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Scott Black: What is empathy? The capacity to feel with others is central to our thinking about ethics, education, social life, and politics. And empathy, of course, is at the core of the humanities. But like all important cultural ideas and keywords, empathy has a history, and in this case a surprising one. Where does the concept of empathy come from?

Welcome to the Virtual Jewel Box Podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center.

I’m Scott Black, director of the Tanner Humanities Center, and today I am joined by Joseph Metz, Associate Professor of German and Cultural Studies in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Utah. Joe has just published a wonderful, surprising history of the idea of empathy called The Feeling of Form: Empathy and Aesthetics from Büchner to Rilke from Cornell University Press.

I’m delighted to welcome Joe, and I’m delighted to hear more about the cultural history of empathy. Welcome, Joe.

Joseph Metz: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Scott Black: This is a great book. It’s deeply researched, really fascinating, and covers a lot of territory. It starts from the origins of the very concept of empathy in German culture in the nineteenth century.

Could you just give us a brief outline of the concerns of the book—where empathy comes from?

Joseph Metz: Right. This is actually a very interesting history that a lot of people don’t know. Empathy was a neologism in English, a newly coined word. It didn’t enter the English language until 1909.

It was actually a translation from a German word that was also a neologism, coined in 1873. The German word is Einfühlung, which literally means “feeling oneself into something.” It was originally a term in German art theory and aesthetic theory and had to do with human relationships with objects, particularly objects in nature such as rocks, stones, and clouds, but also works of art and abstract shapes and lines.

It migrated from that beginning through a series of developments, including what we call physiological or psychological aesthetics, and eventually ended up being translated by a Cornell psychology professor into the word “empathy.” This was an attempt to make a word analogous to the already existing English word “sympathy.” So he went back to ancient Greek roots and coined empathy—em plus pathos, “feeling into”—as a way to translate the German word while making it sound like an existing English term.

That’s the etymology of the word, but it comes from a lot of different places. That’s a very brief etymological history.

Scott Black: That’s really interesting. So originally when people were thinking about empathy, they were not actually thinking about interpersonal empathy. They were thinking about feeling with art objects.

Joseph Metz: Yes, that’s right. It was coined by the art historian and art theorist Robert Vischer in 1873 in his dissertation Über das optische Formgefühl (On the Optical Sense of Form).

In that dissertation, he was talking about the way human beings relate to objects through sensations of the body—the way the human being projects emotional states or vitality into various objects, whether objects in nature or works of art.

That was the original usage of the word in German for at least twenty-five years. It became very popular and became the center of one of the most influential disciplines at the time, physiological or psychological aesthetics. Only later, bit by bit, did it start to become connected with interpersonal feeling, particularly through the work of Vischer’s successor, Theodor Lipps. He was the first to use the term in both ways.

Scott Black: As an aesthetic category, this was about how we respond bodily to art forms, and that was part of a new scientific kind of aesthetics in nineteenth-century German thought.

Joseph Metz: Exactly. It has a long and interesting history. It goes back to the eighteenth century, to the Enlightenment, particularly to Immanuel Kant.

Kant developed the theory that when we interact with the world, we’re not necessarily seeing the universe as it is in itself. We’re seeing the hardwiring of our own mind, which imposes certain categories on perception. In that sense, we project our own mental categories onto reality and see their reflection back at us.

This idea was massively influential in the late Enlightenment and early Romanticism. It became foundational for German idealist philosophy and spread throughout Europe. Parallel to this, European scientists—particularly German scientists—were undergoing what you might call the discovery of the nervous system. Neuroanatomy and neurophysiology were emerging, and thinkers were studying how nerves worked.

In 1826, Johannes Müller, one of the most important physiologists of the time, formulated the law of specific nerve energies. It states that when you expose the body to a stimulus, different types of sensory nerves process that stimulus in different ways appropriate to that nerve. The same stimulus might register as sight if it stimulates the optic nerve or as sound if it stimulates the auditory nerve.

Many physiologists took this as empirical verification of Kant. We don’t know reality as it is in itself; there is something out there, but we project our own sensory processing onto the world. These ideas came together—Kantian philosophy and physiology—and kicked off an intense interest in human projection onto the outside world. Einfühlung, or feeling oneself into the outside world, emerges at this point as a way of thinking about how we imbue supposedly dead objects with human vitality by projecting our feelings into them.

Scott Black: One of the things that troubles empathy as an idea is whether, when I’m feeling with you, I’m feeling you or I’m feeling myself. Is empathy about the feeler or the object of feeling? That seems to have existed right from the beginning.

Joseph Metz: Yes, it’s a very complex issue and one that has led to critiques of empathy over the years, especially interpersonal empathy. We don’t quite know where feeling is coming from.

This is especially apparent in Vischer’s dissertation. He describes objects like rock faces or cliffs and says we read defiance into them. We read the cliff as opposing us, but this is our own emotional state projected into the object because the cliff resembles a human body towering over us.

The question becomes: what comes first? His language is vague and ambiguous. At times it seems as though without external objects we wouldn’t even have a conception of ourselves. At other times he says objects symbolize our body because they resemble bodily postures. It’s unclear whether feelings originate in the self or the object.

