From Sympathy to Empathy: Baudelaire, Vischer, and

Early Modernism
Timothy C. Vincent

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While often regarded as similar, the difference between sympathetic and empathetic identification is essential
in the so-called expressivist turn that took place in early modernism. This essay argues that the deep connection between Baudelaires rebellion against realism and German aesthetician Robert Vischers concept of

Einfhlung, or in-feeling, has not been explored sufficiently and can shed light on modernisms distinctive
identity and the deep perceptual changes that underscore its innovations.

From Sympathy to Empathy:

Baudelaire, Vischer,
and Early Modernism
TIMOTHY C. VINCENT

harles Baudelaire should continue to enjoy his critical and creative status as the
father of modernism; Eliots and Benjamins famous praise of him is not misplaced. But shifting the focus away from France takes some of the pressure off
Baudelaire and his fellow innovator, Czanne, as strange and solitary geniuses who
changed how everybody perceived things. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios
Ikonomou, editors of Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 18731893, provide rare and valuable translations of Robert Vischers seminal 1873 essay
On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics and five others that
constitute a uniquely Germanic contribution to a modern theory of art and architecture but whose works scholars writing in English have, with few exceptions,
scarcely reviewed (2). As this important contribution is examined further, a clearer
and more complete picture of the early years of modernism emerges that can serve
both to give a more unified sense of modernism as a distinctive period and to reveal
its continuities with what preceded and followed it.

Mosaic 45/1 0027-1276-07/001020$02.00Mosaic

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Difficulties always occur when an attempt is made to subsume a number of representations into some unified discourse, but Douglas Mao, Art Berman, and other
recent critics, such as Peter McCormick and Stephen Halliwell, have re-examined the
background of modernist aesthetics, positioning the modernist rebellion against realism squarely within the complexities of the object/subject relationship, which, as
McCormick points out, constitutes the central problem of modernist aesthetic investigation: Whether we talk of languages, pictures, ideas, or beliefs, every representation
has two sides, one as an ordinary thing in the world and the other as an icon of the
world. So representations seem to be both inside the world and outside it (3, emph.
McCormicks). This modernist continuation of Kants noumenon and phenomenon
updates them by relocating them both within what Vischer called Einfhlung, or infeeling. Instead of Kants clear distinction between content and form, the representation of the thing-in-itself is now both content and form; the expressive gestureor
form of the contentbecomes the content itself. In this essay I will draw a closer connection between the Baudelaire-inspired expressivist turn and the Vischer-inspired
empathetic projection, which Mallgrave and Ikonomou believe has not received
enough critical attention; provide the philosophical and aesthetic context for the perceptual shift in which feelings are projected onto the object world rather than sympathizing with the object world as in the romantic tradition; and examine two key
modernistsPound and Eliotin terms of the extent to which their work reflects
this fundamental shift in perception.
In his poem Epilogue, Baudelaire sees in the reality of the city a new form of
perception itself:
With heart at rest I climbed the citadels
Steep height, and saw the city as from a tower,
Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells,
Where evil comes up softly like a flower.
Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain,
Not for vain tears I went up at that hour;
But, like an old sad faithful lecher, fain
To drink delight of that enormous trull
Whose hellish beauty makes me young again.
Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapours full,
Sodden with day, or, new apparelled, stand
In gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,

Timothy C. Vincent

I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and

Hunted have pleasures of their own to give,
The vulgar herd can never understand. (169)

