903): 185–204. 89. Initially the term “empathy” (Einfühlung) only comes up sporadically in Lipps’s early studies on spatial aesthetics, and when it does it is frequently used in conjunction with or as a synonym for the older term, “sympathy” (Sympathie). Cf. Jahoda, “Theodor Lipps.” 90. Cf. Robert Zimmermann, Allgemeine Ästhetik als Formwissen­ schaft [General aesthetics as a science of form] (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller Universitäts-Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1865). 91. Vischer, “Das Symbol,” 452. 92 . On this cf. also Robert Vischer, “Der ästhetische Akt und die reine Form” [1874] [The aesthetic act and the pure form], in idem, 430 Kirsten Wagner Drei Schriften zum ästhetischen Formproblem (Halle/Saale: Max Niemeyer, 1927), 45–54.  93. Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen (1897), 21.   94. “This (the aesthetic symbolism of form) has no content other than that which lies within or appears to lie within the forms themselves; not for this or that person, but for anyone who has come to know of the forces from which such forms tend to derive; likewise for anyone who has himself arrived at an awareness of the joy there is in the activation of one’s own analogous forces. For what lies within the forms themselves is the very manner in which they come into being and will likewise seem inevitable in the light of human action. To contemplate such forms aesthetically is to transform their existence into activity.” Ibid., 20f.   95. Ibid., 21.   96. Karl Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen [1844–52] [The tectonics of the Hellenes], 2 vols (Berlin: Wilhelm Ernst & Korn, 1862).  97. For Bötticher cf. Hartmut Mayer, Die Tektonik der Hellenen. Kontext und Wirkung der Architekturtheorie von Karl Bötticher [The tectonics of the Hellenes: the background and influence of Karl Bötticher’s architectural theory] (Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2004).   98. As Richard Streiter writes in a dissertation supervised by Theodor Lipps and submitted to the philosophical faculty of the University of Munich, Karl Böttichers Tektonik der Hellenen als ästhetische und kunstgeschichtliche Theorie. Eine Kritik [Karl Bötticher’s tectonics of the Hellenes as an aesthetic and art historical theory: A critique] (Hamburg: Leopold Voss, 1896), 33.  99. Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen, 43. 100. Ibid., 20. 101. Ibid., 35. 102. “When the idea invented the archetype of active form it simultaneously also furnished it with analogous models of artistic form: these never come after the fact or gradually over the course of implementation. Rather, they are conceived on a par and in unison with the origins of active form.” Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen, 40. 103. Streiter and Lipps were consistent in their criticism of Bötticher’s interpretations of the various artistic forms. Both were far more inclined to see the corresponding ornaments as geometric figures that directly expressed mechanical forces without the need for visual similes, organic or otherwise. 104. Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen, 41. 105. Streiter, Karl Böttichers Tektonik, 32f. 106. Ibid., 38. 107. Ibid., 40. Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space 431 108. “With this we have identified the bearers of aesthetic behavior. It is not the column that raises itself up so much as the spatial formation that presents itself to us from within the column. It is the lines, planes, and corporeal formations that bend and flex, expand and contract—not the masses, which carry the lines, are contained by the planes, and occupy corporeal space. They are also the only things that ‘bear down’ when considered aesthetically. It is not that the roof of a building bears down; the plane of the roof sinks or follows a downward tendency.” Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen (1897), 14f. 109. Cf. especially Arthur Schopenhauer, “Zur Ästhetik der Architektur,” in idem, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II. Sämtliche Werke Bd. II, ed. Wolfgang Frhr. von Löhneysen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 527–37 [“On the Aesthetics of Architecture,” in idem, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne, vol. 2 (New York: Dover, 1966), 411–18]. 110. The pioneering influence of Lipps’s aesthetics for modern art and architecture has since been recognized. Cf. Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space; de Rosa, Theodor Lipps; Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung. 111. Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen (1897), 16. 112. Lipps, “Zur ‘ästhetischen Mechanik,’” 3f. 113. For the links between empathy aesthetics and Wölfflin’s early writings, cf. de Rosa, Theodor Lipps; Braungart, Leibhafter Sinn; Büttner, “Das Paradigma ‘Einfühlung.’” 114. Heinrich Wölfflin, “Theodor Lipps, Raumästhetik und ­geometrisch-optische Täuschungen” [Theodor Lipps, spatial aesthetics, and geometric optical illusions], Kunstchronik, Wochen­ schrift für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe 17 (1898): 292f. 115. Ibid., 293. 116. Ibid. 117. According to de Rosa: “Their common program is the approximation of architecture to expression, the assumption being that empathy is the instrument of choice for reading and deciphering it. But the theoretical shift Wölfflin makes is to suggest that here, in the artistic sphere and that of the spatial arts, expression is bound to the forms, not the content—one reading, incidentally, that had already been prepared by Lipps. Both of them certainly shared another central idea, though, one that was supposed to bring about the transition from form to subject: this idea made the physiognomic model responsible for mediating between them and expected the reading of the body and its composition to provide appropriate schemata for the interpretation of architectonic forms.” Moreover, de Rosa claims that Lipps and Wölfflin shared a dynamic conception of architecture. This comprised the 432 Kirsten Wagner ­ rocedural and constructive aspects of perception on the subject p side as well as the emergence of the building from dynamic forces on the object side. De Rosa, Theodor Lipps, 84–6. 118. Robert Vischer had still subscribed to both of these Wundtian views. 