Introduction

1 Although Theodor Lipps remains famous as a theorist of empathy, the issue of Lippsian empathology continues to be relatively understudied today and has thus far been systematically addressed only rarely (Romand 2022a; see also: Pinotti 2002; Jahoda 2005; Allesch 2017; Fabbianelli 2018). For Lipps, “empathy” [Einfühlung] is a generic term that refers to one’s capacity to project one’s own affective ego onto the objects of the external world, to subjectively “live” in them, and to construe them as the reflection of one’s own subjectivity. It has been largely forgotten that the concept of empathy was instrumental in Lipps’s conception of language, as expounded, in particular, in the Leitdaden der Psychologie (Lipps 1903a, 195-197) and in the first volume of the Ästhetik. Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst (Lipps 1903b, 481-504).1

2 In reality, Lipps did not await thematizing his concept of Einfühlung, between 1900 and 1903, to address the question of the place of intersubjectivity in language experience. As early as 1893, in his Grundzüge der Logik (1893, 25, 26-27 and 29-30), he admits that “everywhere our language is imbued with anthropomorphism” (Lipps 1893, 25) and that “the possibility of communicating judgments [...] depends on the association of the heard sentences with the judgments that we make on the basis of our own experience or our own reflection” (Lipps 1893, 29).2 In Chapter XIX of the Grundzüdge (1893, 75-79), he also proposes an interesting discussion of “nominal judgments” [Namenurtheile], that is, of the kind of judgment that, according to him, is specifically associated with word comprehension. As he explains, such a judgment is “the consciousness of the fact that a verbal representation (Wortvorstellung) or an association of verbal representations objectively belongs to the representation (Vorstellung) of a thing or to the object denoted by the word or the association of words” (Lipps 1893, 75); in such a case, “I think of the word as the object of a will [Willens]” (Lipps 1893, 75), which coerces me, in accordance with usage, to apprehend it as something that refers to a definite semantic content (see also: Romand 2022b). The here proposed developments directly announce Lipps’s later empathic theory of comprehension, especially his notion of “empathy for language sounds”. The views expounded in the Grundzüge would be taken up and discussed further in Chapter IV (“Associativ bedingte Beziehungen” [Associatively Conditioned Relations]) of the monograph Einheit und Relationen (Lipps 1902, 65-71), issued one year before the publication of the Leitfaden (1903a) and the first volume of the Ästhetik (1903b). Nevertheless, the issue of the link between empathy and linguistic comprehension is not explicitly addressed in this writing. Although explored most in depth in the Leitfaden and the Ästhetik, the question of the role of empathy in language was not restricted to these two writings, and valuable developments on this topic are also found in Soziologische Grundfragen (Lipps 1907, 661-667) and in the late essay “Worte” [Words] (Lipps 1912).

3 As far as I know, Lipps’s empathy-based contribution to the theory and aesthetics of language has never been investigated in depth until the present day. Until recently, the issue of language in Lipps was addressed only abstractly and rather indirectly within the framework of the study of his logical and epistemological thought (e.g. Raspa 2002; Fabbianelli 2013; Martin 2013; see also my other contribution to this volume). Nevertheless, in the last few years, a series of publications has permitted reassessment of the importance of Lipps’s contribution to language sciences. In two recent articles, I briefly discussed his concept of intellectual empathy (Romand, 2022a, 321) and his above-mentioned theory of nominal judgments (Romand, 2022b). Taken together, these two studies constitute, as far as I know, the first attempt to revisit Lipps’s psycholinguistic thought. Other studies have permitted highlighting of the proven or presumptive impact of his psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic research on early 20th-century language sciences. Scholars have discussed the significance of Lipps’s psychoaesthetic concept of form-feeling [Formgefühl] in light of the English- and German-speaking linguistic context (Fortis 2014; 2015; 2019; Romand, 2019; in press), the place of his psychoaffective and epistemological ideas in Jac. van Ginneken’s Principes de linguistique psychologique (Cigana 2018; Romand 2021; see also: Elffers 1996; Foolen 1997), and the close relation between his affective psychology and Heinrich Gomperz’s psychoaffective semantics (Romand 2019; 2022b).

4 As a theorist of language, Lipps focused on how, when hearing or pronouncing a statement, the individual spontaneously empathizes with it and interprets his or her own experience of language as being shared by another individual – a psychological process that Lipps referred to as “intellectual empathy” [intellektuelle Einfühlung]. According to him, without such a mechanism of comprehension [Verständnis], words and sentences would remain thoroughly meaningless and language impossible as a phenomenon of consciousness.

5 Lipps overtly regarded the study of intellectual empathy and comprehension as falling under the psychology of language. In this respect, his approach proves to be in line with the psycholinguistic research tradition that was then, in German-speaking countries, the leading approach in language sciences(Knobloch, 1988; Romand, 2021; 2022b). Elaborated from 1903 onward, his psychology-based reflection on the role of empathy in linguistic phenomena contrasts with the logical and much more abstract conception of language that he strove to develop, at the same time, within the framework of his theory of judgment. On the other hand, as the issue of empathy basically deals with the issue of affective life, and more specifically, as we will see, with the manifestation of the “affective self” or of the “feeling of the self”, it can be said to have to do with the psychoaffectivist approach of language – a research tradition that reached its high point in the first decade of the 20th century (Romand, 2021, 2022b). Lipps was among the theorists of the time who systematically discussed the place of feelings [Gefühle], considered the subjective constituents of the mind endowed with evaluative properties, in language (Romand, 2021, 2022b). In this respect, it is worth emphasizing that his way of addressing the question of the relation between language and affectivity differed from that of most of his contemporaries (e.g. Van Ginneken 1907; Gomperz 1908) insofar as he was interested not in the study of the involvement of individual affective qualities in language processes, but in how the individual’s affective life takes part, as a whole, in the making of linguistic experience.