These ambiguities persist and later resurface in critiques of interpersonal empathy. Do we really experience another’s feelings, or are we projecting our own feelings into them? That history goes back to Theodor Lipps and continues through later theory.

Scott Black: So the problems with empathy go all the way back to its origins.

Joseph Metz: I would say so. There’s an even deeper question underlying this: the conceptual framework of self and other. Empathy presupposes a dualism between self and other, but early theorists already struggled to maintain that distinction. It’s extremely difficult to determine where the self ends and the other begins.

If we can’t clearly define self and other, how can we speak of empathy at all?

Scott Black: You also describe empathy emerging out of a particular historical constellation in the nineteenth century.

Joseph Metz: Yes. Alongside Kant and neurophysiology, there was a major scientific debate in the German-speaking world between vitalism and materialism.

Vitalism held that the universe is a living organism and that matter and life are inseparable. This view developed into Naturphilosophie and was influential in German Romanticism, particularly with philosophers like Friedrich Schelling.

Opposing this was scientific materialism, which argued that matter is dead and life is merely the result of chemical processes. Johannes Müller thought he was a vitalist, but many of his students interpreted his work as supporting materialism.

Eventually, materialism won out. By the late nineteenth century, vitalism was largely discredited. At that moment, empathy theory can be seen as an attempt to reanimate a world that science had rendered dead—to project human life back into inert matter.

This becomes uncanny and anxiety-ridden. Empathy starts to resemble a Frankenstein-like project of resurrecting dead form.

Scott Black: You talk about early concerns that empathy might involve possession.

Joseph Metz: Yes, and that leads to how I got the idea for the book. I was reading Vischer’s dissertation and came across a striking passage. He writes that empathy animates plants, anthropomorphizes animals, but toward other humans it becomes a doubling of the self. He then compares this to legends of resurrected corpses, skeletons dancing at night, and the devil animating a corpse, including the tale of a Parisian nobleman seduced by the devil animating the corpse of a recently hanged young woman.

This is extraordinary. In the middle of a treatise praising a new aesthetic theory, empathy is figured as demonic possession and reanimation of the dead. That raised questions for me about the anxieties underlying the concept.

That passage became the starting point of the book.

Scott Black: Your book is a work of literary scholarship. You lay out this cultural history in order to discuss literature, particularly Büchner, Stifter, and Rilke.

Joseph Metz: Yes. The structure is inspired by David Bohm’s notion of the implicate order. History isn’t linear; different moments interweave. I combine close readings of literary texts with voices from physiology, empathy theory, and contemporary theory.

I analyze Vischer’s dissertation, Georg Büchner’s fragmentary texts, Adalbert Stifter’s prose as offering a different, less anxious path through empathy, and then Rainer Maria Rilke, where metaphor becomes strained or “bad.” In Rilke, the inadequacy of metaphor opens an ethical space that preserves otherness without possession.

Scott Black: That ethical space teaches humility and recognition of limits.

Joseph Metz: Exactly. I show this through close readings of a little-studied poem cycle by Rilke. The metaphors strive to force understanding and simultaneously show their failure. That failure opens an ethical space between metaphor and otherness.

Scott Black: This resonates strongly with contemporary theory—object-oriented ontology, Black feminist theory, postcolonial theory.

Joseph Metz: Yes. Older theories anticipate many current debates. In my reading of Stifter, for example, there’s a neurodivergent, traumatized girl who performs emotional texts flawlessly but without access to feeling. The story raises questions about whether we ever have access to another’s real feelings or only to their formal expression.

Scott Black: That suggests the progression from aesthetic to interpersonal empathy never fully happened.

Joseph Metz: Exactly. The aesthetic origins haunt interpersonal empathy. Our access to others is always mediated through form, gesture, language—through aesthetics.

Scott Black: This connects directly to object-oriented ontology.

Joseph Metz: Yes. In the final section, I connect Rilke to object-oriented ontology, particularly Graham Harman. Objects are never encountered in their totality, only through metaphors. Every object relates to every other object through partial metaphors. This resonates with Rilke’s “bad metaphors” and suggests an ethics grounded in the impossibility of full access.

Scott Black: An ethics based on respecting otherness rather than mastering it.

Joseph Metz: Exactly. We need both traditional empathy and recognition of limits, to avoid possessing or erasing the other.

Scott Black: You also raise the question of dualism and non-duality, particularly Buddhism.

Joseph Metz: From the perspective of Mahayana Buddhism and the doctrine of the two truths—relative and ultimate—empathy and dualism may be shadow problems at the ultimate level. At the relative level, however, we still need ethical ways of relating to others.

Scott Black: Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.

Joseph Metz: Exactly. The Heart Sutra warns against privileging either side. Both truths are operative, and that balance is crucial.

Scott Black: I’m glad we got from zombies to Buddhism. This is a fascinating book. It’s an academic book, but deeply engaging. Your work on Stifter in particular is revelatory.

Is there anything else you’d like listeners to know?

Joseph Metz: I hope readers take pleasure in reading it. The book moves between voices and registers, and I hope readers feel the form as they read it.

Scott Black: And it is a pleasure to read. You’ve been listening to the Virtual Jewel Box Podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center. Our music is Jelly Roll Morton’s Perfect Rag. Thanks for joining us.