119. “The evident error in this theory, therefore, appears to be the belief that, because it is the eye that perceives physical forms, their visual properties are the determining factors. Yet the eye appears to respond with pleasure or displeasure only to the intensity of light; it is indifferent to forms or at least is unable to determine their expressive nature.” Wölfflin, Prolegomena, 14 [151]. 120. Ibid., 15 [151]. 121. Ibid., 15 [151–2]. In defining “architectural creations” as “massive forms” Wölfflin contested the claims of formalist aesthetics, which limited architectural creation to geometry, line, and planimetry. 122 . The animistic undertone that pervades all empathy theory is mentioned in relation to Wölfflin by Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, 44. 123. As an immanent will that works its way out of matter, form is no longer something external either, though form and matter are inseparable—this was how Wölfflin used empathy aesthetics to solve the dichotomy. Wölfflin, Prolegomena, 23 [160]. 124. Wölfflin, Prolegomena, 22 [159]. 125. Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, 42–3, have shown that there is a direct link from Wölfflin’s source here— Friedrich von Hausegger’s Die Musik als Ausdruck [Music as expression] (Vienna: Carl Konegen, 1885)—to Charles Darwin’s Der Ausdruck der Gemüthsbewegungen bei dem Menschen und den Thieren, trans. J. Victor Carus (Stuttgart: E. Schweizerbart’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1872) [The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872)]. 126. Wölfflin, Prolegomena, 18f. [155f.]. 127. Ibid., 26–8 [163–5]. 128. Wölfflin goes on to give examples: “Let us observe … the range of proportions. The square is called bulky, heavy, contented, plain, good-natured, stupid, etc. Its peculiarity lies in the equality of height and width; ascent and repose are held in perfect balance. We cannot tell whether the body is reclining or standing. More width would make it appear at rest; more height would make it appear standing.” Ibid., 31 [168]. 129. The development of Wölfflin’s art theory was influenced by the final shift in the psychological problem of form: from the level of the individual to that of the collective. Beyond that he came to see the various styles as the expression of historically contingent, culturally differentiated national feeling. The close ties to Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space 433 empathy theory gradually receded in his later writings, and the anthropological constant of the empathetic body made way for an abstracted conception of seeing. The Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Basic concepts of art history) were ultimately about the history of seeing following its own autonomous course. This history was not concerned with the expression of form but with how, according to the “intrinsic development of the eye,” only certain things were visible and representable at specific points in historical time. Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst [1915], (Munich: Münchner Verlag, 1948), 13 [Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M.D. Hottinger (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1932), 12. A new English translation by Jonathan Blower (ed. Evonne Levy and Tristan Weddigen) is forthcoming in 2015 in the Getty Texts & Documents series]; see also de Rosa, Theodor Lipps, 91. 130. August Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung. Antrittsvorlesung, gehalten in der Aula der K. Universität Leipzig am 8. November 1893 (Leipzig: Anton Hiersemann, 1894) [“The Essence of Architectural Creation,” in Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, 281–97]. 131. Cf. Bettina Köhler, “Architekturgeschichte als Geschichte der Raumwahrnehmung” [Architectural history as the history of spatial perception], Daidalos. Architektur Kunst Kultur 67 (March 1998): 36–43; Beatrix Zug, Die Anthropologie des Raumes in der Architekturtheorie des 20. Jahrhunderts [The anthropology of space in twentieth-century architectural theory] (Tübingen: Ernst Wasmuth, 2006). 132. Schmarsow described his own approach in terms of Wundt’s genetic theory. Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung, 6 [284]. 133. Ibid., 5f. [284]. 134. August Schmarsow, Unser Verhältnis zu den bildenden Künsten. Sechs Vorträge über Kunst und Erziehung [Our relationship to the visual arts: Six lectures on art and education] (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1903), 13. 135. Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung, 10f. [286–7]. 136. On this Schmarsow might have cited Immanuel Kant, “Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raum” [1768], in idem, Vorkritische Schriften bis 1768. Werkausgabe II, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 993–1000 [“Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space,” in Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, trans. and ed. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 361–72]; or 434 Kirsten Wagner Stumpf, Ursprung der Raumvorstellung, 306f.; as Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, have shown. 137. Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung, 15–17 [289–90]. 138. Ulya Vogt-Göknil, Architekturbeschreibung und Raumbegriff bei neueren Kunsthistorikern [The description of architecture and the concept of space in recent art history] (Leiden: Groen, 1951), 18. Schmarsow is just as indebted to English empiricism as to physiological psychology in helping to prepare the way for modern, space–time architectural theory. 139. Schmarsow, Unser Verhältnis zu den bildenden Künsten; August Schmarsow, Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft am Übergang vom Altertum zum Mittelalter kritisch erörtert und in systema­ tischem Zusammenhange dargestellt [Fundamental concepts of art theory at the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages, systematically presented with a critical commentary] (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1905); August Schmarsow, “Über den Werth der Dimensionen im menschlichen Raumgebilde” [On the value of dimensions in human spatial constructs], Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Königlich-Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. Philologisch-Historische Klasse 48, no 4 (1896): 44–61; August Schmarsow, “Raumgestaltung als Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung” [Spatial design as the essence of architectural creation], Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 9, no 1 (1914): 66–95. 