This book, _A Rumor of Empathy_, undertakes a fascinating journey into the philosophical and intellectual history of the concept of empathy. The author, Lou Agosta, a philosopher by background, was initially prompted to explore this topic when encountering psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut's work, which proposed that psychoanalysis itself was a "science of empathy". At the time, the very existence of empathy as a distinct phenomenon, separate from things like agreement, sympathy, or compassion, was debated. This uncertainty is reflected in the book's title, suggesting that empathy might seem like just a "rumor". The ultimate goal of the project is to help make empathy less of a rumor and more of an active presence in the community and the world. The book's approach is not a clinical or psychoanalytic treatise, but a philosophical one, focused on intellectual history. However, it employs methods that delve deeper than just summarizing existing texts. The author describes this method as "rewriting empathy". This means looking for instances where the _use_ or _distinction_ of empathy occurs, even if the specific _word_ "empathy" (or its German equivalent, "Einfühlung") isn't explicitly mentioned. It's like tracing a concept through history by its effects and relationships, even when it goes by different names or is described in other terms. This "rewriting" process involves describing and redescribing ideas, working from what's immediately apparent to the underlying structure. The author distinguishes between explicitly _mentioning_ the word "empathy" (often in quotation marks) and actually _using_ the capability of empathy. The real challenge is identifying and understanding the _use_ of empathy, the capability, in thinkers who may not have named it as such but contributed to its understanding and expansion in the world. One of the core contributions of the book is the proposal of a unified, multi-dimensional definition of empathy as a process. The author argues that common views of empathy often present false choices, such as seeing it as either purely affective or purely cognitive. Instead, empathy is presented as a complex process with at least four interconnected dimensions, forming a kind of hermeneutic circle that can be entered at any point. These four dimensions are: 1. **Empathic Receptivity:** This is the initial openness to the feelings, emotions, sensations, and lived experiences of others. It's the capability to receive the affect of another person, whether face-to-face or through things like art. Think of it as a form of "empathic data gathering". While it draws on mechanisms similar to emotional contagion or vicarious feeling, empathy isn't _reducible_ to just these responses; it needs further processing. The paradigm case here is vicarious feeling. If the process stopped here, it would remain just a blind emotional reaction. 2. **Empathic Understanding:** This involves recognizing the other person and grasping their possibilities for human flourishing. It's about acknowledging the other within the context of their constraints and commitments. This dimension is seen as a recognition of the other. It involves understanding possibility in relatedness to the other, a sense of understanding "writ large" that includes cognition but is not limited to simple rule-following logic. 3. **Empathic Interpretation:** This builds upon receptive data and understanding by elaborating on the possibilities the other person embodies. It involves using various perspectives, including first-, second-, and third-person viewpoints, often as if temporarily identifying with the other ("as if" one were the other in their situation). It uses cognitive methods like framing, conceptualizing, and transient identification. The paradigm case is transient identification, acting "as if" one were the other. 4. **Empathic Responsiveness / Speech:** This is the articulation of empathy through optimal responses, which crucially includes both listening and speaking (or behaving). While empathy could theoretically exist internally and unexpressed, its primary form of expression is paradoxically listening. Responding involves letting the other person appreciate that they have been genuinely heard. The paradigm case is the speech act of narrative or storytelling, like the story of the Good Samaritan, where listening is the moment of empathic relatedness, distinct from the subsequent altruistic action. Empathy conveys _information_ about the other's experience, while morality or altruism might dictate what to _do_ about it. These dimensions work together in a cyclical, interconnected way. This multi-dimensional approach helps clarify debates in the literature by showing how different perspectives might simply be emphasizing different parts of the overall process. It highlights how affect (in receptivity) and cognition (in understanding and interpretation) work