Quasi-Subjects and As-If: Empathy in Aesthetic Experience

Abstract

Many aesthetic theorists and psychologists of art, in the late 19th-early 20th century, considered the notion of empathy as the key-concept in order to understand the experience of artistic reception: nowadays neuroscience has revived the issue, thanks to the discovery of the mirror-neurons, and the question has been brought back to the core of the aesthetic debate. Gathering in itself the dynamics of identification, fusion, vivification, animation, resonance, such a versatile conceptual tool allows us to comprehend different aspects of our response to the artistic object. This paper aims at offering a map of the most remarkable implications raised by the empathic experience for the response to the main artistic forms of our cultural tradition. A response that is correlated to the artistic object “as if” it were not just a mere thing, but rather a “quasi-subject”: a type of relationship, which necessarily rejects the projective, subjectivistic and psychologistic model of empathy, and adheres to an analogical and expressive paradigm.