The invention of empathy, Kahlil Gibran on creativity, how Rachel Carson taught us to consider Earth from a nonhuman perspective, and more

The invention of empathy, Kahlil Gibran on creativity, how Rachel Carson taught us to consider Earth from a nonhuman perspective, and more. NOTE: This message might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](. If a friend forwarded you my newsletter and you'd like your very own copy, [subscribe here]( – it's free. donating = loving I pour tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider supporting my labor of love with a recurring monthly [donation]( of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner: [Subscribe]( You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount: [Donate]( And if you've already donated, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. Share [[Forward] Forward to a friend]( Connect [[Facebook] Facebook]( [[Twitter] Twitter]( [[Instagram] Instagram]( [[Tumblr] Tumblr]( --------------------------------------------------------------- [Unsubscribe]( [Welcome]Hello, {NAME}! This is the weekly email digest of [brainpickings.org](. If you missed last week's edition – Nina Simone on time, Alan Turing on love and loss, Bruce Lee's never-before-seen letters to himself about personal authenticity and the measure of success, and more – you can catch up [right here](. And if you're enjoying this newsletter, please consider supporting my labor of love with a [donation]( – each month, I spend hundreds of hours and tremendous resources on it, and every little bit of support helps enormously. [The Invention of Empathy: Rilke, Rodin, and the Art of “Inseeing”]( Empathy, an orientation of spirit [decidedly different from sympathy]( has become central to our moral universe. We celebrate it as [the hallmark of a noble spirit]( [a pillar of social justice]( and [the gateway to reaching our highest human potential]( — a centerpiece of our very humanity. And yet this conception of empathy is a little more than a century old and originated in art: It only entered the modern lexicon in the early twentieth century, when it was used to describe the imaginative act of projecting oneself into a work of art in an effort to understand why art moves us. That improbable origin and its wide ripples across the popular imagination are what Rachel Corbett explores in [You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin]( ([public library]( — a layered and lyrical inquiry into the personal, interpersonal, and cultural forces behind and around Rainer Maria Rilke’s iconic [Letters to a Young Poet]( a book so beloved and widely quoted in the century since its publication that it has taken on the qualities of a sacred text for secular culture. Out of its origin story Corbett wrests a larger story of “how the will to create drives young artists to overcome even the most heart-hollowing of childhoods and make their work at any cost.” Recounting her revelatory first encounter with the Rilke classic, a gift from her mother, who had in turn received it from a mentor as a young girl, Corbett captures the singular enchantment that this miraculous book has held for generations: Reading it that evening was like having someone whisper to me, in elongated Germanic sentences, all the youthful affirmations I had been yearning to hear. Loneliness is just space expanding around you. Trust uncertainty. Sadness is life holding you in its hands and changing you. Make solitude your home. […] What gives the book its enduring appeal is that it crystallizes the spirit of delirious transition in which it was written. You can pick it up during any of life’s upheavals, flip it open to a random page, and find a consolation that feels both universal and breathed into your ear alone. What most people don’t know, Corbett points out, is that as Rilke was bequeathing his poetic wisdom to the recipient of his letters, the nineteen-year-old cadet and aspiring poet Franz Xaver Kappus, he was also channelling his own great mentor — the French sculptor Rodin, for whom Rilke worked for a number of years and whom he revered for the remainder of his life. Despite their staggering surface differences — “Rodin was a rational Gallic in his sixties, while Rilke was a German romantic in his twenties,” Corbett writes, likening Rodin to a mountain and Rilke to “the mist encircling it” — the sculptor became the young poet’s most significant influence. But Rodin’s greatest gift to Rilke was the very thing that lends Letters to a Young Poet its abiding spiritual allure: the art of empathy. Corbett writes: The invention of empathy corresponds to many of the climactic shifts in the art, philosophy and psychology of fin-de-siècle Europe, and it changed the way artists thought about their work and the way observers related to it for generations to come. Empathy may be a concept saturating today’s popular lexicon so completely as to border on meaninglessness, yet it was entirely novel and ablaze with numinous meaning in Rilke’s day. Its invention is the work of two unlikely co-creators — Wilhelm Wundt, a German doctor who “accidentally forged the birth of psychology in the 1860s,” and Theodor Lipps, a philosopher from the following generation. In seeking to understand why art affects us so powerfully, Lipps originated the then-radical hypothesis that the power of its impact didn’t reside