The Feeling of the Form

<p><b><i>The Feeling of the Form</i></b><b> explores the concept of </b><b><i>Einfuehlung</i></b><b> - the projection of human feelings and life into inanimate forms - developed by German aesthetic theorists in the late nineteenth century. </b>The word would be translated into English as "empathy" and migrate in meaning from the aesthetic to the interpersonal sphere. Combining close analysis and cultural "para-history," <i>The Feeling of the Form</i> reads literary texts by Georg Buechner, Adalbert Stifter, and Rainer Maria Rilke alongside philosophical texts by Robert Vischer, Vernon Lee, and Theodor Lipps to uncover the often-uncanny intersections of aesthetic and interpersonal empathy.</p><p>Traveling both backward and forward in time from the 1873 invention of <i>Einfuehlung</i>, Joseph R. Metz traces the diverse and multidirectional exchanges among subjects and objects, feelings and forms, and selves and others that together yield an expanded understanding of <i>Einfuehlung</i>, empathy, and the connections between them. In its surprising juxtapositions, <i>The Feeling of the Form</i> also shows how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts prefigure a wide array of later thought, including affect theory, "other minds," artificial intelligence, object-oriented ontology, and cinema and video game aesthetics.</p>