Two key aesthetic principles included in this poem tend to support the widespread
opinion, following Eliot and Benjamin (and more recently Terry Smith [3]), that
Baudelaire was a central figure in the establishment of modernism. First, his preference
for the hellish beauty of the city places him firmly in the camp of those after midcentury, such as the Goncourt brothers and Zola, who were shifting from realism to
naturalism as a desirable aesthetic goal; second, and related to the first, his complete
reversal of what constitutes the vulgar herd relegates both romantic and Victorian
transcendentalist theories of all kinds, and the art that accompanies them, to a herd
mentality of vulgar escapism. Instead of transcendentalism, the mystery and wonder
of stark reality alone possesses the power to refresh and renew the creative spirit.
Whereas Ruskins selective realism was drawn to symbols of high-minded human
endeavours in such locations as Venice and Gothic cathedrals, Baudelaire selected
aspects of the real that rejected lingering vestiges of spirituality in favour of an aesthetic
that ignored both idealism and the need to inculcate moral beliefs and behaviours.
Moshe Barasch points out, however, that the term realism so often used to
describe this mid-century environment is extremely complicated and nearly impossible to capture in a unified statement: One hesitates. Perhaps no other aesthetic concept is as multifaceted, and therefore as difficult to use, as is realism. In speaking of
realism, one should recall, we are dealing with a general tendency, not a specific doctrine. Realism, it hardly needs stressing, means different things in different contexts
(330). Following Baraschs cautionary note about defining realism too narrowly, it is
important to point out that Baudelaire also rejected strictly representational art as
bowing down before reality (Art 154). This position, which includes both the
starker reality of naturalism as well as the seemingly rather contradictory shift away
from representation, tips the balance of realism to more of a creative act performed
on the object world by the artist rather than strict adherence to the facts and the lessons learned or spirit enlarged from them. It is this shift that makes Baudelaire so
important for the symbolistsboth literary and visualof the 1880s as well as for the
modernists after the turn of the century. In an important essay, Philosophical Art,
Baudelaire makes a nearly prophetic distinction between what he calls pure art and
philosophic art: What is pure art according to the modern idea? It is the creation
of an evocative magic, containing at once the object and the subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself. What is philosophic art? [. . .] It is a plastic art

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which sets itself up in place of books, by which I mean as a rival to the printing press
in the teaching of history, morals and philosophy (qtd. in Barasch 364). In the poem
Epilogue, evidence of Baudelaires notion of pure art can be seen in the deep intermingling of the external and internal that creates a new reality of the city, one that
contains objective and subjective elements that move beyond realisms emphasis on
empirical accuracy and romanticisms emphasis on transcendental ideas.
The narrator of Epilogue views the city from a steep height, but not to witness human institutions with the vain tears of idealistic longings; instead, he has a
heart at rest in the new citadel of empiricism, from which he has a clear knowledge of the good and evil that the devil, the patron of my pain, has promised him.
The loss of innocence that comes with such knowledge is mitigated by the freedom of
possessing the human agency that makes me young again. The city represents a new
relationship between object and subject that creates an evocative magic through the
power of an empathetic identification with the object world in which the subject is
projected onto the object instead of experiencing a sympathetic identification with it.
This was a lingering element of romantic idealism and can be seen clearly in key
romantic documents such as Hazlitts Shakespeare and Milton (He [Shakespeare]
was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become
[113]) or Shelleys A Defence of Poetry: Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty
of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces
all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of
that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with
which it coexists (517). The poets first goal with such sympathetic identification, as
Ann Wroe points out, was to shadow forth Reality; his second [was] to open readers
eyes to that wonder within themselves (348). Even the complex ending of Shelleys
Mont Blanc, which William Keach describes as a response to Humes argument that
the ultimate springs and principles of phenomenal reality are totally shut up from
human curiosity and enquiry (675), offers sympathetic identification with the
object world which, while ultimately inaccessible to human understanding, is infused
with principles that resonate with the human mind:
[. . .] The secret strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee [Mont Blanc]!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human minds imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy? (101)

Timothy C. Vincent

The object world, in short, is ruled by the same secret strength that governs the
mind; not a deity, as in Coleridges 1802 poem set in the same location, Hymn before
Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni, but a spirit nonetheless, whose presence is available to the receptive individual.
The shift in perception to empathetic identification, on the other hand, relies
less on Shelleys and other Romantics emphasis on the transference of meaning from
object to subjector the interpenetration of the two, to use another of Shelleys
key terms (Defence 532)as it does on what Art Berman calls transcendental
realism (22), which he defines as the modernist attempt to counter the growing conviction after Darwin (and suggested as early as Coleridges Ode to Dejection) that
nature is inherently meaningless and mechanical, with the desire to rise above such
determinism through the transcendent qualities of artistic production: Ones vision
of the world is a rebuttal to being passively fashioned by the world. Art is the alternative both to conformity and to madness (Berman 39). It is this search for the resolution of the modernist tension between materialism and expressionism that can be
seen in Baudelaires famous wanderings In sinuous coils of old capitals / Where even
horror weaves a magic spell (Little 181). With such a significant shift in perception, appropriately symbolized by the city, Baudelaire and other early modernists
had now created a loose but recognizable ethos that was consistently beginning to
replace mimetic representation and idealism with expressive gestures of sensory and
historical experience.
In his The Renaissance, in a less celebrated passage than the histrionics about
burning with a gemlike flame of aesthetic ecstasy, Pater carefully and deliberately
shifts the perceptual relationship with the object away from one of sympathy toward
a psychological state of empathetic identification:
At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon
us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of
action. But when reflection begins to act upon those objects they are dissipated under its
influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like a trick of magic; each object is loosed
into a group of impressionscolour, odour, texturein the mind of the observer. And if
we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and
are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further; the whole scope
of observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the individual mind. (1639-40)