6 Interestingly, Lipps also addressed the question of the role of empathy in language within the framework of his aesthetic reflection. Here, too, the view taken on language processes is a psychological one, and the basic tenets of his aesthetic of language are not fundamentally different from those of his theory of language. The corresponding developments, which are found, first and foremost, in the first volume of hisÄsthetik (1903b, 487-504), are in keeping with the principles of his psychological aesthetics and they resonate, more generally speaking, with the psychoaesthetic research tradition that was then prevailing in the German-speaking context (Allesch, 2017; Romand, 2018). Partly based on his concept of intellectual empathy, Lipps’s aesthetic of language focuses on the participation of the affective self in various aspects of one’s aesthetic experience of language, notably one’s capacity to appraise narrative.

7 The present chapter is divided into five parts. First, I briefly discuss Lipps’s concept of empathy, by insisting, among other things, on his typology of empathic processes. Second, I analyze how Lipps, by correlating the emergence of language comprehension with the development of one’s capacity to empathize with emotional sounds, words, and sentences, addressed the question of the psychogenesis of linguistic experience. Third, I deal with Lipps’s concept of language comprehension, which he basically identified with the manifestation of intellectual empathy, that is, one’s psychological power of immersing oneself in words and sentences and of feeling what they mean. Fourth, I show how, for Lipps, language comprehension, as mediated by intellectual empathy, underpins interindividual communication by making the hearer and speaker mutually aware of the fact that they take part in the same linguistic experience. Fifth and last, I dwell on Lipps’s aesthetics of language by showing that it basically consists in the fact of empathizing with “the ideal ego” that, in speech and literature, “stands behind or anywhere between the words”. In conclusion, I insist on the innovativeness of Lipps’s theory and aesthetics of language in the early 20th century and highlight how he paved the way to a novel research tradition that has fully developed only recently in language sciences and aesthetics.

Lipps's concept of empathy: a brief account

The nature of Lippsian empathy

8A pioneering and probably the most famous theorist of empathy, Lipps largely helped thematize and make popular the corresponding concept in the early 20th century, far beyond the scope of aesthetics (see in particular: Romand 2022a). Although his discussion of empathy-related concerns dates back to the early 1880s, Lipps systematic interest in empathology emerged at a relatively late stage of his career, namely, at the turning point of the 20th century (Lipps 1900), and it was only in 1903 that he made Einfühlung a generic psychological concept and a core aspect of his thought (Lipps 1903a, 1903b, 1903c; Romand 2022a). Although the term “Einfühlung” does not always assume the same meaning in Lipps’s writings,3 and Lipps’s views on empathy tended to change over time (Romand 2022a), it is possible to provide a “canonical” definition of Lippsian empathy: empathy corresponds, in Lipps’s view, to one's capacity to project oneself onto externally perceived objects and to apprehend them as a reflection of one's own subjectivity. In this respect, he also referred to empathy as one’s “vital outpourings” [Sichausleben], one's “participation” [Anteilnahme, Anteilnehmen] in something different from oneself, or one's “self-objectivation” [Selbstobjektivation, Objektivierung meiner selbst] in the constitutive elements of the surrounding world.

9 Etymologically speaking, “Einfühlung” is nothing but “the fact of feeling into” something. In this respect, the Lippsian issue of empathy is closely related to that of Gefühl (in English: “feeling”) – a psychological concept of which Lipps was major theorist.4 In the German-speaking psychological context of the time, the term “Gefühl” referred to all mental states of an affective nature, that is, to all subjective experiences that serve to evaluate the contents of consciousness or their mutual relationships, by being added to them (Romand 2015; 2017; 2019). Here it is worth emphasizing that, in Lipps’s mature conception, empathic phenomena have to do, not with individual feelings per se, that is, with special affective qualities, but with affective life considered as a whole – what he called “the affective ego” [das Gefühls-Ich] or “the ego’s feeling” [das Ich-Gefühl].5 In this respect, he also referred to empathy as an “activity” [Tätigkeit] of the self and identified it as the manifestation of a unitary and multifunctional power of the mind (Romand 2022a).

10 As defined by Lipps from 1903 onward, empathy has basically to do with what currentscholars use to refer to as “social cognition”, that is, all the cognitive mechanisms by virtue of which the individual interprets the phenomena of the external world as the manifestation of feeling, acting, or thinking entities and infers the existence of other living or conscious individuals with whom he or she is likely to interact and communicate. Under the encompassing Lippsian concept of Einfühlung, one can subsume a variety of cognitive functions that are more or less directly related to social cognition issues: (a) empathy in the “ordinary” sense of the term – that is, the fact of sharing the emotional states of others; (b) theory of mind; (c) the perception of animacy; (d) the sense of agency; (e) the expression of emotions; and (f) the perception of causality and physical forces (Romand 2022a).

11 Psychologically speaking, Lipps regarded empathy as a phenomenon of an instinctive nature resulting from both an impulse of imitation [Nachahmungstrieb] and an impulse of expression [Trieb der Äußerung] (e.g. Lipps 1903b, 107-122; 1906b, 22-32). As he explained, when empathizing with an object, one reexperiences, on the one hand, an effort, a motor impulse, or an action tendency and, and, the other hand, the emotional states that are characteristic of one's own interiority, as if one were effectively performing the corresponding action.