in the work of art itself but was, rather, synthesized by the viewer in the act of viewing. Corbett condenses the essence of his proposition and traces its combinatorial creation: The moment a viewer recognizes a painting as beautiful, it transforms from an object into a work of art. The act of looking, then, becomes a creative process, and the viewer becomes the artist. Lipps found a name for his theory in an 1873 dissertation by a German aesthetics student named Robert Vischer. When people project their emotions, ideas or memories onto objects they enact a process that Vischer called einfühlung, literally “feeling into.” The British psychologist Edward Titchener translated the word into English as “empathy” in 1909, deriving it from the Greek empatheia, or “in pathos.” For Vischer, einfühlung revealed why a work of art caused an observer to unconsciously “move in and with the forms.” He dubbed this bodily mimesis “muscular empathy,” a concept that resonated with Lipps, who once attended a dance recital and felt himself “striving and performing” with the dancers. He also linked this idea to other somatosensory imitations, like yawns and laughter. Half a century later, Mark Rothko would observe: [“The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”]( He was articulating the model of creative contagion — or what Leo Tolstoy called [the “emotional infectiousness” of art]( — that Lipps had formulated. Corbett writes: Empathy explained why people sometimes describe the experience of “losing themselves” in a powerful work of art. Maybe their ears deafen to the sounds around them, the hair rises on the backs of their necks or they lose track of the passage of time. Something produces a “gut feeling” or triggers a flood of memory, like Proust’s madeleine. When a work of art is effective, it draws the observer out into the world, while the observer draws the work back into his or her body. Empathy was what made red paint run like blood in the veins, or a blue sky fill the lungs with air. But although empathy originated in the contemplation of art, it was psychologists who imported it into popular culture, largely thanks to [the cross-pollination of art and science in early-twentieth-century Europe](. Corbett writes: In Vienna, the young professor Sigmund Freud wrote to a friend in 1896 that he had “immersed” himself in the teachings of Lipps, “who I suspect has the clearest mind among present-day philosophical writers.” Several years later, Freud thanked Lipps for giving him “the courage and capacity” to write his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. He went on to advance Lipps’s research further when he made the case that empathy should be embraced by psychoanalysts as a tool for understanding patients. He urged his students to observe their patients not from a place of judgment, but of empathy. They ought to recede into the background like a “receptive organ” and strive toward the “putting of oneself in the other person’s place,” he said. The concept, of course, was far from novel, even if the language to contain it was — half a century earlier, across the Atlantic, Walt Whitman had articulated the very same notion in his [timeless treatise on medicine and the human spirit](. But Lipps devised the right language to infiltrate the popular imagination and placed himself in the right place, at the right time. When he became chair of the University of Munich’s philosophy department in 1894, his students included the great Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, who would later come to echo a number of Lipps’s ideas in his writings about [the spiritual element in art]( and Rilke, who enrolled in Lipps’s foundational aesthetics course as soon as he arrived in Munich from Prague. Central to Lipps’s invention of empathy was his notion of einsehen, or “inseeing” — a kind of conscious observation which Corbett so poetically describes as “the wondrous voyage from the surface of a thing to its heart, wherein perception leads to an emotional connection.” She writes: If faced with a rock, for instance, one should stare deep into the place where its rockness begins to form. Then the observer should keep looking until his own center starts to sink with the stony weight of the rock forming inside him, too. It is a kind of perception that takes place within the body, and it requires the observer to be both the seer and the seen. To observe with empathy, one sees not only with the eyes but with the skin. The concept struck Rilke as a particularly revelatory way of looking at not only art but life itself. He wrote in a letter to a friend: Though you may laugh if I tell you where my very greatest feeling, my world-feeling, my earthly bliss was, I must confess to you: it was, again and again, here and there, in such in-seeing in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this godlike in-seeing. Corbett captures the crux of Rilke’s insight: In describing his joy at experiencing the world this way, Rilke echoed Lipps’s belief that, through empathy, a person could free himself from the solitude of his mind. At the same time that Rilke was studying at the zoo in Paris, Lipps was in Munich working on his theory of empathy and aesthetic enjoyment. In his seminal paper on the subject he identified the four types of empathy as he saw them: general apperceptive empathy: when one sees