This view of the unstable, flickering, inconsistent signals received from the object
world, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, denies

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Shelleys equal interpenetration of object and subject as well as Ruskins brand of realism, which demanded that objects not be loosed into a group of impressions but
viewed in ways that forfeit no atom of truth (Ruskin 168). By the early 1870s, therefore, a wider gulf had opened up between two aspects of reality itself. On one hand
was the view that the object world was stable and the subject gained stability through
sympathetic identification with it; on the other was the view that it was actually the
object world that was unstable, and the subject gained stability through empathetic
identification with it.
An earlier version of this gulf can be seen in the differences and similarities between
Lockes epistemological dualism and Berkeleys subjective idealism, both of which were
an attempt to address the limitations of correspondence theory, which depended on
consensual verification of perceptions. In Lockes dualism, correspondence between
object and subject is possible in the individual mind, but only in the sense that the subject internalizes the object world and represents it in the mind, with the shortcomings
and distortions attendant upon such an exchange. In Berkeleys idealism, correspondence between object and subject is also possible in the individual mind, but only in the
sense that the object relinquishes its independent existence and corresponds only within
the mind in the role of sensations, which, Berkeley agrees with Locke, exist as internal
entities. Both of these theories can be relegated to the sympathetic identification side of
the new equation because, in both of them, a resonance occurs between stable object and
reflective subject, whether that resonance occurs between external object world and subject, or whether object and subject are resonating only within the mind, assuming the
mind exists at all, if nothing else can be proven to exist.
Empathetic identification, on the other hand, neither attempts to produce an
internal copy of the object world as in Locke, nor does it absorb the object world as
in Berkeley; instead, it acknowledges the separateness of the object on both counts
while at the same time acknowledging the role of psychological projection in the creation of reality and avoiding the problem of solipsism. The object world does not
cease to exist when the subject ceases to think about it, as it does in Berkeley; it exists
but is unintelligible, not in Shelleys Platonic sense of being connected to higher principles, but in Baudelaires sense of possessing no inherent meaning whatsoever outside of what is empirically assigned to it.
t is significant that in 1873, the same year that Paters Renaissance, the first
impressionist exhibition in Paris, and other signs of the modernist rebellion against
naturalism were emerging, Robert Vischer, a young German psychologist, completed
his dissertation, On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics. In this

Timothy C. Vincent

work, Vischer coined the term Einfhlung, or in-feeling, which was later translated
as empathy by German-trained American psychologist E.B. Titchener, who
described sensory experience as a psychological process in which the mind projects
meaning and significance onto nature (196).
For Vischer, Hermann Lotze, Gustav Fechner, Hermann Helmholtz, and other
German aestheticians after mid-century, the search for the basic concepts of
Kunstwissenschaft, or science of art, was replacing Kantian idealism, which, as
Mallgrave and Ikonomou point out, could never fully resolve the ambivalence
between formal and ideal beauty:
The problem appears early in Kants work, in his commentary on the third moment of
beauty, purposiveness without a purpose. Shortly after insisting that the judgment of taste
is independent of the concept of utility or perfection, he distinguished between free and
dependent beauty. The former is a pure beauty of form taking account only of the purposiveness of form; the latter is an ideal beauty adhering to a concept. Kants reason for
opening up his aesthetics to ideal beauty, which essentially contradicts the very notion of
purposiveness without a purpose, is rooted in a practical concern. Whereas we can appreciate the foliage of a wallpaper design or a nonprogrammatic musical work simply as form,
it is nearly impossible to perceive other types of beauty, such as the beauty of a human figure or a building, apart from the ideas of the object. (8)

