You must change your life, Rachel Corbett, on empathy, brainpickings.com, quotes

You must change your life, Rachel Corbett (brainpickings)

this is delicious reading,

starting with a quote from Rilke, Letters to a young poet:

"Loneliness is just space expanding around you. 
Trust uncertainty. 
Sadness is life holding you in its hands and changing you. 
Make solitude your home."

leading across the invention of empathy, the friendship of Rilke and Rodin, directing attention to a Wilhelm Wundt and a Theodor Lipps, both persons i had never heard of as far as i know,
R. Corbett explains what was meant by empathy, coming from Lipps:

"..The moment a viewer recognizes a painting as beautiful, it transforms from an object into a work of art. The act of looking, then, becomes a creative process, and the viewer becomes the artist.

Lipps found a name for his theory in an 1873 dissertation by a German aesthetics student named Robert Vischer. When people project their emotions, ideas or memories onto objects they enact a process that Vischer called einfühlung, literally “feeling into.” The British psychologist Edward Titchener translated the word into English as “empathy” in 1909, deriving it from the Greek empatheia, or “in pathos.”..."

quoted:

"Central to Lipps’s invention of empathy was his notion of einsehen, or “inseeing” — a kind of conscious observation which Corbett so poetically describes as “the wondrous voyage from the surface of a thing to its heart, wherein perception leads to an emotional connection.” She writes:

If faced with a rock, for instance, one should stare deep into the place where its rockness begins to form. Then the observer should keep looking until his own center starts to sink with the stony weight of the rock forming inside him, too. It is a kind of perception that takes place within the body, and it requires the observer to be both the seer and the seen. To observe with empathy, one sees not only with the eyes but with the skin."

beautiful...to see and feel this way makes me feel like a  relative...!


and on Rilke and Lipp, the article continues this way:

 "He had reasoned that if einfühlung explained the way people see themselves in objects, then the act of observation was not one of passive absorption, but of lived recognition. It was the self existing in another place. 
And if we see ourselves in art, perhaps we could also see ourselves in other people. 
Empathy was the gateway into the minds of others. "