Lipps’s typology of empathic processes

12This brief survey of Lipps’s theory of empathy would not be complete without saying a word about his typological analysis of empathic phenomena (for a detailed analysis: Romand, 2022a). Although Lipps did not propose any systematic typology of the latter, seven chief “types” (Arten) of empathy are regularly mentioned in his writings from 1903 onward (see in particular: Lipps 1903a, 187-201; 1903b, 96-246, 481-504): (a) general apperceptive empathy [allgemeine apperzeptive Einfühlung], the most basic form of empathy, thanks to which, “by mentally taking over what characterizes and marks out the objects, I spread over the latter through my own activity and my own life” (Lipps 1909, 224); (b) empathy for nature or natural empathy [Natureinfühlung, natürliche Einfühlung] – also called “empirical empathy” [empirische/erfahrungsgemäßige Einfühlung], “empirically conditioned apperceptive empathy” [empirisch bedingte apperzeptive Einfühlung], or “empathy for nature and the natural context” [Einfühlung in die Natur und den Naturzusammenhang] – the form of empathy by which one spontaneously animates, enlivens, and anthropomorphizes the physical world by interpreting natural forces and causal relationships in light of one’s own activity; (c) empathy for others’ sensory manifestation [die Einfühlung in die sinnliche Erscheinung Anderer], which corresponds, mutatis mutandis, to what current scholars call “theory of mind”, that is, one's capacity to interpret, on the basis of definite “vital expressions”,some objects of the external world as “psychic individuals” or “conscious entities”; (d) mood-empathy [Stimmungseinfühlung], the form of empathy by which one inserts into objects “a state of mind of [one's own] personality” and apprehend them as the expression of “a global atmosphere” (Lipps 1903b, 443-44); (e) intellectual empathy [intellektuelle Einfühlung], that is, “empathy for something intellectual, for an intellectual work, or for an intellectually active personality” (Lipps 1903b, 495); (f) ethical empathy [ethische Einfühlung], also called “practical empathy” [praktische Einfühlung], which underpins the way in which individuals behave and interact with each other within social organizations; and (g) aesthetic empathy [ästhetische Einfühlung], the most famous kind of Lippsian empathy, which is nothing but the subject’s capacity to immerse him- or herself in the aesthetic object.

13 Notably, there is no clear-cut distinction between these types of empathy. Not only are they not necessarily exclusive of each other, but there exist ontogenetic relationships between them (Lipps, in particular, regards general apperceptive empathy and natural empathy as elemental and ubiquitous of forms of empathy). In any case, it should be kept in mind that we are dealing, in the final analysis, with the manifestation of one unique empathic function (Romand, 2022a). Regarding the issue of language, it primarily has to do with intellectual empathy, but, as we will see, it also involves other forms of empathy, especially aesthetic empathy and the empathy for other’s sensory manifestation.

Empathy and the psychogenesis of language

14“No other domain of what is perceptible by the senses”, Lipps emphasizes in the first volume of his Ästhetik (1903b, 481), “is accessible to a so manifold empathy as language.” According to him, indeed, language, as “the specific means of man’s psychical vital expressions” (Lipps 1903b, 482), has, par excellence, a symbolic function whose psychological basis consists of nothing but empathy. The fact of empathizing with the perceptual aspects of language, Lipps reminds us, can occur at various levels of complexity and development of the language faculty. In the second volume of his Ästhetik, at the beginning of the chapter V “Symbolik der Sprache. Akustische und formale Elemente” (Lipps 1903b, 481-485), he discusses in detail how instrumental empathy proves to be for the emergence of language. Here he identifies three steps psychogenetic steps:

Emotional sounds

15According to Lipps, the emergence of language begins with what he called “emotional sounds” [Affektlaute]6 – sounds associated with definite emotional states that are the most primitive and natural way of communication between individuals. As he explains:

I can understand [verstehen] the emotional sounds of somebody else, because there is in me an innate or an ‘instinctive’ impulse to utter something [Trieb der Verlautbarung]. I instinctively utter [verlautbare] joy, pain, fright, or similar emotions. In other words, I experience [erlebe] such an emotion [Affekt] and the latter trigger the movement that produces the sound. Here three experiences [Erlebnisse] are identified. But these three experiences constitute [in reality] one and the same global experience. (Lipps 1903b, 482)

16Even in the case of a linguistic phenomenon as simple and unevolved as emotional sounds, the comprehension of what is meant implies, in Lipps’s view, not only the fact of experiencing what is spoken, but also the fact of subjectively adopting the stance of the speaker.

Empathy for language sounds

17At a higher psychogenetic level, the empathic mechanism concerns “language sounds” [Sprachlaute]. By such an expression – then very much commonly used in German language sciences – Lipps refers to the sounds that words are made of. Here the point is to analyze how the child gradually develops his or her ability to empathize with linguistic sounds and finally succeeds in understanding words (Lipps 1903b, 482-485). Lipps details the psychogenetic processes that result, according to him, in the appearance of language comprehension [Verständnis der Sprache]. As he reminds us, “the impulse to utter something is a necessary basis for [language] comprehension too. Here it should be more broadly conceived, namely, as an impulse to utter inner experiences in general and to make known other experiences in other sounds” (Lipps 1903b, 483). When beginning with acquiring language, Lipps explains, the child performs reflex movements that produce sounds and gradually comes to fuse the two corresponding auditory and motor experiences into one homogeneous experience [Erlebnis]. Thus, when hearing words similar to those that he or she produced before, the child feels the tendency to evoke the previously performed sound movements [Lautbewegungen]. Nevertheless, as the intended sound movements are slightly different from those that were executed before, the evoked tendency appears as a tendency to modify the latter. As Lipps emphasizes, “the motor impulse is”, in such a case, “deflected by the difference” (Lipps 1903b, 483) that exists between the two kinds of movements. After a period of trial and error, the child succeeds in correctly imitating [nachahmen] the heard sounds. At this point, Lipps explains, he or she feels the tendency to utter his or her experiences [Erlebnisse zu verlautbaren] (Lipps 1903b, 483-484). Such a tendency appears together with the child’s capacity to apprehend the image of a definite object. When hearing the word by which the adult refers to the object in question, he or she “associates [the] image of the word, that is to say, the complex of sounds, with the corresponding movement”, so that “there is, in the perception of the word, an immediate tendency to perform this movement” (Lipps 1903b, 484). More specifically, the child feels, in that case, two simultaneous tendencies, that of uttering the apprehension of the object and that of repeating the heard word, which fuse to each other and result in “the tendency of uttering the apprehension of the object in [a] definite way, that is, by imitating the heard word” (Lipps 1903b, 484). So, for the child, at the end of this learning process:

(...) the object has its ‘name’ [Name] and the word its objectual sense [gegenständlichen Sinn]. The consciousness that an object has a definite name or ‘is called in such a way’ consists in the consciousness that, for me, there is in the apprehension of an object the tendency, the urge, the necessity to utter this apprehension or the fact that I innerly have this object through the production of a definite complex of sounds. It consists of the consciousness of the fact that an utterance belongs to an act of apprehension. And the consciousness that a word signifies [bedeute] something consists in the consciousness that the word means [meint] the fact of innerly grasping [das innerliche Erfassen] an object, in other words, that, in the fact of speaking out the latter, there is the tendency or the necessity to innerly grasp this object. (Lipps 1903b, 484-485)

