A Brief Historical Reconstruction

Abstract

In this chapter, the genesis of empathy as a word is briefly traced. In particular, it is the Theodor Lipps' work on the subject and his insistence on the imitative mechanism underlying the empathic phenomenon which is recalled. This analysis is preliminary to the examination of empathy as a concept, which will be offered in Chap. 2.

Few concepts have received the same immense amount of attention as that obtained by empathy in the last four or five decades. Empathy was literally everywhere to be found: in the popular press,¹ in the mouth of world-leaders,² and of course in the research on different topics and disciplines such as psychopathy,³ autism spectrum disorders,⁴ medical care,⁵ ethics and moral development,⁶ justice and the law,⁷ art and the media,⁸ clinical psychology,⁹ neurosciences,¹⁰ and the theory of mind.¹¹

At the beginning of our inquiry on empathy, it will pay to spend some time trying to retrace the complex history of this concept. For those who are familiar with ancient Greek, the term ‘empathy’ reveals a clear etymology: it is the union of the Greek en ‘inside’ and pathos, which means ‘pain’, ‘suffering’, but also ‘feeling’. Therefore, the term can be translated as ‘feeling inside’ or ‘feeling into’. In spite of this clearly Greek etymology, the term ‘empathy’ was coined by a British psychologist and philosopher named Edward Titchener¹² in order to convey the semantic load of a German word that had rapidly become very popular in psychological and philosophical discussions between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, namely, the term Einfühlung. Many scholars think that the first appearance of this concept is to be found in the work of Theodor Lipps,¹³ a German philosopher and psychologist famous for his contributions in the field of psychology of aesthetics. Actually, it should be noted that at least the verb einfühlen was already present in the work of Herder¹⁴ and Novalis,¹⁵ as well as in that of Robert Vischer.¹⁶ However, Lipps was certainly the first to use this concept in a very systematic way, giving it considerable importance in his theory. In a few words, Lipps saw in empathy the basic mechanism for the understanding of expressive phenomena. He started from the presupposition that we do not have any experiential access to the minds of others, since the only mind we have direct access to is our own, and that only thanks to an imaginative enactment of other people’s experience (provided by empathy) is it possible to get to know something of the psychic lives of these people. Thus, Lipps harked back to what David Hume asserted 150 years before¹⁷ about sympathy, the conceptual ancestor of empathy.

However, whereas Hume was interested in both the ethical and the epistemic role of empathy, Lipps gave this phenomenon a fundamental role to play only at the epistemic level. In this regard, his contribution also managed to further develop considerations on the matter of another famous and extremely influential British philosopher, John Stuart Mill, particularly with reference to an argument which gradually became a classic in the circle of the philosophy of mind: the so-called Argument from Analogy.¹⁸ Irrespective of the fact that this argument, traditionally attributed to Mill, does not reflect Mill’s¹⁹ opinion and should with all probability be ascribed to Bertrand Russell,²⁰ the argument can be described as follows. If we take as prerequisite that human beings are in relevant aspects similar to each other, then it seems reasonable to suppose that others have thoughts and feelings, for the very good reason that I am aware, in my own case, of having them. Lipps, surely influenced from the phenomenological tradition (Husserl in particular), goes beyond the extent of this argument and sees in empathy the base for interpersonal understanding, describing it as an original, primordial, not further derivable act.²¹ Is it enough to make of him a follower of the phenomenological views on empathy? The answer should be negative, as Lipps’ position diverged from that of the phenomenologists on one essential point: in Lipps’ opinion, in fact, we have an experiential access only to our own mental states and, as a consequence, we can get an idea of what others think or feel only thanks to a projective mechanism. In particular, Lipps thought that as we see a gesture, or an expression made by someone, we immediately have the tendency to reproduce it interiorly and this tendency evokes in us the feeling normally associated with this expression. On Lipps’ account, human beings have a general instinct of empathy, and this instinct has a twofold drive: a drive directed towards imitation and a drive directed towards expression.²² Basically, when I see someone making a certain expression, I have a natural inclination to imitate this expression, which in turn evokes in me a feeling that I attribute to the other through projection. As it is presupposed that humans are under many aspects similar to each other, we can presume with a certain degree of probability that the feeling we are projecting is, if not identical, akin to the feeling the other (the target of our empathising) is experiencing. This is the fundamental mechanism allowing for the interpersonal understanding.²³

Of course, one may wonder why we should resort to a mechanism of imitation plus projection in order to understand what other people feel or think. The answer is that for Lipps, as we have said, the only mind we have access to is our own, consequently, the mental states of other individuals can be inferred only in analogy with our own mental occurrences.