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From Absorption to Judgment: Empathy in Aesthetic Response

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Empathy

Abstract

In this chapter, Freedberg sets out to establish a more rigorous basis for the understanding of empathy, and proposes a novel hypothesis about the neural substrate of judgment. After discussing the history of empathy in aesthetic theory and the frequently ambiguous conceptualizations of aesthetic judgment within cognitive neuroscience of art, he confines empathy to the domain of motor responses. Moving on to examine the role of immediate and automatic bodily reactions both in the perception of visual images and in aesthetic response, he emphasizes the precognitive dimension of empathy and its place in the understanding of such responses. He distinguishes empathy from sympathy by assessing the degree of cognitive content of each. Finally, he shows how these positions enable a new neural theory of aesthetic judgment predicated on the modulation of bottom-up responses, the ensual of self-awareness, and the detachment from absorption essential for judgment.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I discussed not only the well-known war photos by Brady and Gardner, but also those by Reed Brockway Bontecou in a lecture entitled The Great Paradox of Civil War Photography: Art History, Neuroscience and the Real War, given at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 31, 2013, which I hope to publish on another occasion.

  2. 2.

    The feeling is clear; the precise location of the feeling less so.

  3. 3.

    For a vigorous dismissal of what Nelson Goodman called the “tingle-immersion theory,” see Goodman (1976, p. 112).

  4. 4.

    See the more recent and excellent work by Thomas Hilgers that suggests Kant never intended his notion of disinterested judgment to be detached from the body – pace Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals, III, 6 and my own earlier work. See Nietzsche (1887/1996); for Hilgers’ work (which I hope will be published soon), see for the moment Hilgers (2010).

  5. 5.

    On the subject of the enhanced motor potentials evoked upon observing the raised hand and extended wrist gesture (as in Michelangelo’s Adam warding off the Angel in the Expulsion from Paradise mentioned in this paragraph), see Battaglia, Lisanby, & Freedberg (2011). For a recent behavioral study of the automatic imitation of “goal-less” actions, see Chiavarino, Bugiani, Grandi, & Colle (2013).

  6. 6.

    Warburg grappled with this issue from the very beginning. The Vorbemerkung to his dissertation on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring concludes “Nebenbei sei bemerkt, dass dieser Nachweis für die psychologische Aesthetik deshalb bemerkenswerth ist, weil man hier in den Kreisen der schaffenden Künstler den Sinn für den ästhetischen Akt der ‘Einfühlung’ in seinem Werden als stilbildende Macht beobachten kann”. (Warburg, 2010, pp. 39–40; Engl. transl. in Warburg, 1999, p. 89).

  7. 7.

    See the valuable edition of the text and notes in Warburg, 2010. For an extremely useful contribution to the understanding of the origins of Warburg’s use of the term Pathosformel, see Wedepohl (2012). For more on this, see my remarks in Freedberg (2013).

  8. 8.

    “Daß diese Engramme leidenschaftlicher Erfahrung als gedächtnisbewahrtes Erbgut überleben und vorbildlich den Umriss bestimmen, den die Künstlerhand schafft” (Mnemosyne Einleitung, B 10/VI 929, in Warburg, 2012, p. 631, own transl.). See also Gombrich and Saxl (1986, p. 245).

  9. 9.

    “Das schwierigste Problem für die bildende Kunst, lenkt das Festhalten der Bilder des bewegten Lebens” (Warburg 2012, p. 107). See also the contribution to this subject by Philippe-Alain Michaud (1998).

  10. 10.

    The passage continues, “Then a similar feeling arises in us in consequence of an ancient association between movement and sensation…”. (Nietzsche, 1881/1997, p. 142).

  11. 11.

    The term seems to have been coined by the neurologist Charles-Edouard Brown Séquard (1871–1894). For its origins, see Crary (1999, pp. 165–9). Crary also notes the relationship between the term “dynamogeny” and the concepts of motor excitation and facilitation (Crary, 1999, p. 165, note 31).

  12. 12.