movement in everyday objects; empirical empathy: when one sees human qualities in the nonhuman; mood empathy: when one attributes emotional states to colors and music, like “cheerful yellow”; and sensible appearance empathy: when gestures or movements convey internal feelings. Out of this dynamic dialogue between inner and outer arises the most elemental question of existence: What is the self? This invites an auxiliary question: If we ourselves can possess a self, how can we know that others are also in possession of selves? Corbett writes: [This] was the question to which Rilke’s old professor Theodor Lipps’s empathy research eventually led him. He had reasoned that if einfühlung explained the way people see themselves in objects, then the act of observation was not one of passive absorption, but of lived recognition. It was the self existing in another place. And if we see ourselves in art, perhaps we could also see ourselves in other people. Empathy was the gateway into the minds of others. Rilke’s prodigious capacity for it, then, was both his greatest poetic gift and probably his hardest-borne cross. In the remainder of the spectacular [You Must Change Your Life]( Corbett goes on to disentangle the intricate mesh of influences and interdependencies that shaped Rilke’s enduring legacy and its broader implications for the inner life of artists. Complement it with Rilke himself on [writing and what it means to be an artist]( and [the life-expanding value of uncertainty](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [The Great Lebanese-American Painter, Poet, and Philosopher Kahlil Gibran on Why Artists Make Art]( The questions of why we humans create — why we paint caves and canvases, why we write novels and symphonies, why we make art at all — is so perennial that it might indeed fall within the scope of what Hannah Arendt considered [the “unanswerable questions” central to the human experience](. And yet some memorable answers have been given — answers like Pablo Neruda’s [stirring childhood allegory of the hand through the fence](. Another exquisite answer comes from the great Arab-American artist, poet, and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) in [Beloved Prophet]( ([public library]( — the collection of his [almost unbearably beautiful love letters]( to and from Mary Haskell. Kahlil Gibran, self-portrait In a letter to Haskell penned on November 10, 1911, Gibran writes: There is an old Arabic song which begins “Only God and I know what is in my heart” — and today, after rereading your last three letters, I said out loud “Only God and Mary and I know what is in my heart.” I would open my heart and carry it in my hand so that others may know also; for there is no deeper desire than the desire of being revealed. We all want that little light in us to be taken from under the bushel. The first poet must have suffered much when the cave-dwellers laughed at his mad words. He would have given his bow and arrows and lion skin, everything he possessed, just to have his fellow-men know the delight and the passion which the sunset had created in his soul. And yet, is it not this mystic pain — the pain of not being known — that gives birth to art and artists? [Beloved Prophet]( is a gorgeous read in its totality. Complement this particular portion with Virginia Woolf on [the epiphany in which she understood what it means to be an artist]( then revisit Gibran on [the seeming self vs. the authentic self]( and [the difficult balance of intimacy and independence in love](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [Friend of Foe?: A Lovely Illustrated Fable About Making Sense of Otherness]( more you know about another person’s story, the less possible it is to see that person as your enemy,” the wise and wonderful Parker Palmer wrote in his treatise on [healing the heart of society](. Yet, paradoxically enough, it is often our stories — those involuntary circumstances of our lives dictated by accidents of birth and chance — that cast the air of enmity in another’s eyes: that we were born one race and not another, that we came from one country and not another, that we fell in love with a person of one gender and not another. (This, perhaps, is why [the ancient Greek notion of agape]( is directed equally at friends and enemies.) But the heartening counterpoint to these tragic polarizations is that they can often be undone just as easily, by another accidental flip of circumstance. That’s what Canadian writer John Sobol and Brooklyn-based Russian illustrator Dasha Tolstikova explore with delightful levity in [Friend or Foe?]