You might be surprised to learn that the word “empathy” is a fairly new addition to the English language. It was suggested as a translation for the German term einfühlung (“a feeling into”) by psychologist Edward B. Titchener only in 1908. We needed a term for the experience of “feeling oneself into” another’s experience to explain a phenomena that was first raised in the realm of aesthetics. The way in which we project ourselves into a work of art and are moved by it, this is what German philosopher Robert Vischer meant to pick out with the German *einfühlung *in his 1873 doctoral thesis. A recognition that our relationship to art isn’t only intellectual, and we can be emotionally and physically moved, sometimes to tears and laughter, by works of art. Twenty-five years later, Theodor Lipps expanded the concept beyond aesthetics to encompass the psychological experience of projecting oneself into others' experiences.

The original Greek term empatheia (ἐμπάθεια), of which the English term is a straight transliteration, refers specifically to physical affection or passion. The Greek word combines the preposition en (ἐν, meaning “in”) and pathos (πάθος, meaning the “undergoing” of something, “feeling” or “suffering”). The Greek term did not encompass the psychological concept of projecting oneself into another's emotional experience, if for no other reason than the “self” had not yet been invented.

In contrast, the word “sympathy,” similarly formed from the combination of pathos with the preposition syn or sym (συν): “with” or “together” goes back all the way to the 16th century and comes to us via the Latin sympathia. But with sympathy, we keep our distance from the other. We feel for them, not with them. When sympathizing with another, you may care for them, but you do not share their emotional state. Sympathy is supportive, but is found to lack the emotional depth and connection captured by the word empathy. Pity is even less close to empathy, often coming with a sense of superiority and judgment. Pity is an emotion that is caused by witnessing abothers suffering or bad fortune, but often with some measure of condescension. Empathy is not in and of itself an emotion, but describes the openness and a certain permeability of psyche, a chief characteristic of our humanity. The lack of this permeability, the inability to be affected by others, is captured in the term sociopath.

So we really did need another word to embody the idea that sometimes we are affected and influenced by another’s experience, second hand but as if it were our own. I have written about this as a characteristic of intimate friendships in my series on friendship, and how it is a double edged sword. We can fall under a bad influence because we can be affected by others, or we can be moved to act in incredibly difficult and even heroic ways.

In this way, empathy is very close to love. We might do for a beloved other what we might not even do for our own sake.

The elaboration, in Aesthetics, of empathy/einfühlung, is just one aspect of the carving out of a modern, individual self in turn of the century Europe. Philosophy is undergoing a major shift from Kantian German Idealism towards phenomenology, existentialism, and philosophical psychology. When I say “Continental Philosophy” this is where it begins, with the problem of intersubjectivity and philosophy’s address to the Other. Husserl (the father of Phenomenology) wrestled with how the ego (his transcendental subject) could constitute the Other as another subject (as opposed to experiencing the Other as an object), how if experience is all mine, how I can have any experience of another subject as not-me. The Other was proving to be quite the problem, and for this idea of empathy/einfühlung became the foundation for philosophical accounts of intersubjective awareness. In this context, empathy is an indirect but intuitive appreciation of another conscious being. These are the ideas percolation, and which would become the basis for his magnum opera, his Cartesian Meditations (1931). Husserlian scholars note then unpublished notes from this period greatly influenced those close to him, including Martin Heidegger, Edith Stein, and Max Scheler.

Empathy is an idea that was co-developed in the overlap between philosophy and psychology. The aforementioned Theodor Lipps, with his description of empathy as the projection of the self into the experience of another (through space, so this is a spatial metaphor), was a major influence on both Husserl and Stein. But Max Sheler was moving towards critique, arguing that empathy is not a projection but a direct, felt apprehension of another’s emotional state. This is to say that we can be affected, emotionally and physically, by others. We have this capacity and vulnerability.

This critique would help move phenomenological accounts towards a more affective, embodied account of intersubjectivity. For Husserl, the concern was still an epistemological one, inherited from Descartes, of how we can know the other, an intellectual know. But for those who wrote in his wake, it became an increasingly ethical and political question. Spoiler alert, this all ends up in Emmanuel Levinas’ proclamation that ethics — not epistemology nor metaphysics — is first philosophy, the source for our human world. And we’ll get there, eventually.

To be continued…

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