140. This achievement on Schmarsow’s part was already acknowledged in the architectural theory of the early twentieth century. 141. Cf. Kirsten Wagner, “Vom Leib zum Raum. Aspekte der Raum­ diskussion in der Architektur aus kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive” [From body to space: aspects of the spatial discourse in architecture from the perspective of cultural studies], Wolken­ kuck­ucksheim. Internationale Zeitschrift für Theorie und Wissen­ schaft der Architektur 9, no 1 (November 2004), February 15, 2007, http://www.cloud-cuckoo.net/openarchive/wolke/deu/Themen/ 041/Wagner/wagner.htm, accessed 30 May 2014. 142. Mitchell W. Schwarzer, “The Emergence of Architectural Space: August Schmarsow’s Theory of Raumgestaltung,” Assemblage 15 (1991): 48–61, esp. 50. 143. Herman Sörgel, for instance, only finds the influence of empathy theory when Schmarsow is dealing with sculpture, especially since Schmarsow refers to architecture as an inorganic, objective entity that eludes subjective empathy. Still, Schmarsow remains somewhat contradictory on this when he asserts that the tendency to perceive even inorganic nature according to the organization of the body is a basic human characteristic. Besides that, Sörgel points out that while Lipps and Wölfflin largely confine the act Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space 435 of empathetic animation to the effect of architecture—that is, to its reception—Schmarsow goes one further, systematically deriving active design and the production of space from the structure and sensations of the body. Cf. Herman Sörgel, Einführung in die Architektur-Ästhetik. Prolegomena zu einer Theorie der Baukunst [An introduction to architectural aesthetics: Prolegomena to a theory of architecture] (Munich: Piloty & Loehle, 1918), 46f. Schwarzer follows Sörgel here. 144. The latter applies to Köhler and Zug. Ernst Ullmann’s Marxian postdoctoral thesis on Schmarsow’s architectural theory also went into the particular influence of Wundt, but failed to mention the links to empathy aesthetics. Ernst Ullmann, “Der Beitrag August Schmarsows zur Architekturtheorie” [August Schmarsow’s contribution to architectural theory] (typescript dissertation: University of Leipzig, 1967). 145. Schmarsow criticized the excessive compartmentalization of Lipps’s investigation, which lost sight of the broader context and the “core of the organism, to which all individual forms and members owe their legitimacy.” Furthermore, Lipps had failed to understand certain architectures as spatial constructs; the Greek temple for instance. Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonis­ chen Schöpfung; Schmarsow, “Raumgestaltung als Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung.” Schmarsow was also critical of the formal laws enumerated in Wölfflin’s Prolegomena. Schmarsow, Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft, 45–7. 146. Schmarsow, Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft, 45. 147. Schmarsow, Unser Verhältnis zu den bildenden Künsten, 88. 148. Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung, 15 [289]. 149. Again, cf. Kant, “Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raum”; Stumpf, Ursprung der Raumvorstellung. 150. Cf. Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Bd. 1: Die Sprache (Berlin: Cassirer, 1923) [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume 1: Language, trans. R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953)]; Karl Bühler, Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1934) [Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language, trans. D.F. Goodwin and A. Eschbach (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. Co., 2011)]. 151. The image of man underlying Wölfflin’s “organic understanding of the history forms” as well as Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s concept of experiential space have recently been called into question by Ullrich Schwarz. Bollnow also assumed that the spatial body was axial and subject to gravity. Ullrich Schwarz, “Space, Body, Effect,” in Umzug ins Offene. Vier Versuche über den Raum, ed. Tom Fecht and Dietmar Kamper (Vienna: Springer, 1998), 82–5. Article Title 437 Art in Translation, Volume 6, Issue 4, pp. 437–448 DOI: 10.2752/175613114X14105155617429 Reprints available directly from the Publishers. Photocopying permitted by licence only. © 2014 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. Peter Sloterdijk Translated by Iain Boyd Whyte First published in German as “Museum—Schule des Befremdens.” In Der aesthetische Imperativ (Hamburg: Phil & Philo, 2007), 354–70. Museum—School of Alienation Abstract Peter Sloterdijk’s witty and acerbic text is directed against the museum and in particular the national museum of the nineteenth century, which he sees as essentially xenological—concerned with the study of that which is foreign and alien. Introducing his theme, Sloterdijk imagines a scenario in which “the world looks like a film in which the soundtrack that gives it sense has been turned off, so that nothing remains but an impenetrable and attention-grabbing swarm of facts, which seem to be permeated by a preposterous claim on Being.” It is this swarm that finds its way into the museum, which is where we control and deal 438 Peter Sloterdijk with strange facts and objects. This is the collection and neutralization point for the ugly unfamiliar, the unassimilated, the dissimilar, and the dead. The Hegel-inspired museal historicism of the nineteenth century achieves, according to Sloterdijk, a noteworthy symbiosis of observation and violence. Locating the mechanism of the museum in the broader cultural and social context, Sloterdijk concludes his polemic by comparing museums with cemeteries, mortuaries, garbage dumps, mausolea, mental institutions, prisons, and brothels. KEYWORDS: museum, museology, narrative museum, ethnological museum, xenology, cemetery, necropolis, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Weltgeist [world spirit], Nelson Goodman Introduction by Mark Dorrian (University of Edinburgh) Born in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Peter Sloterdijk has been a key­ —and sometimes controversial—figure in postwar German philosophy and cultural theory. He first came to inter­ national attention through his