Rader's "A Modern Book of Esthetics" has finally arrived, and the brief
excerpts from Lipps and Lee are a bit disappointing.
The 3 pages excerpted from "The Beautiful" by Vernon Lee tell us nothing about
her concept of "empathy" except that it could include any association that a
perceivor might have regarding the perceived.
"Empathy" is not just "attributing what goes on in us when we look at a shape
to the shape itself" -- but it also includes the "complex mental process by
which we (all unsuspectingly) invest that inert , bodiless shape, with the
stored up, averaged, and essential modes of our activity". (Has anyone read
the entire book? It's still in print, presumably kept there by fans of all
things Victorian)
Nearly 9 pages have been excerpted from Theodor Lipps' "Archiv fur die gesamte
Psychologie" (the entirety of which is hardly available today in German, much
less English) , but still it seems as if he has barely begun to discuss
"einfuhlung". Only one example was given, regarding the feelings one might
have while watching a person
move:
"In a word, I am now with my feeling of activity entirely and wholly in the
moving figure. Even spatially, if we can speak of the spatial extent of the
ego, I am in its place. I am transported into it. I am in its place. I am
transported into it. I am, so far as my consciousness is concerned, entirely
and wholly indentical with it. Thus feeling myself active in the observed
human figure, I feel also in it free, facile, proud. This is esthetic
imitation and this imitation is the same time esthetic empathy"
Can we then conclude, on the basis of this single example, that Lipps is
proposing that esthetic imitation is best facilitated by the arts that
present the most clearly recognizable human figures? (BTW - it is so, so
bourgeois German of him to enjoy feeling "free, facile, and proud")
Happily, Rader's anthology also includes 8 pages excerpted from Worringer's
"Abstraction and Empathy", which includes the following footnote:
"That we today can empathize ourselves even into the form of a pyramid is not
to be denied, and in general the possibility of an empathy into abstract
forms, of which much will be said later, should not be denied. But everything
contradicts the supposition that this impulse of empathy was effective in the
creators of the pyramidal form.."
Oh really?
Would anyone here care to speculate on just how that supposition might be
contradicted?
**************************
>>And if so --- might you point to where either one of them (Lee and Lipps)
suggests that an
empathic response was inversely conditional to the degree of abstraction? Did
either one of them ever suggest that empathy could not achieve "the escape
from the "arbitrariness of organic existence" (and didn't Vernon Lee
write ghost stories?) I'm just wondering whether Lipps and Lee may have had a
broader concept of
"empathy" than the one which Worringer is opposing to abstraction. (CM)
>Yes, but apparenbtly you have not. Worringer's addition to the empathy view
was the notion of a polar opposite, abstraction. Lipps and Lee dealt with
variations of empathy. See essays by both in Rader's A Modern Book of
Esthetics, part three, beginning p. 367. But since you seem to do all your
"research" on Wickipedia, I suppose you'll never check out the references.
Meanwhile, you are quiter wrong in your assumptions, as usual.(WC)
____________________________________________________________
Find great deals on the latest styles of phones. Click now!
http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/fc/BLSrjnxZxEyqSj4Lf9WXO9Zgf65WDt
VBSvnBk40w9GJPSJ3XwLDU6F2ViL2/