18According to Lipps, the fact of naming an object and the fact of defining a word are the two sides of one’s empathy for words, that is, of one’s capacity to feel actively involved in the joint experience of the name and the corresponding object.7

Empathy for sentences

19Finally, Lipps also considers the issue of empathy at the level of the sentence [Satz], a further stage of linguistic development that, in his view, occurs when the child is able to make a judgment [Urteil] vis-à-vis a definite state of affairs [Sachverhalt]. In that case:

(...) the striving [Streben] to utter inner experience, also called judgment, merges into the striving to repeat the sentence, into a tendency to utter the judgment in the sentence. More precisely, the first striving receives, in the second striving, a content [Inhalt] of its own. Here the sentence has reached [the level of] the expression [Ausdruck] corresponding to the judgment, in other words, [the level of] the ‘statement’ [Aussage] and has gained in this judgement the sense [Sinn] corresponding to the latter. (Lipps 1903b, 485)

20As Lipps points out, the fact of empathizing with sentences, insofar as it corresponds to the expression of a judgment, that is, to the occurrence of a statement, is par excellence the foundation of language comprehension [Sprachverständnis].

Language comprehension as an empathic process

Language and intellectual empathy

21What Lipps calls, in the first volume of the Ästhetik and in the Leitfaden, “language comprehension” is a phenomenon of a psychological nature that depends on nothing but one’s capacity to subjectively take part [Mitmachen] in meaningful words or sentences. To put it in other words, the phenomenon in question is the result of the “objectivation of myself” [Objektivierung meiner selbst] in language processes (Lipps 1903b, 486). Or, as Lipps explains in Chapter V of the first volume of his Ästhetik:

When hearing a word, I do not simply ideate [stelle mir ... vor], know, or believe that I know that the speaker is currently innerly having or ideating [vorstelle] something, but I also immediately experience [erlebe] this inner act in the word. And, when hearing a sentence, I do not only ideate, know, or believe that something is being judged, but [in that case] the [corresponding] judgment is given to me in the sentence. I ‘get to know’ [höre] it when hearing [höre] the sentence. I am judging in [in] and together with [mit] the speaker. (Lipps 1903b, 485-486)

22In language comprehension, the important point is not that I share, in full knowledge of the cause, what the speaker is thinking about and wants to communicate to me, but the fact is that I put myself in his or her shoes, that I claim for myself his or her subjective involvement in the language process. More specifically, according to the model of comprehension proposed by Lipps, I succeed in understanding what the speaker is willing to tell me as soon as (a) I become aware of the fact that he or she is stating something and (b), by adopting his or her stance, I feel in the heard word or sentence my own inner way of behaving [Verhalten] or acting [Tun]. In the Leitfaden (1903a, 197), Lipps refers to as intellectual empathy [intellektuelle Einfühlung] this act of empathizing that is responsible for language comprehension (see also: Romand, 2022, p. 321).

Understanding vs. judging

23Nevertheless, it is worth keeping in mind that intellectual empathy, despite its name, should be in no way identified with an intellectual act [ein intellektueller Akt]. According to Lipps, language comprehension does not correspond to “the fact of representing, knowing, believing”, but only to “the expression [...] of a will, a feeling, or an emotional experience [Affekterlebnisses]” (Lipps 1903a, 197). As a result, “what is experienced by me in words [is] not a logical necessity (Notwendigeit), but a psychological needfulness [Nötigung] of ideating, judging, willing, feeling, not a logical ‘requirement’ [Forderung], but [...] an incitement [Aufforderung] that is addressed to me by the linguistic use” (Lipps 1903a, 197).As he explains in hisÄsthetik, intellectual empathy can be positive or negative, according to whether I give way to or oppose the needfulness of taking part in what is spoken (Lipps 1903b, 486). In any case, he emphasizes, intellectual empathy is characterized by the fact of experiencing a coercion [Nötigung] or a “suggestive force” (Lipps 1903b, 486).

24Here Lipps insists on the importance of distinguishing between the psychological and the logical dimensions of the sentence [Satz], that is, respectively, between the expression of a judgment [der Ausdruck eines Urteils], in other words, the statement [Aussage], and the judgment [Urteil] itself. According to him, indeed, word comprehension [das Verständnis der Wörter], as a relation between word and sense [Beziehung zwischen Wort und Sinn], “is not a logical relation between objects, and in particular not a relation between reason and consequence, that is, a judgment” (Lipps 1903a, 197), but it corresponds to a merely subjective activity.

25 These developments on the necessity of not confounding understanding and judging reflect the “antipsychologist” turn that occurred in Lippsian thought from 1903 onward and that Lippstheorized, for the first time, in the first edition of the Leitfaden (Raspa, 2002; Fabbianelli, 20138). According to the new epistemological approach he endorsed from then on, judgment is a process of a logical nature insofar as it consists of responding to the “requirements” [Forderungen] of the object, which are properties transcendent to consciousness. In this respect, it should be clearly distinguished from the feelings that subjectively accompany the act of judging and that, as properties immanent to consciousness, are, par excellence, phenomena of a psychological nature.

Language comprehension as an experience of sharing

26In Lipps's view, language comprehension, as the manifestation of an empathic process, is not simply a shared experience, that is, the occurrence of similar psychical processes in two different minds, but also and above all an experience of sharing. The capacity to establish a relation between word and sense is inextricably linked to the fact of feeling that what is stated or expressed is the common belonging of two mutually interacting individuals, the hearer and the speaker. In other words, language makes sense to me only insofar as I am willing to communicate [mitteilen] something to somebody else or as I experience somebody else's willingness to communicate something to me.