together in a unified process. The book then traces this multi-dimensional concept through the works of several key thinkers, revealing empathy's "deep history". **David Hume** is chosen as a starting point because, arguably, all three trajectories relevant to empathy—aesthetics, interpersonal relations, and altruism—converge in his work. Although Hume used the word "sympathy" rather than "empathy," a close reading reveals that his usage overlaps significantly with what is understood by "empathy" today. Hume's exploration of "sympathy" can be mapped onto the four dimensions of empathy. - Hume's description of "sympathy" as the communication of feelings, where ideas of others' emotions are converted into one's own impressions through imagination, can be rewritten as **empathic receptivity**. His idea that "minds of men are mirrors to one another" points to a mechanism for this receptivity. Hume's "delicacy of sympathy" allows one to notice fine-grained distinctions in feelings, akin to modern ideas of emotional micro-expressions and mapping to empathic receptivity. Unlike emotional contagion, Humean sympathy, in its full sense, requires a "double representation": not just experiencing a vicarious feeling, but also recognizing the other person as the _source_ of that feeling. - Hume's focus on how individuals relate to the community and become "exemplary individuals" who inspire others by pursuing possibilities like courage, generosity, and eloquence points towards **empathic understanding** – grasping the other as a possibility for human flourishing. His idea of "friendship of humankind" and "humanity" connects to this sense of expanded sympathy as understanding possibilities beyond mere self-interest. - Hume's concept of the "sympathetic general observer" who evaluates moral qualities from a common point of view, transcending the limitations of distance and proximity, aligns with **empathic interpretation**. This involves the ability to take another individual's point of view, transposing oneself from a first-person to a second-person perspective, much like empathic interpretation "as if" in the other's place. - While Hume initially used "sympathy" more broadly, its meaning evolved towards "benevolence" or an interest in the well-being of others, especially in his later work. This development of "sympathy" as an active concern for others can be seen as mapping to **empathic responsiveness**. However, by the time of his _Enquiry_ (1751), Hume largely downgraded "sympathy" to mere "power of suggestion" or "emotional contagion," shifting the basis of morality to benevolence. It's notable that Hume's concept of "delicacy of taste," his ability to make fine-grained distinctions in aesthetic appreciation, is connected to his ideas about sympathy. While Hume merged "delicacy of sympathy" into "delicacy of taste," the author argues for reconstructing a distinct "delicacy of empathy" that allows for fine-grained perception of others' feelings. Hume's many meanings of "sympathy" ultimately set a standard for the multi-dimensional understanding of empathy. **Immanuel Kant**, famously awakened by Hume, also contributes to the "rumor of empathy," though in a less explicit way than Hume. His contribution requires reconstruction. Key clues appear in two concepts: the "communicability of feelings" and "enlarged thinking". - Kant's idea of the "communicability of feelings" (from his aesthetics) sounds very much like the initial step of empathic receptivity. This idea suggests a fundamental human capacity to share feelings that can be seen as a rumor of empathy. It provides a basis for a Kantian reconstruction of relatedness that resembles modern empathic receptivity. - Kant's notion of "enlarged thinking" involves taking into account the perspectives of others. This resonates with the cognitive dimensions of empathy, particularly empathic understanding and interpretation, which involve perspective-taking. - The author finds a compelling analogy between Kant's aesthetic judgment (taste) and empathy. Both involve disinterestedness, universality, and a certain necessity, and both recruit an underlying common sense ("sensus communis"). However, this is an _analogy_, not an identification, unlike what a later thinker would do. - Kant also identified a mental mechanism he called "subreption," where internal feelings or purposes are mistakenly attributed to external objects. For instance, calling a storm "angry" attributes a human emotion to nature. This concept foreshadows Theodor Lipps's theory of aesthetic empathy. The analogy between taste and empathy in Kant points towards a relatedness to the other that is necessary but doesn't necessarily involve moral judgment or utility in a narrow sense. **Theodor Lipps** is arguably the figure most responsible for popularizing "Einfühlung" (translated as "empathy") and making it a central term, particularly in aesthetics. Lipps was a