These two strands of Kantian aesthetic thoughtdisinterestedness on the one hand

and idealist content on the othercould be resolved, according to Vischer, through
more attention to what the psychological perspective of the subject contributes to the
object, not in sympathetic resonance with it, but in an empathetic response to the
object in which the inorganic and unconsciously organic phenomenon (a plant)
becomes a symbolic intimation of the harmony of the soul (120). The subject views
the object neither from a value-free position of disinterestedness, nor from a preexistent position of some idea or another; instead, the subject animates the object
with the subjects own conscious existence, experiencing itself through the object: Thus
I project my own life into the lifeless form, just as I quite justifiably do with another person. Only ostensibly do I keep my own identity although the object remains distinct. I
seem merely to adapt and attach myself to it as one hand clasps another, and yet I am
mysteriously transplanted and magically transformed into this Other (104). Vischer
demonstrates this projection by pointing out that gestures, such as opening the arms
wide to suggest something large or raising them high to suggest something grand (115),
constitute an imitative expression of an impression(114) that replicates the subjects
impressions in an attempt to set down its images in a more permanent presentation

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with solid material (115). What is being imitated, however, is not the object but the
impression, which then finds its symbolic realization in the lifeless form of the
object: This symbolizing activity can be based on nothing other than the pantheistic
urge for union with the world, which can by no means be limited to our more easily
understood kinship with the human species but must, consciously or unconsciously,
be directed toward the universe (109). Vischer avoids solipsism by doing more than
merely acknowledging that the object world exists independent of thought (which
can be a problem for Berkeley, for instance); he acknowledges that, with time and
reflection, the individual subject grows more aware of the collective human symbolizing activity, and such awareness of what Vischer calls universal coherence fulfills
the desire for transcendence without returning to idealism:
The more we become aware of universal coherence, the greater becomes its pull against our
purely subjective position. This restraining action comes into being the moment the general significance of an objective power is realized. As I think abstractly and learn to see
myself as a subordinate part of an indivisible whole, my feeling expands into emotion. Thus
I am mentally affected by a personal injury or satisfaction to the extent that it can be conceived as weakening or strengthening the universal harmony. The instinct for happiness
discovers that the only magical secret of satisfaction is care for the general human welfare.
Thus we rise from simple love of self to a love of family and species (race) and from there
to absolute altruism, philanthropy, and the noble sentiments of civic awareness. (109-10)

It is in the establishment of such universal coherence that the expressive artist plays a
key role through the ability to go beyond the blurred, embryonic empathetic identifications of which the ordinary individual is capable to the transformation of the
object into [a] shared, universally valued human possession (115). The work of art
itself is evidence of a person harmoniously feeling himself into a kindred object
and, by extension, contributing to the collective human experience of objectifying
itself (117) in an object world that Vischer describes as absolute otherness (113)
and unconscious (118).
Vischers essay was widely popularized in the remaining decades of the nineteenth
century by German-trained psychologists, aestheticians, and architects such as Robert
Zimmermann, Johannes Volkelt, and Heinrich Wlfflin (Mallgrave and Ikonomou
28), but it was Theodore Lipps (in Aesthetics of Space and Geometrical-Illusions) and
especially Wilhelm Worringer (in Abstraction and Empathy) who brought Vischers
concept of Einfhlung, albeit considerably altered, into prominence in the first decade
of the twentieth century, influencing a disparate group of expressionist artists, including Kandinskis Blaue Reiter and Kirchners Die Brcke in Germany, and the Fauves in

