I understand it as ;
There is no empathy without previous knowledge in our mind.
"Empathy is Pre-reflective" sounds like the opposite" to me.
mando
On Jul 19, 2009, at 6:46 PM, Boris Shoshensky wrote:
Husserl's student Edith Stein described Einfuhlung (empathy) as a
blind mode
of knowledge that reaches the experience of the other without
possessing it.
Einfuhlung is not the same as Verstehen or human understanding, which,
as Dilthey pointed out, requires the use of one's mental powers,
and cannot
be reduced to a mere mode of feeling. To understand is not to
apprehend
something empathetically.
Whereas understanding is reflective, empathy is prereflective.
Boris Shoshensky
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Worringer and his predecessors
Date: Sun, 19 Jul 2009 13:32:32 GMT
It (empathy) has always seamed simple to me, Am I wrong?:
Things or objects reflect the experiences in the mind's knowledge of
those things and objects as individuals or like minded
groups. ...Mando
************
That's Vernon Lee's definition of empathy, and it would have a
very wide
application: "Empathy can be traced in all modes of speech and
thought"
Theodor Lipps restricts his discussion to empathy in aesthetic
enjoyment,
where "empathy is the fact that the antithesis between myself and
the object
disappears, or rather, does not even exist"... "the object (of
esthetic
pleasure) is the strong, proud, free ego; not the ego as such, but
just so
far
as it objectifies itself, that is, so far as it is bound up with the
sensuously perceived figure"
Worringer quoted Lipps with "Esthetic enjoyment is objectified
self-enjoyment", and then focused on the kind of example that Lipps
offered
(of a dancer moving his arm) to further narrow the scope of empathy as
follows: "The need of empathy may be regarded as the presupposition
of the
artistic purpose only where this purpose inclines to
the truth of organic life, that is, to naturalism in the higher
sense". Then,
Worringer introduced another phrase, "self-privation", which he
suggested
encompassed both naturalism (empathy) and it's opposite (abstraction).
In our discussion that followed, William told us that "it's not
the majority
case that contemporary art is antagonistic to empathy"
But he also told us that "contemporary art aims to be outside the
familiar",
which would make it anti-empathetic by all of the above definitions.
And that's why I asked William to explain what he means by 'empathy'
(though I'm afraid he's not going to tell us)
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