best-selling Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), with its celebrated diagnosis of a widespread contemporary condition of cynicism, operating at both personal and institutional levels. Famously characterized by Sloterdijk as “enlightened false con­ sciousness,” this is a mindset both modernized and unhappy, and one that is impervious to ideology critique because it has already absorbed its terms while remaining unable to act on them. In the face of this, Sloterdijk’s book appealed to the ancient tradition of kynicism, as em­ bodied in the figure of Diogenes, and the possibility of regaining a “li­ bidinous closeness” to the world prior to subjectivity and socialization. Sloterdijk’s is a distinctive voice. Articulated in supple prose pat­ terned by frequent neologisms, it moves fluidly across different registers, often resulting in what might be described as a speculative philosophi­ cal anthropology. The use of images in his work, in ways unusual for a philosopher, has led to comparisons with the authorial practices of figures such as, amongst others, W.G. Sebald. An important theorist of media, Sloterdijk is suspicious of received models of critique, which he sees as undergirded by unsustainable metaphysical, and even theologi­ cal, commitments. From this derives his emphasis on the inescapability and necessity of mediation, which in turn links his work to that of intel­ lectual allies such as the French philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour. This concern is reflected in the first volume of his massive Spheres trilogy, entitled “Bubbles,” in which he develops a kind of his­ tory of intimacy, an “excessive theory of pairs” as he puts it, which, in prioritizing the dyad, seeks to overcome the philosophical primacy historically accorded to the individual. Museum—School of Alienation 439 The Spheres trilogy (“Bubbles” [1998], “Globes” [1999], and “Foam” [2004]) has been described by Sloterdijk as a response to Heidegger’s Being and Time, one that displaces the earlier book by making the question of existence and space central. As the volumes in the trilogy range across cultural-historical material such as doubles and soul-companions, geometrical conceptions of God, the emergence of atmoterrorism, and considerations of architectural institutions and forms, a philosophical history of capitalist globalization begins to un­ fold, which is at the same time an account of the development of mass interiorization and hence also, as Sloterdijk puts it, a “history of atmos­ pheres.” Emblematic of this tendency is the Crystal Palace (1851), a vast incorporation of the external world that produced—as he writes in his 2005 book In the World Interior of Capital—“a magical immanence transfigured by luxury and cosmopolitanism.” In Sloterdijk’s read­ ing, with mass enclosure (a biopolitical project), a posthistorical era of incorporation is inaugurated, in which the antagonistic conditions of prior (historical) “external” life become replaced with existence in mass-mediated interiors of consumption. In the present text, “Museum—School of Alienation,” Sloterdijk re­ flects on a closely related example, the museum, which, from this point of view, is an institution that both interiorizes and spatializes time. If, in the nineteenth-century museology that Sloterdijk describes, the museum is figured as a posthistorical recapitulation of the spirit’s historical jour­ ney of self-recognition, whereby everything apparently distant and alien is in fact already marked as internal to it and hence domesticated, then in the wake of this—when the narrative of assimilation is renounced— the museum can only be thought of as a xenological institution, a place of contact with what is alien. The task of the museum of the twentieth century is thus, as Sloterdijk writes, “to engage a society that clings to identity in intelligent border exchanges with foreignness, and also with its ‘own’ culture. For this reason, the authentic museum of today is a museum of internal ethnology.” Pursuing this question brings the arti­ cle to a conclusion with an unexpected twist, as Sloterdijk introduces the question of cultural value and, through it, of garbage as a radical condition of non-value, which is to say, non-assimilability. If industrial production creates items of value, the significance of these is dwarfed by the unwanted by-products and effects that emanate from their manu­ facture. Thus, “right at the center of the global appropriation process itself, amidst self-empowerment through manufacture, erupts the abso­ lutely strange and non-appropriatable.” This is the characteristic anxi­ ety of the anthropocene—that of a world become alien through the very historical processes that were supposed to result in its mastery. And so Sloterdijk finishes with a radicalized program for the contemporary museum as a “school of alienation,” which in fact turns out to present us with a kind of Hegelianism-in-reverse—the task of showing “the pro­ gress of the world in becoming other to its inhabitants.” 440 Peter Sloterdijk Museum—School of Alienation Peter Sloterdijk The remains are not a sign of death but of the secret. H.P. Jeudy 1  Otherness and Gloss There are days on which the feeling of belonging to the world fades. It is as though an invisible elastic band, which normally summons us to everyday concerns, has become worn out—and one is tempted to believe that a partial function of the spiritual apparatus that attends to our participation in life has failed. Albert Camus described conditions like this in order to illustrate his ethics of the absurd. In contrast to Heidegger, who constructed Being [Dasein] in his Freiburg inaugural lecture of 1929 as confinement in nothingness, Camus explained the absurd aroma of Being in terms of the shock-like experience of being immersed in triviality. A short interruption of the brain activity with which we unremittingly induce the formulation of tasks and the framing of meaning suffices to relocate us in the naked actuality of Being. In seconds like these an otherwise-hidden aspect of the world in its entirety can become clear. In this moment “Being” means being surrounded by things that are of no concern to us. We walk past a public ’phone box and see someone inside, gesticulating forcefully as he speaks into the receiver, and at a stroke the whole city quarter is transformed into a flat coulisse. The houses stand around like senseless, boastful