Timothy C. Vincent

Paris, with whom Kandinsky had spent a pivotal year from 1906 to 1907. Hal Foster
points out that Worringer drove a wedge between Vischers Einfhlung and a concept
that Worringer called Kunstwollen, or artistic will (86). The first expressed an
empathetic engagement with the world, while the second expressed shocked withdrawal from it (86). Kunstwollen, according to Worringer, reflected the urge toward
abstract art. The Blaue Reiter and Die Brcke artists themselvesmany of whom
were former architecture students and had connections with Vischers original audience of architects such as Conrad Fiedler, Heinrich Wlfflin, and Adolf Gller
returned to Vischers original essay, which does not divide Einfhlung and
Kunstwollen, and, in fact, does not even mention Kunstwollen: Rather than abstraction versus empathy, then, the Blaue Reiter proposed an aesthetic of abstraction as
empathyempathy with nature and/or spirit. [. . .] The Blaue Reiter artists sought an
equation of feeling and form, a reconciliation between inner necessity and outer
world; Kandinsky insisted that the very contents of his art are what the spectator lives
or feels while under the form and color combinations of the picture (87, emph.
Fosters). Vischers concept of Vorstellungswille, or imagining will, unlike
Worringers Kunstwollen, or artistic will, reflects the Blaue Reiter position that
so-called abstraction, rather than being a shocked withdrawal from the world, is
actually a clear account of what the subject is expressing in the world: I want to show
and replicate for my fellow human beings what goes on inside me, what my imagining will is doing in the object. The actual reaction of the imagining will is therefore
based on imitation (114, emph. Vischers). What is imitated, then, is not the object
world, but the empathetic identification of the subject with it. Subsumed within this
fundamental shift are such often-heard accounts of modernism as art for arts sake,
Czannes ralisation, Freuds Die Traumdeutung, Pounds imagiste, and even
Baudelaires flneur.
Revisiting the split between sympathetic and empathetic identification can be
useful in addressing the current interest in whether a unified concept of modernism
is even possible after the recent splintering of a once rather monolithic consideration.
If such splintering is inevitableeven desirablegiven so many modernisms that
have been made more visible as a result of it, the deeper conceptual fault line between
sympathetic and empathetic identification can serve as a starting point and reminder
that modernism rests on the notion that perception, as Douglas Mao says of G.E.
Moore, for instance, begins with a sense of the sheer strangeness of the object world
(53). Berman echoes this position by pointing out that, following the expressivist turn
of the 1870s, life can no longer have meaning; it can only produce meaning (46).

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t this point it is important to examine two well-known modernist innovators,

Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, to see what combination of sympathetic and empathetic identification characterizes their work. In other words, to what extent have they
become fully modernist in the sense that the object world, while existent, no longer
can be viewed as possessing the secret strength of things, but in ways that view it as
both an absolute otherness and a shared, universally valued human possession?
While famously calling on his contemporaries to make it new, Pound also kept
one foot in the past with his conviction, first stated in 1913 and reiterated in 1918, of
the first principle of poetic expression: Direct treatment of the thing whether subjective or objective (Imagisme 94). Pounds dictum has been correctly linked to his
dislike of Victorian poetryTennysons in particularon the grounds that it was
intellectually and emotionally dishonest. Michael Harper, for instance, points out that
Pound accused such poetry of, along with other ills, pandering to popular taste:
What was wrong with the mode of Victorian poetry in Pounds view was that it was
an artificial universe of discourse divorced from common speech; this meant that its
postures and attitudes were similarly artificial and false, constituting a never-never
land of literary sentiment instead of accurate reports of real experience. The
Victorians, he believed, did not for the most part say what they really felt but professed to have felt whatever their Philistine readers would find acceptable (84). The
remedy for such falseness, according to Pound, was to allow the object world to
express itself in language appropriate for it rather than allowing language to find the
appropriate expression for the object world. Harper goes on to describe this position
as Pounds worst theoretical mistake and one that led to Pounds worst moral mistake:
Pound believed that reality was accessible to direct examination, that the significance or essence of any part of that reality was there to be perceived. [. . .] If the poem
was the scientific induction he believed it to be, its conclusions were a solid foundation for action. The fact that the beliefs are mistakenthe poem yielded not knowledge but at best hypothesis that a man less convinced of the invulnerability of his
method would have regarded more skepticallyexplains the anti-Semitism, the scurrilous rhetoric, the Rome broadcasts, Mussolini, and Pisa (103, emph. Harpers).
Pounds other poetic principles and list of Dontsdont be wordy, dont use
abstractions, dont use shopworn rhythms, etc.reveal this tendency toward the
dogged and dogmatic presented with the certainty of proven scientific fact.
Along with that of his friend and mentor Hulme, Pounds original goal was to
resuscitate the dead art of poetry (Hugh 61) by bringing it more or less kicking and
screaming into what Hulme calls the new classical attitude, one that appears to have
left romantic sympathetic identification well behind in favour of scientific skepticism:

