The Origins of Empathy

Slides presentation that accompanies this article

Introduction

In 1873, Robert Vischer, a German philosopher, created the concept of einfühlung: “in-feeling” in his doctoral thesis (“Robert Vischer,” 2024). The concept of einfühlung was popularized by Theodore Lipps, also a German philosopher, who described it as “projecting oneself onto the object of perception.” (“Theodor Lipps,” 2025)

The word empathy entered the English lexicon in 1908 as a translation of einfühlung, which was appearing more frequently in German experimental psychology journals. 

Empathy captured the ability to project one’s own inner strivings, movements, and feelings into the shapes of objects. In the early twentieth century, then, empathy was quintessentially an aesthetic impulse.

Susan Lanzoni

Interpersonal empathy followed a couple of decades later in the social sciences.

Empathy theorists declared that the divide between ourselves and the things around us was not as stark as we might imagine. The ability to animate forms with our feelings and movements reveal that we live, at least to some extent, outside ourselves.

Susan Lanzoni

There are varying definitions of empathy that range in generality. 

Empathy is the ability to attune using the felt sense to perceive what we see somatically. Interpersonally, empathy “allows us to exhibit an affective response more appropriate to another’s situation than one’s own” (Hoffman, 2000). A more narrow definition of empathy suggests that there is empathy if:

1. one is in an affective state; 
2. this state is isomorphic to another person’s affective state; 
3. this state is elicited by the observation or imagination of another person’s affective state; 
4. one knows that the other person is the source of one’s own affective state (Vignemont & Singer, 2006)

We might understand this narrower definition of empathy as a later formulation of empathy as it depends on modulation by the frontal cortex, which formed later in our evolutionary development as well as later in our cognitive development as we mature.

Importance

Empathy has foundational importance in understanding appropriate behavior in social settings. It allows us to attune to and resonate with the experience of the beings around us, thereby influencing social harmony and creating a sense of safety. It is also a unifying experience that engenders a sense of connectedness between all things.

Forms of Empathy

Empathy is made possible via bottom-up and top-down processes in the nervous system. 

Bottom-up processing

Bottom-up processing engages the mirror neuron network in constructing a representation of another’s experience by “direct mapping of a motor or somatosensory representation of the observed action in the observer. (Brass & Heyes, 2005)” . 

This brings to mind instructions from the Maha-satipatthana Sutta (DN 22) translated by Maurice Walsh and Thanissaro Bhikkhu:

In this way one remains focused internally on the body in & of itself, or externally on the body in & of itself, or both internally & externally on the body in & of itself.

By maintaining awareness of our bodies and feelings, we create a somatic mapping that allows us to simultaneously interpret the felt experience of another and to differentiate that from our own. 

Top-down processing

Top-down processing allows beings to modulate the bottom-up affective mirroring to imagine how another feels distinguished from how we feel, in order to understand their intentions and beliefs (Decety & Grèzes, 2006). A form of top-down processing is known as cognitive perspective taking which involves imagining the affective or cognitive state of another without feeling that state. The inference of another’s cognitive state is known as mentalizing and appears in infants from 18 months onward (Frith et al., 2003). 

Because empathy is defined as a synchronization of affective and somatic states (Jankowiak-Siuda et al., 2011), “being empathic” assumes that we have an analogous somatic and affective experience available with which to associate with what another is feeling. In some cases, this is contingent upon having had a similar past experience, making shared past experiences a factor in the capacity for empathy. This aspect of empathy differs from cognitive perspective taking which allows for an intuited understanding without affective synchronization (Nichols et al., 1998).

Our medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a key area for high-level social cognitive function. Research on empathy indicates it’s involved in helping us differentiate our own feelings from those of others. It may do this by inhibiting the automatic, bottom-up mirroring of other people’s emotional states. This could suggest that bottom-up processing is a more basic function of empathy which top-down capacities rely upon. , The “merged” state of pure empathic connectedness may be of a more primal origin. The grammatical structures of the indigenous languages of the America seem to suggest as much:

A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (p. 55).  Kindle Edition.

We’ve since developed the ability to differentiate between ourselves and others because of the vulnerability of existing in a potentially emotionally chaotic undifferentiated state, However, given how empathy begins and evolves along our own cognitive development, it seems valid to question whether connectedness is a more fundamental way of being

Eco-empathy

Eco-empathy fosters an aesthetic appreciation of the natural world as well as an impulse to care for that world. Today it might even help save our planet.

Susan Lanzoni

Can there be a felt experience of the flow of a river or the rapid dip of a bird flying into an oncoming gale? When we observe with our full senses do we find a felt sense of the observed? This is the essence of mindfulness of the body and feeling internally and externally – feeling the whole world through the eyes. Empathy is an immersive experience that brings union. When we expand our empathy beyond the interpersonal, into the aesthetic and ecological, we not only see, but also feel the fabric of spirit shared between ourselves and the living world.

Compassion

Compassion begins with empathy as we open to the painful experience of others, and extends as an equanimous witnessing and heart opening that motivates the intent to alleviate the suffering of another. 

Compassion arises out of our willingness to come close to suffering..There are strong tendencies in the mind that keep us defended, withdrawn, indifferent, or apathetic in the face of suffering. This indifference is often unacknowledged and is a great barrier to a compassionate response.

Joseph Goldstein – Mindfulness

Compassion comes to the suffering in our experience of the world and intends to alleviate it. Compassion is enabled by empathically absorbing, mentalizing, and being motivated to respond lovingly, from a place of emotional resourcefulness, to the suffering of ourselves and other beings. We can operationalize compassion as: 

1. an awareness of another’s suffering
2. a benevolent emotional or affective response
3. the motivation to help or act. (Strauss et al., 2016)

Compassion is an infinite reservoir of life sustaining energy that meets the suffering in this world with love. Great spiritual teachers across world traditions have emphasized the essentiality of compassion to the spiritual path. In the sciences, researchers have shown how self-compassion encourages growth after setbacks and is strongly associated with well-being among adolescents as well as adults (Neff & McGehee, 2010). Compassion is at the core of the caring professions and has been shown to be correlated with health care professionals quality of life (dos Santos et al., 2016).

Compassion requires both openness and equanimity. It requires learning to let things in without drowning in the difficulties and without being overcome by sorrow. It means learning to simply be with the truth of things as they are. This is the great gift of mindfulness that opens us to compassion. Being with the truth of what is present is what we do every time we open to our own pain or difficulty. As we practice opening to and coming close to the suffering in our own lives with compassion, we then have greater strength and courage to be with the suffering of others.

Joseph Goldstein – Mindfulness

Compassion creates resilience in relationships by spreading the effect of pain across a network of care to cushion its impact. It resources those directly affected by misfortune with compassionate affect and action by those able to offer it. 

We feel nonsensual joy when we practice qualities like love and compassion. The great Zen master and poet Ryokan summed up the expression of this feeling when he wrote, “Oh that my monk’s robes were wide enough to gather up all the people in this floating world.”

Joseph Goldstein – Mindfulness

Cultivating all-encompassing empathy and compassion can benefit all of our relations and broaden our understanding. It forms the foundation of a wise worldview that sees through to the heart of existence. By committing to a regular practice of cultivating compassion, we create a world which rises up with care to meet the pain that pervades it.

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