gestures; the passers-by thunder past, totally absorbed in absurd and self-important movement; the placards gesticulate sickeningly into the emptiness and the avenues of trees, the traffic lights, the shop windows, the vehicles are nothing more than a congregation of gesticulations, swaggering about their very existence. The world looks like a film in which the soundtrack that gives it sense has been turned off, so that nothing remains but an impenetrable and attention-grabbing swarm of facts, which seem to be permeated by a preposterous claim on Being. The world around us is stripped of everything that language and participation had brought to it—the meaning of Being has suffered an infarct and now survives only by ticking over. The observer is surrounded by events and activities that tie him to no contract of relevance, he holds out within himself, he stands still in his cognition, he no longer gives credit to things, and the world crinkles up into inconsequence, like a sheet of paper in the fire. When language returns after the absurd pause, there is a high probability that someone will say that the world looked as if it had become entirely musealized. One was relocated at the edge of the whole ­scenario, Museum—School of Alienation 441 from which it looked like a gigantic exhibition piece, a full-scale replica of itself. As an imitation of itself, the world differed in no respect from its original condition, except for the mark of significance, through whose sudden disappearance the world was transmuted into something incomparably different. The same thing in the condition of complete otherness reveals itself as a bottomless pit of otherness. Something that has a thousand times coalesced in front of our eyes into a mutual habitude can transform itself back into something indefensibly strange; back because in such estranging moments as these the lacquer of trust that covers things fractures, revealing them to be clad in a primeval and aggressive strangeness. Whoever lives through an insane pause like this is, in a certain way, attending an ontological vernissage, at which the world puts itself on display and in the fresh gloss of strangeness sparkles meretriciously at us like a senseless novelty. In the ecstasy of boredom, of the sense of purposelessness and of weariness the world itself becomes a World Fair—everything known and visible looks to be relocated into a world museum into which we have no recollection of ever entering. We should be on our guard against interpreting this speculation as a symptom of the modern malady of alienation. The second look on that which is too familiar is already an accomplishment of antiquity—its appearance marked a threshold in the history of civilization. The birth of philosophical thought out of astonishment, with which the SocraticPlatonic adventure begins, is coterminous with the birth of subjectivity out of our estrangement from the world. It takes a profound alienation from the world and an uncertainty as to what it actually is, to set in motion the dialog with oneself which Plato designated as the medium of philosophy. The emergence of the world is a matter of amazement, in that everything we know appears over the horizon, as at sunrise on a bright day, in order to join the arena of the actually existent. Hence the alienation that has been articulated by the authors of modern absurdism is an authentic variation of philosophical amazement—both are conditions that cannot be captured or professionalized. Otherness and amazement belong in the no-man’s-land that stretches between science and inspiration, psychedelics and method. These reflections reveal a connection between the museal and the other: museology is a form of xenology; museum science belongs to the phenomenology of the cultural strategy of dealing with what is strange. This explains the deeply rooted ambivalence of the word museal; if the museum per se is a xenological institute, it inevitably has a stake in the double meaning of the unfamiliar. As the site of encounter with the beautiful other, it facilitates experiences on the xenophile spectrum such as delight in the new, recognition, vitalization, exoticism, and sympathy with the not-I [Nicht Ich]. As the site of the display of the ugly unfamiliar, the museum is tied to the xenophobe spectrum, with defensive 442 Peter Sloterdijk reactions against the not-I, with contempt, antipathy, and repulsion against the dead, the unassimilated, the dissimilar. As a result of this ambivalence, the modern museum is one of the sensitive points at which to study how culture works as attraction and repulsion at the same time. In contrast to the theories that stress the didactic functions, as Nelson Goodman does, for example, or to the doctrines that lead back to the conservation problems of historically accelerating societies (as proposed by Lewis Mumford), that which follows will seek to develop a xenological concept of the museum. This will locate the indisputable didactic and conservationist aspects of museum practice at that point on the horizon at which the strange world becomes known to us and the known world looks to us as a stranger. 2  The Hall of Remembrance of the Self and Cranial Shrine of the Other According to the view prevalent since the nineteenth century, the museum has an epic function: on the basis of works of art and utilitarian objects it narrates the path of a historical subject back to the highpoint of its present. In practice, however, such a evolutionary idea of the museum can only be realized with difficulty and most likely in the form of a national museum, in which a people represents its history with the help of national relics—from the bronze sword to the cruise missile, from linear pottery to the blender, from the ox cart to the magnetic levitation railway, from the water mill to the nuclear reactor, from Charles Martel to Helmut Kohl. Best of all, the epic project could be implemented in the area in which “history” can be presented as the sum of continuities and innovations. An army museum would have the chance to tell the story of the generic history of a warring animal in the mirror of its weapons; a technical museum could unroll the story of animal laborans and of homo faber on the basis of the tools and machines of peasant and industrial production, with which the nineteenth century shames the twentieth. In that the museum was commissioned to tell a great narrative, historicism