( ([public library]( — a charming modern-day fable, without a simplistic moral, about what makes for and what undoes the sense of otherness. We meet a lonely mouse who lives in a small house beneath a lavish castle, and a white cat who lives in the castle above. (It is a modernist castle, to be sure — portraits of same-sex royal couples grace its walls and lightbulbs like the kind you’d see in a Brooklyn bar illuminate its halls.) Every evening, the two look at one another for hours on end — the mouse sitting atop the little house, the cat perched at the window of the big palace. One day, the mouse discovers a tiny hole in the wall of the castle that could bypass the stringently guarded main entrance. Sobol writes: He stared at the hole for a whole day. He was wondering if — after all those hours of looking at each other — he and the cat were friends. It’s a lovely question — can sustained mutual attentiveness turn natural enemies into friends? — a question evocative of Simone Weil’s abiding assertion that [“attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”]( Finally, the mouse decides that he cannot go on living lonesome and friendless, and must find out if a friend or a foe resides in the castle. So he skulks inside, past the garrulous royalty in their glittering gowns, and makes his way to the top. It took all day to climb the stairs. But finally, as the sun was setting, the mouse reached the top step. He peered around the great oak door and there was the cat, sitting on the window sill, staring at the empty roof below. The mouse creeps quietly up the lush velvet curtain and positions himself on the stone ledge next to the unwitting cat, where he gathers the courage to speak up. But when he finally does, posing his existential question — “Hello, are you friend or foe?” — the cat is so alarmed by the surprise visitor that she leaps into the air. The mouse studied the cat’s whiskered face as she flew through the air. At first he felt sure he was about to be eaten. Then he changed his mind. Perhaps they were to be friends after all. Friend or foe, thought the mouse. In a moment I’ll know. But in her startled pirouette, the cat slips and falls out the window, landing to safety, in perfect feline fashion, near the little house below. A moment later, a woman came out of the small house and scooped up the cat. “Why, we’ve been wanting a cat, and now here you are. Dropped right out of the sky, didn’t you, puss?” Hopeful that the fortuitous cat will solve the household’s mouse problem, the woman takes her in. And, just like that, the tables have turned, and one can almost hear Bob Dylan singing: “The order is rapidly fading / And the first one now will later be last / Cause the times they are a-changing.” A cat lives in a small house beside a great palace. In the great palace lives a mouse. Every evening the mouse creeps up the stairs to the palace tower. Every evening the cat climbs to the roof of the house. In the end, the mouse once again confronts his question, this time from the other side of privilege. The answer offered in the final page is perhaps the only real answer that existential question has. Complement the quietly delightful [Friend or Foe?]( with this [visual taxonomy of platonic relationships]( then revisit the Tolstikova-illustrated [The Jacket]( — a lovely meta-book about how we fall in love with books. For other treasures from independent Canadian powerhouse Groundwood Books, see [The White Cat and the Monk]( [The King of the Birds]( and [Sidewalk Flowers](. Illustrations © Dasha Tolstikova courtesy of Groundwood Books; photographs by Maria Popova [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [Undersea: Rachel Carson’s Lyrical and Revolutionary 1937 Masterpiece Inviting Humans to Explore Earth from the Perspective of Other Creatures]( Pioneering biologist and writer Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) catalyzed the modern environmental movement with [the groundbreaking publication of Silent Spring]( in 1962, but the spark for this slow-burning revolution was kindled a quarter century earlier, while 28-year-old Carson was working for what would later become the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. When she was tasked with writing a brochure for the Fisheries Bureau, summarizing their annual research findings, Carson transmuted the science into poetry and turned in something so exquisitely lyrical that her supervisor told her they simply couldn’t publish it as their standard government report. But he encouraged her to submit it to The Atlantic Monthly as an essay. She did. It was enthusiastically accepted and published in the September 1937 issue as the trailblazing masterpiece “Undersea” under the byline R.L. Carson — a choice reflective of Carson’s era-calibrated fear that her writing wouldn’t be taken as seriously if her gender was known. Ironically, of the twenty-one contributors in that issue of the magazine, Carson’s name is the only one widely recognized today. The essay became the backbone of Carson’s first book, [Under the Sea-Wind]( which remained her favorite piece of writing, and was later included in the excellent [Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson]( ([public library](. Rachel Carson Creatively, “Undersea” was unlike anything ever published before — Carson brought a strong literary aesthetic to science, which over the next two decades would establish her as the most celebrated science writer of her time. Conceptually, it accomplished something even Darwin hadn’t — it invited the reader to step beyond our reflexive human hubris and empathically explore this Pale Blue Dot from the vantage point of the innumerable other creatures with which we share it. Decades before philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote his iconic essay “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” and nearly a century before Sy Montgomery’s beautiful inquiry into [the soul of an octopus]( Carson considered the experience of other consciousnesses. What the nature writer [Henry Beston]( one of Carson’s great heroes, brought to the land, she brought first to