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phenomenology, but started to break away from the field and its figurehead, Edmund Husserl, in order to pursue a psychological approach to his central question: Why does art give us pleasure?
    At the time, scientists largely reduced art appreciation to mathematical properties. They believed that certain unities of geometry were simply more agreeable to the mind’s eye than others. But Lipps refused to settle for this rigid, retinal explanation. He thought it could help explain perception, but that it had little to do with pleasure, which he suspected involved more subjective forces, like an individual’s mood or educational background.
    Perhaps the equation could be reversed, he decided. Rather than art grafting pleasure onto the eye, maybe the eye made the art. After all, the distribution of paint on canvas could not be considered beautifulwithout a beholder to see it as such. (A contemporary of Lipps’s in Vienna, the art historian Alois Riegl, later called this the “beholder’s involvement.”) In this view, colors are simply pigments until a mind filters them into what one might call tones, or hue-based triggers of memory and emotion. 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.
    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.
    Paradoxically, then, empathy is by definition a selfish emotion: we empathize with the external in order to enjoy ourselves. Empathy is life-affirming, it allows us to permeate the world. On the other hand, when art fails to activate this response, people may say that it doesn’t“move” them. That it is “impenetrable” or they cannot wrap their “head around it.” In these instances, perception is the only sense at work.
    Intellectuals across Europe quickly took note of Lipps’s research on einfühlung and began to build upon it. Art historians had been attempting to explain why certain cultures created certain art, what Riegl called Kunstwollen , or the “will to art.” In 1906, one of Lipps’s students, Wilhelm Worringer, proposed a seminal theory that coupled his professor’s writing on empathy with that of another professor, the Berlin sociologist Georg Simmel. Adopting Simmel’s use of binaries—a relativist view that held that to understand one concept, such as symmetry, one should also consider its opposite, asymmetry—Worringer described the binary that he believed