created an institution to implement as cultural policy the preconception of a history told for and about us. In this sense the narrative museum, like the evolutionary review museum, is simply the materialization of a historical text that one can find written at an earlier date in the philosophical and political literature. The same intellectual power that writes national, cultural, and world history also enters into the realm of cultural politics, which leads to the building of national museums, Pinacotheca, national galleries, museums for applied art, and technical museums. The museal historicism of the nineteenth century achieves a noteworthy symbiosis of observation and violence. The imperial bourgeoisie’s power of conquest permits for a historical moment a compromise with contemplation. The fact that the Museum—School of Alienation 443 world just at this moment was set up as a global factory, as a universal department store, and as a boundless theater of war, does not preclude its simultaneous transformation into an object of visual devotion. Historicism is the philosophical Sunday of the imperialist week, and its museum is the bourgeois temple. For that reason, every exhibit in the nineteenth-century museum whispers to the visitor: enrichissez-vous. The spiritual enrichment of the visitor mirrors the bourgeois process of global appropriation as the simultaneous identification and mobilization of all assets. In truth, the nineteenth-century museums are not narrational. The history that they apparently reveal and justify has, de facto, already been told somewhere else. Treitschke’s historical narrative is essentially the Prussian Nationalmuseum, just as Burckhardt’s morphological vision of Renaissance culture embodies the actual visit of the cultured European to the imaginary museum that is Italy. The museums themselves always remain mere compilations, storage sites for cultural war booty, magnificent lodgings for the trophies of scientifically disguised looting, archives, treasure houses, stockyards for the objects of bourgeois esteem. The great stories reanimate the epic spirit of the visualization of history, which is formulated beyond the walls of the museum in the literature and by the academic chairs of philosophy. The Zurich-based art historian, Beat Wyss, has uncovered the true origins of philosophical museology in his ingenious interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of art.1 Even if the word museology is a neologism, which did not appear before the end of the second quarter of our century [i.e. the twentieth century, trans.], the museological idea is already immanent in Hegelian aesthetics and even more so in his philosophy of history. In his journey through world history, Hegel transforms himself into the first complete museum visitor. In his capacity as the secretary of the Weltgeist [world spirit] he minutes the developmental steps from the implicit spirit to the transformative spirit. Cosmic time has for him become an interior space, which the spirit has to traverse in the process of its self-recapitulation. This interior space is already conceived as the exhibition room of the absolute historical world museum. Through this museum, phenomenology approaches its present, in which the worldappropriation and the self-appropriation of the spirit becomes accomplished fact. After hastily crossing the first hall, in which the monstrous, sphinx-like, African-Asiatic-Egyptian ancient history is exhibited, Hegel reaches the second hall, where examples from Antiquity sparkle in their beautiful individuality, before arriving in the hall of the Christian era, which, as one would expect, had to be the third and last. The air there reeks of prayer and labor—this is the integral culture-state as the rational old-folks’ home of humanity. In this gigantic hall the spirit has much to look at; it strides forward from its medieval predilection for revelatory faith and feudal guardianship to the modern autonomy of self-knowledge and of the bourgeois 444 Peter Sloterdijk constitutional state. The third hall is so gigantic that it already includes a Prussian posthistoire and the thousand-year Reich of the modernist project. It is the room that houses the Western world civilization of the modern age and in which gather the united nations of the final humanity. Hegel’s power is to be thanked for the fact that the world of the present is sketched out as a world exhibition of progress. In his design, the world itself becomes a dynamic museum in which life and memory, exhibition and millennium are one and the same. For that reason, the difference between the staged event and the absolute does not apply here. The fact that the real is also the rational suggests the insight that the ultimate, universal truth reveals itself in the exhibits of the phenomenological world exhibition. In the constitutional state, in the encyclopedia of arts and sciences, and in Romantic art the spirit finally reveals what it has borne, objectively and subjectively within itself from time immemorial. Since then, it no longer breezes around wherever it wants to, but only at the place where it can do everything which is inside the millenarian third hall. As a result, Hegelians cannot to this day distinguish between the rustle of inspiration and the humming of an air-conditioning unit—perhaps their fury against so-called false immediacy derives from this, for how should a fresh wind from outside get into a Hegelian museum? When something blows there, it can only be the ventilator. The fundamental concept of Hegelian and of historical museology is at the same time the key concept of bourgeois society: acquisition. Whoever strides through the museal history of the nation and the world does so in order, en route, to become an owner in a double sense, both of the world and of himself. Precisely to gain full possession of its identity, the spirit must either assimilate or destroy that which it was not—most likely destroy through assimilation. That is the meaning of the historical museum culture: it should offer the entire past as an expression of the nascent self. That which is alien can, accordingly, be nothing other than one’s own possession, which at first appeared incognito, but was then figured out and assimilated. Hegel’s absolute spirit is enthroned, strangely reconciled, over the world historical scene, of which it is said, this spirit is a resting place