Timothy C. Vincent

11

In the classical attitude you never seem to swing along to the infinite nothing. If you
say an extravagant thing which does exceed the limits inside which you know man to
be fastened, yet there is conveyed in some way at the end an impression of yourself
standing outside it, and not quite believing it, or constantly putting it forward as a
flourish. You never go blindly into an atmosphere more than the truth, an atmosphere
too rarefied for man to breathe for long (Hulme 2399). In other words, the new classical attitude is an ironic stance toward ones own pronouncements, while at the same
time searching for scientifically verifiable truth. But Pounds unflinchingand not
noticeably ironicposition that the thing can be understood as an image which
presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time (Few 95)
leaves two questions that remain perhaps at the heart of the Pound problem, as
Wendy Stallard Flory calls his puzzling contradictions (106). How does understanding of the thing occur through direct treatment of it? How does the thing acquire
and convey on its own its intellectual and emotional complex? Pound concedes that
some may consider open to debate his views on the direct treatment of the thing
(Imagisme 94), but he appears not to question the inherent meaning and significance of the object world. Harper explains this key point: It is important to note once
again in Pounds thinking the implied gulf between language and experience.
Experience is independent of language; experience is direct perception and language
is only a means of expressing that experience. The idea that language is involved in
creating experience, since its structure provides the interpretations that constitute
what is popularly and mistakenly supposed to be immediate experiencesuch an
idea seems to be precluded by much of Pounds critical thinking (86-87, emph.
Harpers). Despite Pounds close ties to Hulmes new aesthetic of dry, hard, classical
verse (Hulme 2402) and rejection of everything romantic, Pounds connection to
romanticism runs deeper than its damp (Hulme 2400) poetry. He shares the
romantic conviction that the object world contains and generates meaningful content, and his sympathetic identification with the object world is so complete that
consciousness surpasses representation altogether and resonates directly with the
objecta situation that any practitioner of bad romantic aesthetic (Hulme 2402)
would admire.
No discussion of this kind would be complete without including Eliot, who has
deep connections with almost everyone discussed so far, going all the way back to
Baudelaire himself, as his two essays on Baudelaire reveal. But, as Armin Paul Frank
points out, it was F.H. Bradleys idealist sense of the undivided whole of intellectual
experience that perhaps had the strongest influence on Eliot relatively early in his
career, from his dissertation on Bradley, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy

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of F.H. Bradley, which he completed in 1916, to Tradition and Individual Talent and
Hamlet and His Problems, which were published for the first time the following
year in the Egoist and Athenaeum, respectively: There is no doubt that Bradley influenced Eliot in many ways. It has been known for a long time that Eliot held Bradley
in high esteem; and that he felt he owed a great deal to the British Idealist philosopher; and that he wrote his doctoral dissertation on an epistemological problem
raised by Bradleys metaphysic (311). The epistemological problem that Eliot sees
in Bradleys idealism is connected to absolute idealism in general: the mind as the only
reality. Bradley attempts his own brand of sympathetic identification by identifying
human emotion as a connection to the immanent realm from which the mind builds
its ideas, but it is unclearas it is in Poundhow feelings can get jumpstarted from
the immanent realm if it is a world totally separate from the mind. In his essay On
Our Knowledge of Immediate Experience, Bradley shifts to empathetic identification
as a way to explain the connection between object and subject that his idealist position lacks. Frank explains the shift in terms of Einfhlung:
Bradley [. . .] explains that a feeling becomes an object of knowledge by projecting onto an
objectof which the observer knows through prior sense perceptionand thereby
becomes part of that object. In this epistemological process according to Bradley, a feeling
is objectified by becoming something that is tagged onto an object of my knowledge, and
yet feeling still remains. There is a correlation between the two: That new element projected
onto the object answers to my feeling which I still have. Bradley does not say exactly how
this happens; but he assumes a correlation between the two terms, a (state of) feeling and,
on the other hand, an object, sensorially experienced, and modified by projection. (316,
emph. Franks)

