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Empathy is, at heart, an aesthetic appreciation of the other | Psyche Ideas

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Empathy is an aesthetic practice that relies on our capacity to delight in, and respond with reverence to, the world around us

Today we think about empathy as a way to understand another’s experience. But when the English word ‘empathy’ first appeared in 1908 as a translation of the German Einfühlung, it denoted an aesthetic ability to appreciate objects and nature. What exactly is this surprising early version of empathy, and can we imagine empathy as an aesthetic practice today? At the end of the 19th century, German psychologists defined Einfühlung as an aesthetic transfer of our subjective experiences into objects in the world. To empathise meant to project our feelings and movements into forms of art and…

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