for a skull. For Hegel, the world museum is at the same time a cemetery that also integrates the living; yet the spirit is at home here, for every grave contains a possibility of a lived experience and every bone represents an ancestor. Provided that they willingly allow themselves to be musealized and historically interred, the absolute spirit is willing to recognize every previous and current spirit as a relation. But this recognition ultimately exhausts itself in acts of assimilation. Preserved in the absolute memory, the utterances of alien existences pass over into the ownership of the philosophical museologists. As history itself progresses as an accumulation of museum holdings, the museum management does not need to worry overmuch about the suspicion that here, too, property might be theft. Museum—School of Alienation 445 But as long as appropriation constitutes history, that which is other is preordained to be reduced to a residue. The foreign residue is the variable that can be neglected in the historical game, the dust in the archive, the immaterial breath of a life that can only be important for us in its creations and productions. To the residue belongs—“the lives of infamous men”—and the existence of inexpressiveness.2 In this way of thinking the existential shudder at the other remains an inconsequential residue, and because of that the world, together with its proprietors, is itself plunged into irrelevance. For a new museology, which has freed itself from the nineteenthcentury compulsion for identity, the museum is no longer a memorial hall for the self. The conservators can talk as much as they like about “the function of presenting identity,” but the authentic museum of the twentieth century can be nothing else but the one in which the xenological theme is made as manifest as is appropriate to our age of alienation. For this reason, Lucius Burckhardt is correct in his assertion that of all museums, the ethnological museum is the most museum-like. The museum of the twentieth century must inevitably take its inspiration from this model. Its task is to engage a society that clings to identity in intelligent border exchanges with foreignness, and also with its “own” culture. For this reason, the authentic museum of today is a museum of internal ethnology. While today in the African and Asian nations of the fourth generation, our nineteenth-century museum politics are reenacted, progressive museum practice in the first-generation nation states still has to address the internal decolonization of culture. Whatever aspects of the past and present world these museums would like to display, they will only be able to confront their historical moment when they introduce their public to an enlightened condition of foreignness. 3  Museum and Non-museum It is already a commonplace in the recent museological discussion to compare museums with equivalent cultural institutions and organizations. As the xenological core of museum practice remains as yet unclear in its historical, philosophical, pedagogic, culture-political, conservationist, and compensatory definitions, the more acute authors must approach the problem with indirect methods. From here come the seemingly disrespectful comparisons made between museums and cemeteries, mortuaries, garbage dumps, mausolea, mental institutions, prisons, and brothels. In general, such parallels are not intended to sound more or less humorous or polemical as they do to earnest ears. It requires the seriousness of such museological reflections in order not to shy away from the indications of suspect places and functions in order to identify the specifically differential nature of the museum. The various sites at which museums are based possess a common heterological 446 Peter Sloterdijk and xenological denominator: in respect of the suspect sites it becomes clear that the museum of appropriation is itself, in reality, an eccentric place, a magnificent container for strange, discarded, bizarre, excellent, and incompatible objects, which—were there no museum—we always only encounter from the blind perspective of owners and users. The correspondence between museum and cemetery is the most macabre, but also the most obvious on our list. The idea that things deposited in the museum achieve a somewhat-dulled final resting place is one of the standard notions of popular museology. In truth, however, the museum is less a cemetery than an earthly heaven for leftover objects, for on the day of the exhibition dawns the day of resurrection. In this sense, the things that have succeeded in being incorporated into a permanent exhibition have indeed achieved immortality. For these, the talk of the resurrection of the flesh makes more sense than for the mortal remains of Christians, who in burial as in the crematorium have an equally poor chance of retaining any similarity with their old selves until the Day of Judgment. More Greek than Christian, the arrival of an object in a collection means the crossing to Hades, where it is mustered with celebrities and nobodies in pallid cellars in a crepuscular eternity. The collection of objects in museums leads one to think, of course, of the necropolis, where modest souls “live” beside the private and magnificent sites of final rest, but a convincing analogy between the permanent exhibition of an object and the burial of the dead only exists when we think of the Egyptian pyramid rather than the Christian graveyard. The tertium comparationis exists in the fervent efforts to preserve the perishable body. If museums and burial pyramids do, indeed, represent the strongest earthly equivalents to metaphysical immortalization, then the ancient Egyptian mummifiers are the objective colleagues of our contemporary conservators. There are supposedly people who do not go willingly into the museum because they sense in all the exhibits the smell of funerary objects. And of course, right up until today, part of museum collecting is nothing other than a continuation of grave robbing by different means. It is part of the significant self-representation of the modern period that our Egyptologists seized the ownership of the mummies in order to turn them into exhibits. Whoever has seen the mummies in the Egyptian collection in Berlin or elsewhere must have understood viscerally where the modern spirit of exhibition had triumphed over the ancient and discrete connectedness between the living and