27 The social dimension of language, which is at the very heart of Lipps’s psycholinguistic theory, is the subject of a specific (although brief) discussion in theLeitfaden (Lipps 1903a, 195-197). For Lipps, as stated earlier, my hearing of a meaningful word immediately results in the projection of my ego into it. In that case, I, the hearer, have the property of putting myself in the speaker's shoes. As Lipps emphasizes:

When such a partition of the egos [Iche] occurs, it results, on the one hand, in the fact of knowing that ‘the other’ [der ‘Andere’] apperceives this object and utters this experience in the word, and, on the other hand, in the consciousness of my apperception of the object and of my tendency to utter something. The two [kinds of consciousnesses] remain combined with each other: the heard word, which now appears as the utterance of the apperception of the object by the alien individual [das fremde Individuum] is always what determines my apperception of the object. (Lipps 1903a, 195)

28Similarly, I should be able to experience, besides mine, the other’s involvement in language when I assume the role of the speaker. According to Lipps:

(...) the fact that the word is pronounced [Aussprechen] by me appears as the fact of communicating [Mitteilung] something to the other. And now I can make the apperception of the object by the other the subject of my own striving and consider the fact of pronouncing the word as a means of achieving this objective. I can, in a nutshell, consciously communicate [mitteilen] something. (Lipps 1903a, 195)

29This twofold capacity to empathize with words and sentences, when both hearing and pronouncing them, is what guarantees, beyond the mere issue of linguistic understanding, the mutual intercomprehension between the speakers.

30 As Lipps remarks, every individual, when learning language, has his or her own way of apprehending the objects, that is, of gaining an impression of them. So, every speaker would give a particular sense to words and therefore develop his or her own personal language (Lipps 1903a, 196). In reality, Lipps emphasizes, such an outcome is avoided because of the tendency to reciprocal imitation [die Tendenz der wechselseitigen Nachahmung] that always prevails among the speakers. Here we are dealing with the psychological mechanism that ensures, according to him, the emergence of a collective language [eine gemeinsame Sprache] within a given community (Lipps 1903a, 196).

Empathy in the aesthetic experience of language

31In the first volume of his Ästhetik (1903b, 481-504), Lipps addresses the issue of the relationship between empathy and language not only from the psycholinguistic, but also – as the book’s title suggests – from the aesthetic point of view. Here he deals with both the issue of intellectual empathy, the form of empathy that is specifically involved in language processes (Romand 2022a, 321), and that of aesthetic empathy, the form of empathy that he famously regarded as the core concept of his mature aesthetics (Allesch 2017; Romand 2022a, 323). Although Lipps does not prove to be explicit in this respect, his analysis of the role of empathy in the aesthetic experience of language, insofar as it is largely based on the idea of empathization with the “ideal ego”, as we will see, also appeals to a third type of empathy: empathy for the other’s sensory manifestation (Romand 2022a, 320-321).

“Language symbolism” and its elements

32As Lipps reminds us, when empathizing with words, one apprehends them as definite symbols (Symbole), that is, as “[something] perceived in which we immediately experience (erleben) something else, namely, [as] a striving, an inner action, and a corresponding inner state or way of being innerly aroused, in short, [as] a way of being of our inner vital activity” (Lipps 1903b, 84). More generally speaking, he refers to as language symbolism [Sprachsymbolik] the various ways of empathizing with linguistic phenomena, especially (but not exclusively) when contemplating them aesthetically.

33 There are, in Lipps’s view, two basic constitutive elements of language symbolism, namely, (a) “acoustic” or “musical elements” [die akoustischen/musikalischen Elemente], that is, the complexes of sounds or the combination of complexes of sounds insofar as they are considered per se, independently from the sense [Sinn] attached to them; and (b) “semantic elements” [die Elemente des Sinnes], which correspond to what is stated [konstatiert], reported [berichtet], described [beschreibt], told [erzählt], or taught [belehrt], in other words, to all that is conveyed by speech [Rede] or literature [Dichtung].9 As Lipps specifies, semantic elements of language symbolism can be divided into two categories, according to whether they relate to how speech or literature states, reports, describes, etc., or to what speech or literature is about, that is, according to whether they have to do with the formal or with the objectual dimension of the statement [das Formale/Gegenständliche der Aussage].

34 Here he introduces a distinction between the symbolic elements of a formal nature [die symbolischen Elemente der formaler Natur] and the symbolic elements of an objectual nature [die symbolischen Elemente der gegenständlichen Natur]. Lipps highlights that as a result, there exists a threefold division of “the linguistic whole” [das sprachlichen Ganze] into (a) sound [Klang], (b) the form of speech or of the statement [die Form der Rede oder Aussage], and (c) the objectual [das Gegenständliche], so that one can “distinguish between the symbolism of the acoustic, the symbolism of the formal, and, finally, the symbolism of the objectual elements of speech or literature” (Lipps 1903b, 488).

Empathy for the linguistic artwork and the “ideal ego”

35It would be laborious to review in detail how, through the analysis of the three kinds of language symbolism, Lipps addresses the question of the involvement of empathy in the experience of what he called “the linguistic artwork” [das Sprachkunstwerk]. Here, however, it is essential to discuss the core issue of his aesthetic of language, the concept of the ideal ego of speech or literature [das ideelle Ich der Rede oder Dichtung] or, in brief, the ideal ego [das ideelle Ich] – a psychoaesthetic notion that partly overlaps with the psycholinguistic notion of intellectual empathy. As Lipps explains:

This ideal ego is [...] nothing but myself. That is, I find myself taking [redend] and speaking out [mich ausprechend] in words and word combinations. As a matter of fact, the ideal ego of speech or literature is an ego that is empathized [eingfühltes] by me. It is my ideal ego, but is nonetheless real [real] in literature. And this ideal ego, that is, ‘speech’ or ‘literature’, this individual who is identical to me, speaks out and talksto me, as the result of the tempo characteristic of speech or literature, the tone of voice that is natural to [this individual], the rhythm in which [speech or literature] is embedded. By means of these elements, speech or literature is powerful or peaceful, clumsy or delicate, cheerful or serious, passionate or quiet, exactly in the same way as a personality is or can be either of them. (Lipps 1903b, 493)

36According to Lipps, when reading a speech or literature, I identify myself with a talking person [eine redende Person] who, in the final analysis, is nothing but speech or literature itself. In other words, I empathize with the ideal ego, this fictive personality who, as he nicely says, “stands behind or anywhere between the words” and “talks to us through the words or speaks out in them” (Lipps 1903b, 493). But my capacity to empathize with the ideal ego is not restricted to the act of reading; it also manifests itself when I hear and see a lecturer [Vortragende] talking or speaking out about something. Here, Lipps explains, the concrete speaking individual whom I empathize with is basically not different from the spoken speech or literature, that is, from the ideal ego. The liveliness [Lebendigkeit] that I experience is the lecturer’s liveliness “insofar as it lives in speech or literature and emanates from it”, in other words, “liveliness proper to literature, precisely the one that is being actualized in the speaker” (Lipps 1903b, 492).