psychologist influenced by Kantian ideas. - Lipps's work, especially _Aesthetik_ (1903) and _Guide to Psychology_ (1909), is where "empathy" (Einfühlung) comes to prominence, often used interchangeably with terms like "projection," "humanization," or "self-objectivation". - Lipps is famous (or infamous) for his concept of "aesthetic empathy," where we project our own feelings and life into inanimate objects or nature, thereby humanizing them and making them appear beautiful. He boldly substitutes "empathy" for "taste" as the foundation of aesthetics. - Lipps also discussed "apperceptive empathy," which provides access to relatedness with other people. However, a major critique of Lipps (by Scheler and Stein, for instance) is that his approach, particularly aesthetic empathy, is fundamentally flawed. By projecting the self onto others or objects, Lipps arguably doesn't truly grasp the other as _independent_. His approach seems trapped in a "one person psychology" and leads to the problem of philosophical solipsism, where only one's own consciousness is certain to exist. Lipps's definition of empathy as "self-objectivation" highlights this issue. - Despite the philosophical issues, Lipps introduced the idea of "inner imitation," a barely conscious mirroring or resonance with the actions or forms of others. This concept, though not directly equivalent, gained renewed interest with the later hypothesis of mirror neurons. Lipps saw this inner imitation as a physiological basis for aesthetic experience and empathy. - Lipps's work significantly influenced subsequent discussions of empathy, including those by Titchener (who translated "Einfühlung" as "empathy" into English), Vernon Lee, Wilhelm Worringer, and Sigmund Freud. **Sigmund Freud**, though he only used the word "Einfühlung" (empathy) about 22 times in his extensive writings, demonstrated a profoundly empathic clinical method. A complication in studying Freud's use of the term is that his translators often mistranslated "Einfühlung" as "sympathetic understanding" or other paraphrases, obscuring its critical role. - Freud was familiar with Lipps's work and acknowledged finding his own principles in Lipps, particularly concerning consciousness as a sense organ and mental processes being unconscious. - Freud's clinical practice fundamentally relied on empathy for success. He distinguished empathy from "moralizing," emphasizing the importance of respecting the patient's autonomy rather than manipulating them with approval or blame. He also explicitly distinguished empathy from "sympathy". - Freud's concept of "evenly-hovering attention" (also called "evenly-hovering non-attention") is described as a method enabling the analyst to receive everything the patient says without bias, preventing the analyst from only finding what they already know or distorting perception. This approach, likened to a calculated suspension of attention, can be seen as a form of empathic receptivity. - Freud's idea that the analyst's unconscious mind can reconstruct the patient's unconscious by bending itself like a receptive organ to the "induced vibrations" of the patient's associations also points strongly towards empathic receptivity and interpretation. This highlights the intertwined nature of receptive "bottom-up" empathy and interpretive "top-down" empathy in his practice. - The author notes that Freud's limited view of introspection as self-criticism prevented him from seeing the link between empathy and introspection as later described by Kohut ("vicarious introspection"). - Freud's relatively infrequent _mention_ of the word "empathy" is partly attributed to the term being strongly associated with Lipps, whose theoretical framework Freud wanted to distinguish his own work from. **Max Scheler** is a key figure in the phenomenological tradition who explicitly engaged with "sympathy" and critiqued Lipps. - Scheler strongly rejected both the argument from analogy and Lipps's "projective empathy" as valid ways to understand other minds. His critique, along with Stein's, helped shift the conversation away from Lipps's projection-based model. - Scheler introduced the concept of "modes of givenness" – the various ways other persons present themselves through expressions of life. - He distinguished between "emotional contagion" (lacking intentionality directed towards the other) and "vicarious feeling" or "shared experience," which are forms of openness to the other's affects and experiences. Scheler's analysis of "vicarious feeling" aligns with the multi-dimensional model's concept of empathic receptivity, serving as input for further processing. - Scheler argued that community or society is the context for the "primitive givenness of the other," suggesting that relatedness is fundamental. Scheler's work points towards vicarious experience as a distinct phenomenon, neither entirely one's own nor the other's original experience, providing