What we contemplate in the aesthetic object is ourselves.
Was wir am ästhetischen Gegenstande betrachten, das sind wir selbst.
Psychologists
Theodor Lipps
Theodor Lipps (1851-1914) was a German philosopher and psychologist who, as professor at Munich from 1894 until his death, gave the concept of Einfühlung — empathy, literally feeling-into — its scientific shape. His aesthetics, his theory of unconscious mental events, and his logical psychologism made him one of the most cited German academics of his generation. He fed directly into Freud's account of jokes and the unconscious and into the early Munich phenomenologists. Yet from 1900 onward Husserl's Logical Investigations treated his psychologism as the textbook target, his students defected to phenomenology, and Lipps slipped into a long eclipse. Mirror neurons and embodied simulation research have since revived him as a founder of empathy science.
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Theodor Lipps's Other Quotes
Empathy is the projection of my self into the object.
Logic is a psychological discipline, as certainly as cognition occurs only in the psyche and the thinking which completes itself in it is a psychic event.
Aesthetic enjoyment is objectified self-enjoyment.
The whole realm of the comic lies in the domain of unconscious mental phenomena.
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