37 As Lipps points out, acoustic elements have nothing to do, per se, with the ideal ego, because, although they can be empathized and express specific liveliness, no “thinking, feeling, willing individual manifestsitself in them” (Lipps 1903b, 492). According to Lipps, it is only insofar as words make sense that the elements of language are empathized in relation to the ideal ego of speech or literature. The expression of the ego through words begins with rhythmic elements and their ability to make known “the life of an individual who stands behind the sounds and manifests itself through them” (Lipps 1903b, 492). Nevertheless, Lipps emphasizes, in that case “expression does not lie in the sense of words, is not given by it or content in it, but it lies in the elements of discourse [Vortragselemente] themselves” (Lipps 1903b, 494).

38 In any case, one’s capacity to empathize with the ideal ego is for Lipps a core issue of the aesthetics of language, which is found,par excellence, in two of the three previously identified kinds of language symbolism: symbolism of the formal and symbolism of the objectual elements of speech and literature.

Aesthetically empathizing with the formal elements of language

39As Lipps emphasizes, in the case of the formal elements of speech or literature, “expression is given by the sense [Sinn] of words[,] it pertains to their meaning [Bedeutung]” (Lipps 1903b, 494). He also calls “formal expressive elements” [formale Ausdruckselemente] the elements of language that become symbols according to the “way in which the writer or the speaker expresses himself or herself [sich ausdrückt]”, that is, according to “the forms of the statement [Aussage]” (Lipps 1903b, 494). “[…] here, what is expressed is not the writer or the reader apart from literature or speech, but for aesthetic contemplation, [the] ideal ego” (Lipps 1903b, 494). Formal expressive elements are divided, according to Lipps, into “intellectual” and “emotional” expressive elements [intellektuale/emotionale Ausdruckselemente]. Intellectual expressive elements are characterized by the fact that, when empathizing with them, “I experience [erlebe] in [words and sentences] the fact of ideating something [Vorstellen] or of grasping an object, by the fact of judging, willing, etc. something” (Lipps 1903b, 495). They have to do, in other words, with the above-discussed issue of intellectual empathy and language comprehension. More specifically, intellectual expressive elements encompass, in Lipps's view, “all the literary and rhetorical means and ways of depicting thought” (Lipps 1903b, 495), such as figures, tropes, metaphors, comparisons, analogies, but also “the art of the construction of sentences, the fact of inferring one from the other”, etc. (Lipps 1903b, 495).

40 By “emotional expressive elements”, Lipps refers to all formal elements that, “in speech and literature”, led me, “not to contemplate a kind of object and to intellectually proceed with it”, but to experience “an affective participation [eine gemütliche Anteilnahme], an appraisal (Schätzung) or valuation [Wertung], love and hate, admiration or disgust” (Lipps 1903b, 496). Here we are typically dealing with emotional sounds [Affektlaute], interjections, and, more generally speaking, “all predicates” and “words and turns of phrase” that “are present with our feeling personality” (Lipps 1903b, 496).

Aesthetically empathizing with the objectual elements of language

41Finally, Lipps addresses the question of one’s capacity to empathize with the ideal ego in the case of the symbolism of the objectual elements of speech and literature. Here he deals with the aesthetics of language insofar as it relates, as he also says, to “the objectual side of the linguistic depiction” [die gegenständliche Seite der sprachlichen Darstellung] (Lipps 1903b, 498-504), that is, to speech and literature per se, as they communicate something, regardless of the form of the statement. More specifically, Lipps focuses on the issue of narrative [Bericht], the element of language that he defines as “the means of describing, reporting, telling, communicating particular or general facts or contents of thought” (Lipps 1903b, 498). Even more precisely, he dwells on the notion of the objective narrative [der objektive Bericht], the statement that, according to him, corresponds to “the expression of a judgment on something”, in contrast to what he calls “announcement” (Kundgabe), the statement that corresponds to “the immediate expression of something” that “is always the speaker’s current inner attitude” (Lipps 1903b, 500). Aesthetically speaking, objective narrative is an objectively narrative art [eine objektiv berichtende Kunst], that is, a form of art in which “what is given by the senses does not serve to the immediate expression [Ausdruck] of something” (Lipps 1903b, 501). It is, in other words, the art of mediate depiction [mittelbare Darstellung] and contrasts, in this respect, with all other forms of art, which characteristically have to do with immediate depiction [unmittelbare Darstellung]. As Lipps specifies:

In [immediate depiction,] the carrier [Träger] of ‘depiction’ that is immediately given by the senses is the immediate carrier of what is depicted, in other words, the aesthetic content [ästhetischen Inhaltes], [whereas,] in [mediate depiction,] it is the carrier of the representation [Vorstellung] of the latter. The carrier of the aesthetic content is called an ‘aesthetic symbol’ [ästhetisches Symbol]. Such a symbol is therefore what is given by the senses in immediate depiction. It is no such thing in mediate depiction. (Lipps 1903b, 502)

42Here, by the psychological term “representation” [Vorstellung], Lipps refers to these mental contents that, in contrast to perceptual images, are reproduced in consciousness and are characterized by a limited degree of vividness.10 According to him, in objective narrative, words “do not have events [Geschehnisse] as their natural expression”, but only “the representations of the latter and the way in which [these representations] are apprehended, associated, appraised” (Lipps 1903b, 502). They merely relate [lediglich berichten] something, in contrast to the words of the non-objective narrative that “utter” [verlautbaren] something. Here the important thing is that words that simply relate something are not concerned by empathy. But for Lipps this does not mean that empathy is not involved at all in objective narrative:

[...] there also exists an empathy for [in] mediate depiction or objectively narrative arts, not an empathy for words, but anempathy for the depicted thing. Here, rather than an empathy for words, there is an empathy for what narrative is about. I have a feeling of myself in the landscape, in the described people, in the words, deeds and experiences of people who are told about. (Lipps 1903b, 503)

43Nevertheless, Lipps insists, narrative is never purely objective, seeing that it necessarily occurs in words and that words always have what he calls an “utterative force” [verlautbarende Kraft]. Or, to put it in other words, the objectual side of linguistic depiction never occurs independently from the formal expressive elements of language. As Lipps specifies in the case of literature:

The world of literature is, in the first place, the writer’s world. It corresponds to a world in which [the writer] has empathized with himself or herself. And my empathy for this world occurs by the agency of the writer. Provided that [the latter] is nothing but the ego whom is empathized by me, I can reword it as follows: I have a feeling of myself in literature, I shape in me the ideal ego – a shaping to which ‘literature’ coerces me, and I come to look on as this ideal ego, that is, [...] from the particular point of view that is ascribed to me, the depicted world, and I have in it a feeling of myself. (Lipps 1903b, 503-504)

44As Lipps emphasizes, we are dealing, in that case, with a second-level empathy [eine Einfühlung zweiter Stufe]. According to him, the world of the objectively narrative literature – which he seems to identify with that of epic literature [epische Dichtung] – is not experienced [miterlebt] “as a [world] that is immediately present to me”, but is “experienced by me in retrospect [nacherlebt], from the writer’s ego or from the ego of literature” (Lipps 1903b, 504). Such a world “is given, as it belongs to the writer’s ego or to the ego of literature”, and “as I find [vorfinde] it, is already here, so that islikely to be objectively told about” (Lipps 1903b, 504).

Conclusion

45The developments proposed by Lipps, at the beginning of the 20th century, on how empathy underlies comprehension appear as a new way of addressing, from an overtly psycholinguistic perspective, the question of communication and the issue of language as a social fact. As I tried to demonstrate in the present essay, Lipps did not conceive language processes independently from the subject’s capacity to take part in them. By “comprehension” [Verständnis], he referred to the state of consciousness resulting from such subjective participation, by virtue of which one experiences both what is meant and the intention to mean something. Here Lipps advocated the radical view that words or sentences are meaningful only insofar as, when hearing, pronouncing, or reading them, one is aware of the fact that they also correspond to somebody else's experience and that this “experience of a shared experience” is the very gist of linguistic consciousness. According to him, language considered in its psychological dimension, that is, the experience of language, is inextricably linked to its apprehension as a collective phenomenon. Nevertheless, he insisted that, although communication necessarily implies the participation of two or more conscious individuals, the mechanism that underpins “the experience of a shared experience” always occurs within each one’s individual consciousness. In this respect, it is worth noting that what Lipps called Verständnis is involved both in the process of language comprehension strictly speaking, that is, in the hearer’s capacity to grasp what the speaker is communicating to him or her, and in the process of language production, that is, in the speaker’s capacity to communicate something that is supposed to be grasped by the hearer. In any case, not only does the model proposed by Lipps appear as an elegant solution to long-debated linguistic problems11, but it was also, in all likelihood, quite original within the psycholinguistic context of the time.12Moreover, I also highlighted that Lipps, far from restricting his reflection on the theory of language, insisted on the centrality of empathy in the aesthetic experience of language of the latter. As discussed earlier, his empathy-based aesthetics of language does not boil down to the fact of transposing his psycholinguistic ideas to the field of aesthetics. Among other things, he elaborated an authentic psychoaesthetic theory of the art of fiction, which also proved to be remarkably innovative in light of the contemporary context.

46 As a theorist and aesthetician of language, Lipps demonstrated the fruitfulness of his multifaceted concept ofEinfühlung, even if, as we will see, it is only recently that its heuristic value was fully admitted in language sciences and aesthetics. Since, to the best of my knowledge, his views on the role of empathy in language have not been studied in depth thus far, the question of the impact of his ideas in the field has not been addressed either. Here it is worth recalling that, as a theorist of empathy, Lipps was much read until WWI and that, although his star faded after this date (Allesch 2017, 235-237), his ideas remained influential during the interwar period, far beyond the German-speaking area (Lanzoni 2018, 68-97, 133-143, 216-231). Thus, there is no reason to think that his empathy-based conception of language did not affect linguistics, philosophy of language, and aesthetics in the first half of the 20th century.

47 In any case, the fact is that the issue of the relationship between language and empathy dramatically reemerged in the 1990s, within the context of the renewed interest in the naturalization of language and social cognition, and the rise of affective sciences. In the philosophy of language, Lipps’s ideas were involuntarily taken up by Quine in his late writings (Quine 1990, 1995). Here Quine regards empathy as a pivotal issue of language comprehension and communication (Baghramian 2016). Interestingly, although he makes no reference to Lipps, he uses the term “empathy” in the same generic sense as Lipps, and his analysis of the place of empathic processes in language is clearly reminiscent of Lipps’s analysis. In the field of literary theory, the issue of empathy was revived in the 2000s, in particular following the publication, in 2007, of Suzanne Keen's book Empathy and the Novel (2007; see also: Hammond & Kim, 2014; Fischer 2017)13, as it was, too, in the last few years, in linguistics and philosophy of language (e.g. De Villiers 2017; Herlin & Visapää 2016). However, it is first and foremost in the joint domains of cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind that the question of the place of empathy in language processes has been addressed anew. For three decades, in the wake of the rise of research on mirror neurons and theory of mind, the role of shared experience and experience of sharing in linguistic comprehension and communication has given rise to considerable literature (e.g. Iacoboni 2005; Gallese 2007). More recently, the question of how the contemplating subject immerses him- or herself in literary artworks has (re)established itself as a major issue of psycho- and neuroaesthetics (e.g. Kidd & Castano, 2013; Stansfield & Bunce, 2014). Taken together, these studies, whether scientific or philosophical, theoretical or experimental, demonstrate the fruitfulness of Lipps's seminal ideas on language and empathy.