a basis for empathic receptivity. **Edmund Husserl**, the founder of phenomenology, also grappled with the problem of intersubjectivity and how we access the experience of other minds. Initially, in his published work, empathy ("Einfühlung") was treated as something built upon a more fundamental base, not the foundation itself, and the spectre of solipsism was present. - However, Husserl's extensive, though largely unpublished, later writings (the _Nachlass_) show a growing engagement with empathy. In this later work, empathy moves closer to being considered the _foundation_ of intersubjectivity. - Husserl, particularly in his _Nachlass_, uses various terms and concepts to explain how we access the other, including "pairing" (associating one's own lived body with the other's), "analogical appresentation" (perceiving aspects of the other by analogy with oneself), and "co-originality". "Co-originality," described by Edith Stein (Husserl's student), is reinterpreted by the author as "vicarious" experience – an intermediate mode of givenness between perceiving a mere physical object and fully grasping the other as a conscious subject. - In a compelling metaphor from the _Nachlass_, Husserl describes monads (individual consciousnesses) as having "windows," and these windows _are_ empathy, allowing access to others. - Husserl's later work explicitly describes empathy ("Einfühlung") as an "original form of access" to the other and the basis for forming a community ("communalization"). He discusses various "modes of being with" others, encompassing both cognitive and affective aspects, resonating with the multi-dimensional definition of empathy. His term "quasi-experience" or "as it were life" in relation to the other's subjectivity provides further texture to the idea of vicarious experience. - Although Husserl did not fully elaborate empathic responsiveness in his _Nachlass_, his work strongly positions empathy as a fundamental, intentional relatedness to the indispensable other. Edith Stein, a student of Husserl, wrote her dissertation _On the Problem of Empathy_ (1917). Her work overlaps with Husserl's thinking on intersubjectivity. - Stein also critiques Lipps and the argument from analogy. - She explores "sensual empathy," which connects the body and consciousness and allows for the communicability of sensation. Her concept of "co-originality" describes how we perceive the other's living body ("Leib") as a source of animate expressions of life, distinct from a mere physical object ("Körper"). This idea of "co-originality" is key to understanding vicarious experience as an original, sui generis form of relatedness. - Stein comes very close to explicitly stating that the intentional act of empathy takes the _other_ as its object. The book concludes by emphasizing that empathy, when understood as a multi-dimensional process, reveals a unity amidst diverse historical descriptions. It shows how concepts related to empathy have steadily moved from the periphery to a more foundational understanding of intersubjectivity and human community. Even without using the specific word, thinkers like Hume and Kant contributed significantly to the deep history of empathy through ideas like the communicability of feelings, enlarged thinking, and the analogy between taste and relating to others. Lipps, despite his problematic projective theory, popularized the term and highlighted the connection between empathy and aesthetics. Freud demonstrated profound empathic skill in clinical practice, even if the term was underused and mistranslated. Scheler and Stein, through phenomenology, offered critiques of earlier views and provided new insights into vicarious experience and the givenness of the other. Finally, Husserl, particularly in his later work, moved towards establishing empathy as the fundamental basis for accessing and relating to other consciousnesses and forming community. Throughout this history, the "rumor of empathy" can be seen emerging in various forms: emotional contagion, bodily synchronization, vicarious experience, and the simple communicability of affect, which are precursors to full empathic receptivity. It's the possibility of shifts in how we relate to ourselves and others, a new way of understanding the other as an indispensable possibility. It's the interpretation of others from multiple perspectives and a responsiveness based on reciprocal humanity. Ultimately, the book suggests that behind all the philosophical analysis and historical tracing, empathy, fully realized, means simply being present with another human being. This exploration opens up avenues for further thought on how these historical philosophical ideas about empathy connect with modern scientific inquiries (like neuroscience) and contemporary practices (like therapy or education), and how we can continue to cultivate and expand the use of this vital human capability in our communities.