From a Rumor of Empathy to a Scandal of Empathy in Lipps

Abstract

Theodor Lipps is the thinker most responsible for popularizing the term “empathy” in German. He monopolized the term “Einfühlung” [“empathy”] so that any German intellectual writing from 1897 to 1914 set off an immediate association with Lipps’ “psychology beauty and art” (the subtitle of Lipps’ Aesthetik [1903]). Lipps put “empathy” on the intellectual map. A rumor of empathy becomes a scandal of empathy as Lipps substitutes “empathy” for “taste” as the foundation of aesthetics, unwittingly generalizing Kant’s fallacy of “subreption.” Lipps privileges empathy as a solution to the philosophic problem of other minds, but escapes from one problem only to end up in another—solipsism, the view that there is only one mind, isolated in its experiences.