    Several examples in Gombrich and Saxl (1986, pp. 248–50). Gombrich cites the Allgemeine Ideen, and the notebooks for 1927–1928, p. 20 (“Das antikische Dynamogramm wird in maximaler Spannung aber unpolarisiert in Bezug auf die passive oder aktive Energetik des nachfühlenden, nachsprechenden (erinnernden) überliefert. Erst der Kontakt mit der Zeit bewirkt die Polarisation. Diese kann zur radikalen Umkehr (Inversion) des echten antiken Sinnes führen”) and p. 67 (“die Polarization der Dynamogramme durch die Antikische Mneme”); Koos, Pichler, Rappl, and Swoboda (1994). The source for the first of these passages is given as 1.6.1929.

  13. 13.

    See my discussion of their work further below. For a general view of Jeannerod’s theory of motor cognition and its relationship with what neuroscientists call imagery (what humanists would call the imagination of images), see Jeannerod (2006).

  14. 14.

    The whole study of emotion was long neglected precisely because of this attitude (I remember discussing this in 1980 with Amélie Rorty, whose anthology Explaining Emotions (Rorty, 1980) played a major role in the renewed philosophical interest in the topic).

  15. 15.

    To say this, however, is not to claim that bodily movements that precede emotion are necessarily precognitive, though they may in many instances be automatic. Automatic responses can just as well be the result of training as the result of precognitive mechanisms.

  16. 16.

    Jackson came from Andrew Meltzoff’s team at Washington University in Saint Louis that did fundamental and abundant work on neonate imitation of expression in the late 1970s (Meltzoff, 1988; Meltzoff & Moore, 1977, 1983).

  17. 17.

    Originally suggested by Meltzoff and Moore’s famous neonate experiments of 1977, as in the articles already noted, but especially Meltzoff and Moore (1977). For adult subjects, see Decety et al. (1997, 2002) and Iacoboni et al. (1999).

  18. 18.

    This translation from E. C. Marchant, London-New York: 1923. Not surprisingly the passage is quoted on the very first page of Jennifer Montagu (1994).

  19. 19.

    For basic surveys of the neural substrates of emotional appraisal in terms of prefrontal modulation of lower level responses, see Ochsner, Bunge, Gross, and Gabrieli (2002) and Ochsner and Gross (2005).

  20. 20.

    Learned examples of such denial are provided by Willibald Sauerländer (1989) and the many predecessors he cites.

  21. 21.

    I am grateful to Thomas Metzinger for reminding me of Lipps’ views on the precise role of these elements in the relationship between empathy and aesthetics.

  22. 22.

    Perceiving and assessing the level of pain experienced by a person in photographs (hands and feet in situations likely to cause pain) is associated with significant changes in activity in the ACC, anterior insula, cerebellum and, to a lesser extent, the thalamus. Activity in the ACC is “strongly correlated with observers’ ratings of the others pain suggesting that activity of this region is modulated according to subjects’ reactivity to the pain of others” (Jackson, Meltzoff, & Decety, 2005, p. 771).

  23. 23.

    Other areas of the brain (in particular, the inferior parietal lobule and the hippocampal formation) are also generally regarded as parts of the DMN, but discussion of their role in the relationship between detachment, contemplation and judgment can wait for another occasion (see Buckner, Andrews-Hanna, & Schacter, 2008; Andrews-Hanna et al., 2010; Smallwood et al., 2013).

  24. 24.

    See earlier Kirk et al. (2011). For a further analysis of the aesthetic implications, see Kirk and Freedberg (2015) and Kirk and Freedberg (forthcoming). Significantly, patients with DLPFC lesions seem to have “deficits in empathetic ability related to cognitive flexibility” as opposed to those with right VMPC regions where empathetic deficits are profound and relate to affective recognition and emotional and body states (as highlighted in the present discussion). See, for example, Shamay-Tsoory, Tomer, Berger, and Aharon-Peretz (2003).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, New York, USA

    David Freedberg

  2. Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University, New York, USA

    David Freedberg

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  1. David Freedberg
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Correspondence to David Freedberg .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Psychology, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Vanessa Lux

  2. ZfL Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Sigrid Weigel

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Freedberg, D. (2017). From Absorption to Judgment: Empathy in Aesthetic Response. In: Lux, V., Weigel, S. (eds) Empathy. Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51299-4_6

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