Vischer's Empathy and the Subject of Experience

We began the course with a reading by the philosopher and art historian Robert Vischer, entitled “On the Optical Sense of Form.” This essay, which is widely regarded as one of the founding texts in aesthetic theory of empathy, leads the reader into a series of propositions concerning, concentrated aesthetic experience. Empathy, according to Vischer, animates world of inert matter. Through both sensory and imaginary projections, we feel our way into the objects of our attention, filling them with our own responsive sensations. Such an account seems almost to border on narcissistic delusion, with objects in the world becoming mere extensions of the self. In this reading, I see the objects mainly in and through my own sense of bodily self; the objects become mainly projections of me. Then, however, Vischer adds the following lines: “Only ostensibly do I keep my own identity though the object remains distinct. I seem merely to adapt and attach myself to it as one hand clasps another, and yet I am mysteriously transplanted and transformed into this Other.” Here “I” disappear entirely, my identity becoming one with the object, or rather there is no longer any object since subject and object have merged. Apparent narcissism becomes apparent selflessness. Still I am wondering: what is it that I have merged into? Have I merely attributed my subjective states to things in the world, or has the boundary between me and world dissolved such that I become the things? How can these experiences even be distinguished? Different kinds of artwork seem to suggest or evoke different answers to this question. For example, Edvard Munch’s, The Scream places the tormented figure at the center of a landscape which has been radically transformed by the contortions of the central figure. The world becomes a mirror for subjective states. By contrast, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial presents the viewer with a pair of black, polished granite walls that carve a slice into the earth. Their geometric scale and geological intractability are such that I am pulled out of my mere individual body and fluctuating mental states into something more crystalline, silent and vast. For contemporary artists who are concerned with questions of identity and otherness, with shifting viewers out of their usual subjective boundaries, such questions become pertinent, even urgent.