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Einfühlung as the breath of art: six modes of embodiment

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Abstract

Robert Vischer’s concept of Einfühlung, feeling-into, translated as empathy, serves as the departure point for a proposal about viewing art using the body for a non-imitative form of empathy termed a transomatization and for other embodied operations. A transomatization occurs when viewers reinterpret a component or process of their own bodies to serve as a non-imitative stand-in, or correlate, for something outside of the self, specifically, some quality of an art work or its production. This creates an overlap of the self and other that might be experienced subjectively as a feeling of projection, an operation characteristic of empathy. Transomatizations and other embodied experiences are grounded in empathic, intersubjective modes of engaging others that begin in early life. As applications of the proposed concepts, six different embodiments of the viewer’s breathing are explored in regard to Friedrich E. Church’s 1848 oil painting Morning, Looking East over the Hudson Valley from the Catskill Mountains. Support for elements of the proposed concepts and applications is drawn from research in the biological and social sciences and from first person, embodied accounts of viewing.

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Notes

  1. This sentence was reiterated by the nineteenth-century art historian Frederich Wölfflin in his own theorizing about projection into objects, as noted by editors of (Time, Space, Empathy p. 104).

  2. The reuse of neural circuits originally from (Hurley 2008) is a more recent means of describing the kind of embodied simulations that Gallese and others discuss.

  3. Even if this overall awareness of the somatosensory system were not within our background consciousness—and in places Damasio does not reiterate the notion that it is always present to consciousness, I argue that the internal milieu can come into consciousness upon our inspection of the artwork. As we look at the work the body can become aroused, and this change in bodily homeostasis constitutes a shift from the status quo, which helps draw attention to the body.

  4. For a more recent synthesis of this research in light of current investigations, see (Damasio and Damasio 2006).

  5. In referring to a kinesthetic resonance, I am using language amenable to enactive theories of perception, which do not deploy the concept of matching states between observers and what they observe.

  6. I will not distinguish here between supramodal and amodal but refer readers to distinctions offered by Struiksma et al. (2009).

  7. Anthropologist Dissanayake (2000) argues that the development of these dyadic relationships is the prototypes for later forms of art making and experience.

  8. Implicit knowledge is received unconsciously and not recollected in explicit verbal form.

  9. For discussion of individual differences and other contextual features in various kinds of imaginative and interoceptive tasks, see (Esrock 1994; Porges 1993; Ruggerio 1997; Cameron 2001; Kozhevnikov et al. 2005; Blajenkova et al. 2006).

  10. Pollatos et al. (2016), which concerns the accuracy of interoception and heart beat detection in anorexic individuals, is relevant for developing a profile of those inclined to forming transomatizations.

  11. When considering the various manifestations of empathic overlap at neural and subjective levels, Preston and Hofelich identify "the most stable states of the system" (27). Although this pertains to human-to-human encounters, such variables might be adapted when examining the production of transomatizations. See also Preston and de Waal (2002).

  12. I am arguing here that a conventional relationship between the viewer's breath and real clouds encourages a connection between the viewer's breath and the painted clouds.  I am not claiming that such close relationships are necessary for the transomatization of a bodily part or process into a quality of the art object or its production. I do not argue the point in depth, but I believe that it is the viewer's motivation or desire that generates the transomatization process and that other factors, such as resemblance between body and object, encourage or facilitate the transfer.

  13. See Vischer, Wölfflin and others in Empathy Form and Space (1994).

  14. For early research studying correlations between imagery and heart beat, see the therapeutically oriented work of Ahsen (1984).

  15. Platform might not be the best term for this category. Perhaps the notion of a parallel input source might convey the additional resource offered by a breathing transomatization.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication and Media, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Sage Building, 110 8th Street, Troy, NY, 12180, USA

    Ellen J. Esrock

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Correspondence to Ellen J. Esrock.

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This article is part of the Special Section on “From ‘Einfühlung’ to empathy: Exploring the relationship between aesthetic and interpersonal experience”, edited by Joanna Ganczarek, Thomas Hünefeldt, and Marta Olivetti Belardinelli.

Handling editor: Joanna Ganczarek (Pedagogical University of Cracow); Reviewers: Susan Stuart (University of Glasgow), Ashley Walton (University of Cincinnati).

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Esrock, E.J. Einfühlung as the breath of art: six modes of embodiment. Cogn Process 19, 187–199 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-017-0835-4

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