Bradleys monism is seriously undermined by his own admission that mind and matter are mutually dependent rather than completely separate and undivided systems.
When the object is empathetically modified by projection, immediate experience is
being represented rather than being created by the mind as in subjective idealism, or
subsumed by the mind as in absolute idealism. Representation is explored in greater
depth in postmodernism, hence its interest in Nietzsches perspectivism and other
textual epistemologies, but the issue of representative realism all but defines modernism as well, as can be seen in Bradleys appeal to Einfhlung in an attempt to
resolve issues that various forms of sympathetic identification have failed to do.
Eliot famously adopts Bradleys monism in his views on the monism of tradition that is complete before and after the contributions of new generations of individual talent, and he encounters the same problem of demonstrating how and from

Timothy C. Vincent

13

where such talent originates. This problem is exacerbated by Eliots insistence on the
depersonalization of the individual poet in relation to the whole of tradition: What
happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something
which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality (Tradition 468). Eliots appeal here to sympathetic
identification is complicated by his attempts to explain the dilemma of how the personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected
ways, can be separate from the medium, which is only a medium and not a personality (470). Again, as in Pound and Bradley, the question becomes who or what is animating the medium if not a personality. Toward the end of Tradition and the
Individual Talent, Eliot effectively throws in the towel: Poetry is not a turning loose of
emotion; it is not the expression of a personality, but an escape from personality. But,
of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to escape
from these things (470). Eliot chooses not to address this important modernist
dilemma; instead, he dials back expectations by telling his reader that this essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and confines itself to such
practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry
(470). In the end, Eliot comes closer to Hazlitts complaint that the poets of his day are
not being responsible enough when they act like Rousseau, who interests you in certain objects by interesting you in himself (Hazlitt, Character 49).
In Hamlet and His Problems, Eliot begins his discussion of Shakespeares failure
to objectify Hamlets feelings with the same complaint, only this time he applies it to
that most dangerous type of critic, such as Goethe and Coleridge, who find in
Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization (95). Depersonalization
applies to criticism as well as to poetry, and Eliots rather snide comment that we
should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play (95) reveals
Eliots opinion that the need for the extinction of personality, about which Hazlitt felt
so strongly, is a lasting problem of the romantic legacy.
Eliots famous definition of objective correlative in this overall rather dated
phenomenalistic blend of biographic speculation and authorial intent comes much
closer to Bradleys attempt at an empathetic solution to his monistic dilemma than
Tradition and the Individual Talent. Hamlets failure (and Shakespeares artistic and
apparently personal failure) to locate an adequate object on which to project his feelings is a failure of the subject to express and represent itself by means of empathetic
identification with the object: The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art
is by finding an objective correlative; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a
chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such as when

14

Mosaic 45/1 (March 2012)

the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion
is immediately evoked (Tradition 100, emph. Eliots). Unlike Pound, who seeks to
begin and end with the thing itself, Eliot begins with Einfhlung, or in-feeling,
which is projected onto external facts that become the formula of it. If the projection is successful (which Eliot believes Hamlets is not), the object is now infused with
the expressive/representative realities of the subject, not the other way around.
Examining the modernists in terms of where each of them positions himself or
herself in terms of the important transition from sympathetic to empathetic identification (Williamss concept of no ideas but in things, for instance) can shed light on
modernisms lingering connections to the past as well as the deep perceptual changes
that underscore its innovations. If immediate experience is regarded as unavailable,
modernism, with its expressionistic underpinnings, ushered in a representative relationship between object and subject that avoided both an exhausted idealism and a
reductive materialism. It launched a discussion of representation that was as controversial in the modernist era as it became in so-called postmodernism, making the latter more of a continuation than a clean break.

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Timothy C. Vincent

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TIMOTHY C. VINCENT teaches British literature and writing at Duquesne University in

Pittsburgh and specializes in modernist literature and visual art. Further work of his on the role of
expressionism in modernism has recently been published in Origins of English Literary Modernism,
1870-1914, edited by Gregory F. Tague, and in Red Feather Journal.