On the Limits of Empathy

In late-nineteenth-century Germany, Einfühlung, or empathy (literally, "feeling into") described an individual spectator's active perceptual experience-both haptic and optical-of an image, object, or spatial environment Critique from within the discourse and a loss of interest among art historians and psychologists around 1900 preceded more forceful rejections by Wilhelm Worringer in 1908 and, later, Bertolt Brecht. The concept's critical history reveals and reflects disciplinary fractures; a rejection of narrative with the birth of visual abstraction; and widespread transformations, with the birth of cinema, in the objects of spectatorship and the status of spectators themselves.