the dead. In the exhibition, the modern production of eternity as perennial viewability conquers the antique hope of survival through metamorphosis into the hidden. But as it also displays bodies preserved in bogs, mummies, and human skulls, the museum of appropriation pushes on the limits, behind which the objects can assert their own obstinate identity against that of the exhibition. When the heavenly home of objects becomes a graveyard, there is revealed the xenological core of the museum. The dead exhibit ­communicates the Museum—School of Alienation 447 central message of the modern museum: there is an irresolvable other in the world. At the same time, it is in the nature of museum routine to tame that which is scary and non-assimilable, thus giving us a false familiarity with that which is most extreme and most alien. In his reflections on “Museums and Other Houses,” Nelson Goodman underlines the comparison with the prison and the mental institution. For him, the characteristic they share in common is that these institutions normally maintain a security system that either prevents the inmates from escaping or shelters over-sensitive subjects from the world outside. That makes us aware that once objects have been delivered to a museum, they hardly ever find their way back to freedom. At best they are transferred to more modern establishments or, under the terms of prison reform, are released on parole—highly insured, of course. The fact that some financially strong institutions support “an elaborate intelligence network to capture the wanted” conforms in part to this picture.3 In our context the extraterritorial character of Goodman’s institutional comparison is striking; both are designated to separate individuals who have become alien to their surroundings as a result of law breaking or psychic disorder. It is a similar situation to the comparison with the sanatorium, which also calls attention to the “institutional monstrosity” of the museum.4 The comparison with the house of pleasure offers the “opportunity for a few moments of pleasure without consequences,” the shared feature by which museum and brothel are conceived as sites of secluded purification and relaxation. To those who on grounds of professional loyalty regard the museum as primarily a didactic establishment, this sort of appraisal may well be overstepping the limit of the permissible. For the same reason, the same group must be interested in the similarity between museums and football stadiums, in that both zealously point to success in achieving visitor numbers. The comparison of the museum with cemeteries, Hades, and necropolises leads to the macabre; that with the garbage dump into the realm of cynicism. And just as thanatology touches on the secrets of conscious life, so cynicism gives access to the moral treasure house of civilization. Whoever disputes a priori the comparability of art and rubbish, of worthiness for inclusion in a museum and suitability for throwing on the garbage heap, is missing the opportunity to use the analytical power of cynical indifference against the disparity in value. Seen from the perspective of cultural ecology, the analogy between museology and garbage theory is certainly very telling. Museums are establishments for the processing of cultural waste-management problems—waste-disposal sites for the hazardous waste of civilization, the permanent repository site for low-grade radioactive substances and for the combustion residue of creative processes. While the garbage tips anonymously dispose of the material detritus of life underground, the museum performs a disposal process that is vertical and retained in the memory. It is d ­ edicated to the 448 Peter Sloterdijk hazardous waste category of “objective spirit,” which it selects as the recyclable result of earlier life processes and makes available for supplementary production. In this sense, musealized values and the custodial pieces are more easily comparable with a compost heap than with the permanent disposal site of domestic and industrial waste. Indeed, the old gardening culture of composting anticipated modern recycling practice on the level of organic transmutation. If one considers the material results of civilization in terms of waste disposal, it becomes pellucidly clear that the accumulation of manufacturing knowledge on the subject only generates a pretense of appropriation and of seizing power over the external world. As we are gradually learning to understand, the primary accumulation takes place on the side of the garbage, where the dysfunctional and unwanted results and by-products of the civilization process begin to grow more quickly than our ability to control the waste. As the garbage mountain and the side-effect mountain of societal reproduction builds up faster today than the knowledge of how to conquer the problem, right at the center of the global appropriation process itself, amidst self-empowerment through manufacture, erupts the absolutely strange and non-appropriatable. Garbage as the heterologous category par excellence signals the revenge of not-I on the insatiable subjectivity of production and consumption. Musealized garbage already expresses the self-pity of the viewing subject, who anticipates the danger of his demise in the kickback of the other. Garbage exhibits come about only in part from the identification with the antagonist; rather, they indicate the fractured subject’s belated response in attending closely to the despised exhibit, when, objectively viewed, the civilization should be arming itself for the second battle against nature as garbage. If the museum was primarily a didactic establishment, it could content itself with illustrating human forms of life and creativity for posterity on the basis of art and trivial objects. But as its essential function is xenological, we can at the same time give an account in the museum of the progress of the world in becoming other to its inhabitants. Notes 1. Beat Wyss, Trauer der Vollendung. Von der Ästhetik des Deutschen Idealismus zur Kulturkritik an der Moderne (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1985). 2. Translator’s note: see Michel Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” in Foucault, Power, ed. James D. Faubion, in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 2000–2), 157–75. 3. Nelson Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 175. 4. Ibid., 177.