Reconsidering Positive Empathy in Worringer

My presentation revisits aspects of Wilhelm Worringer’s classic analysis of “positive” empathy in Empathy and Abstraction (Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 1908). I observe, first, that Worringer’s argument, and notably its residual Bergsonism, has been undervalued by researchers. I then argue that positive empathy becomes explicitly immersive in Worringer’s exegesis, by virtue of inhabiting the middle ground of being-in-world and deconstructing his fundamental opposition, between empathy and abstraction, as a kind of “Polarität des Formverhaltens” [polarities of form behavior] (Worringer, 1927: n. p.). Such “form behaviors” constitute a broader interpretive and aesthetic range for artists rendering immersive experience than even Worringer’s otherwise bifurcating analysis allows. Moreover, in its space-traversing aspect, positive empathy requires immersion in pursuit of the aesthetic enjoyment of objects as “objectified self-enjoyment” (Worringer 1967: 5, 7, 14). Yet, as Worringer points out, positive empathy also renders object-bound aesthetic practices “helpless” in the face of abstract, non-Western forms (Worringer 1967: 7). Positive empathy hence imposes culture-bound limits for the Western subject attempting to cross beyond object-sense into foreign abstraction, imposes desiring apperceptive faculties when interacting with otherwise transcendent domains of knowledge (after Theodor Lipps) and centers upon the principle of artistic volition (cf. Alois Riegl’s Künstwollen), rooted exclusively in specific material contexts. I conclude by affirming that Worringer’s argument rightly attributes to positive empathy the avoidance of the “physical dread of open places and . . . dread of space” associated with “primitive” and abstract art in non-Western societies (Worringer 1967: 15), but only at a significant cost: the privileging of Western object-sense as a priori constitutive of immersive experience and at the expense of more abstract modes of artistic being-in-world.