Notes

• 1 Regarding the Leitfaden, the corresponding developments are encountered in the section “Die Sprache” [Language] of Chapter XIV specifically devoted to empathy (Lipps 1903a, 195-197). It is worth noting that the views on language and empathy expounded in the 1903 first edition would remain virtually unchanged in the second and third editions, issued in 1906 (Lipps 1906, 202-205) and 1909 (Lipps 1909, 231-234). Here I will refer to the first edition only. Regarding the Ästhetik, the corresponding developments can be found in Chapter V (“Symbolik der Sprache. Akustische und formale Elemente” [Language Symbolism: Acoustic and Formal Elements]) (Lipps 1903b, 481-498) and VI (“Fortsetzung. Die Gegenstandsseite der sprachlichen Darstellung” [Continuation. The Objectual Side of Linguistic Depiction]) of the fifth part entitled “Farbe, Ton, Wort” [Color, Sound, Word] (Lipps 1903b, 498-504).
• 2 All here proposed translations are mine.
• 3 At the beginning of the second volume of his Ästhetik (1906b, 1), Lipps proposes a twofold definition of empathy: “On the one hand, ‘empathy’ refers, very generally speaking, to the fact that I ‘feel myself” [ich ‘mich fühle’]. But I can feel myself in a thousand different ways. I always feel ‘myself’ when I feel pride, grief, yearning, or something of this kind. I feel myself, very generally speaking, in every feeling [Gefühl]. On the other hand, ‘empathy’ refers to the fact that the feeling in question is associated with something other than me, to an object that is different from me, or that it immediately gives me the impression of being ‘localized’ [liegt] in this object.” This second way of defining empathy, which is what is encountered in most of Lipps’s empathological studies, can be regarded as the “canonical” definition of Lippsian Einfühlung. Nevertheless, as I showed in my recent comprehensive essay on Lippsian empathy (Romand 2022a), the two conceptions tend to conflate in his late writings.
• 4 See my other contribution to this volume: “Sentiments épistémiques et épistémologie affective chez Lipps. Une réappréciation critique de la première édition de Vom Fühlen, Wollen und Denken (1902)”.
• 5 On Lipps’s concept of “Ichgefühl” or “Gefühls-Ich”, see my other contribution to this volume.
• 6 On the issue of the translation of the German psychoaffective vocabulary into English (“Gefühl” as “feeling”, “Affekt” as “emotion”, “Stimmung” as “mood”, etc.), see Romand (2015, 2017, 2019).
• 7 Here, as already specified in footnote 1, Lipps largely takes up an idea that he had developed in his Grundzüge der Logik (1893, 75-79) and Einheit und Relationen (1902, 65-71). See also Romand (2022b).
• 8 See also my other contribution to this volume.
• 9 “Dichtung” and “Dichter” are two ambiguous German terms that can be translated as, respectively, “poetry”, “fiction” or, more generically, “literature”, and “poet” or “writer”. The way in which they are used by Lipps in his Ästhetik led me to favor here “literature” and “writer”.
• 10 This is Lipps’s usual way of defining “Vorstellung” in his writings. Here we are dealing with one of the two ways of defining the term in the psychological literature of the time, the other one consisting in identifying Vorstelllung with every kind of mental content of a sensory nature, whether perceived or reproduced. On the two, specific and generic, conceptions of “Vorstellung” in German-speaking psychology, see Eisler (1910, 1690).
• 11 For instance, Lipps's empathy-based theory of comprehension can be advantageously compared with the model of communication expounded by Hermann Paul in the introduction of his Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (1898, 12-16). Here Paul advocated the view that the communication process consists of the speaker’s capacity to evoke, in the hearer’s individual mind [Einzelseele], the same representational contents [Vorstellungsinhalte] as those that occur in his or her own individual mind, by arousing his or her own motor nerves and indirectly stimulating the arousal of the hearer’s sensory nerves. While convincingly accounting for the sharing of linguistic representations, such a model, unlike Lipps’s theory, leaves unanswered the question of how individuals succeed in experiencing language as a collective fact.
• 12 Interestingly, the role of empathy-like processes in linguistic comprehension was already contemplated by Steinthal, who, in the short section entitled “Sprechen und Verstehen” [Speaking and Understanding] of his Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft (1881, 385-387), overtly assumes that “all comprehension depends on sympathy” [alles Verständnis auf Sympathie beruhe] (Steinthal 1881, 287). Some of Lipps’s ideas are surprisingly reminiscent of the developments proposed by Steinthal, such as when Steinthal maintains that “the speaker understands [versteht] himself or herself and his or her sound by indicating [deutet] something to the hearer, who, by performing an action or producing a sound, makes known that he or she has received the speaker’s sensation as such” (Steinthal 1881, 385); that “language is self-consciousness, or, to put it in other words, comprehension of itself [Verständnis seiner selbst], the speaker’s communication as such [Mitteilung des Sprechenden an sich], a talker’s depiction for himself or herself, an apprehension by himself or herself, while it always manifests itself likewise in the other, the hearer” (Steinthal 1881, 386); and that “while one sees that he or she is understood (verstanden) by the other, one understands oneself [versteht man sich selbst]: this is the beginning of language” (Steinthal 1881, 386). Nevertheless, it should be kept in mind that Steinthal did not try to systematize his views regarding the place of sympathy in language and that his analysis was limited to the issue of the ontogenesis of the latter. The Abriss can be legitimately regarded as a probable source of inspiration for Lippsian theory of language, even if the genealogical link between Lipps and Steinthal remains to be clarified.
• 13 It is worth noting that, in current literary studies, “empathy” tends to be taken, not in its “Lippsian”, generic acceptation, but in its ordinary, restricted sense, that is, as the fact of sharing others’ emotional states. Nevertheless, see Zunshine (2006). On the polysemousness of the term “empathy”, see, for instance, Decety (2012), Zahavi (2014), and Stueber (2019).