the sea, then to all of Earth — intensely lyrical prose undergirded by a lively reverence for nature and a sympathetic curiosity about the reality of other living beings. Long before scientists like pioneering oceanographer [Sylvia “Her Deepness” Earle]( plunged into the depths of the ocean, Carson shepherds the human imagination to the mysterious wonderland thriving below the surface of the seas that envelop Earth: Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere. Nor can we know the vicissitudes of life on the ocean floor, where sunlight, filtering through a hundred feet of water, makes but a fleeting, bluish twilight, in which dwell sponge and mollusk and starfish and coral, where swarms of diminutive fish twinkle through the dusk like a silver rain of meteors, and eels lie in wait among the rocks. Even less is it given to man to descend those six incomprehensible miles into the recesses of the abyss, where reign utter silence and unvarying cold and eternal night. To sense this world of waters known to the creatures of the sea we must shed our human perceptions of length and breadth and time and place, and enter vicariously into a universe of all-pervading water. North Pacific Giant Octopus by photographer Mark Laita from his project [Sea]( After a tour of some of the ocean’s most unusual and dazzling creatures, Carson considers the glorious and inevitable interconnectedness of the natural world, no different from the [“inescapable network of mutuality”]( which Martin Luther King so passionately championed in the human world. She writes: The ocean is a place of paradoxes. It is the home of the great white shark, two thousand pound killer of the seas. And of the hundred foot blue whale, the largest animal that ever lived. It is also the home of living things so small that your two hands may scoop up as many of them as there are stars in the Milky Way. And it is becoming of the flowering of astronomical numbers of these diminutive plants known as diatoms, that the surface waters of the ocean are in reality boundless pastures. Every marine animal, from the smallest to the sharks and whales is ultimately dependent for its food upon these microscopic entities of the vegetable life of the ocean. Within their fragile walls, the sea performs a vital alchemy that utilizes the sterile chemical elements dissolved in the water and welds them with the torch of sunlight into the stuff of life. Only through the little-understood synthesis of proteins, fats and carbohydrates by myriad plant “producers” is the mineral wealth of the sea made available to the animal “consumers” that browse as they float with the currents. Drifting endlessly, midway between the sea of air above and the depths of the abyss below, these strange creatures and the marine inflorescence that sustains them are called “plankton” — the wanderers. Art by Rambharos Jha from [Waterlife]( Carson continues her marine expedition farther and deeper into the ocean, to return in the final paragraphs to this central interconnectedness of life — perhaps, she poetically suggests, our only real taste of immortality: While bottoms near the shore are covered with detritus from the land, the remains of the floating and swimming creatures of the sea prevail in the deep waters of the open ocean. Beneath the tropical seas, in depths of 1000 to 1500 fathoms, calcareous oozes cover nearly a third of the ocean floor; while the colder waters of the temperate and polar regions release to the underlying bottom the silicious remains of diatoms and Radiolaria. In the red clay that carpets the great deeps at 5000 fathoms or more, such delicate skeletons are extremely rare. Among the few organic remains not dissolved before they reach these cold and silent depths are the ear bones of whales and the teeth of sharks. Thus we see parts of the plan fall into place: the water receiving from earth and air the simple materials, storing them up into the gathering energy of the spring wakens the sleeping plants to a burst of dynamic energy, hungry swarms of planktonic animals growing and multiplying upon the abundant plants, and themselves falling prey to the shoals of fish; all, in the end; to be redissolved into their component substances when the inexorable laws of the sea demand it. Individual elements are lost to view, only to repair again and again in different incarnations in a kind material immortality. Kindred forces to those which, in some period inconceivably remote, gave birth to that primeval bit of protoplasm tossing on the ancient seas continue their mighty and incomprehensible work. Against this cosmic background the lifespan of a particular plant or animal appears, not as drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change. Complement the altogether fantastic [Lost Woods]( with Carson courageous and prescient 1953 [protest against the government’s assault on science and nature]( the story of [how she awakened the modern environmental conscience]( and her [touching farewell to her beloved]( then revisit these gorgeous [illustrations of sea creatures from Indian folklore]( and Susan Middleton’s mesmerizing [photographs of marine invertebrates](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [BP] If you enjoy my newsletter, please consider helping me keep it going with a modest [donation](. 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