Vischer - The Symbol

Art in Translation
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The Symbol
Friedrich Theodor Vischer & Holly A. Yanacek
To cite this article: Friedrich Theodor Vischer & Holly A. Yanacek (2015) The Symbol, Art in
Translation, 7:4, 417-448, DOI: 10.1080/17561310.2015.1107314
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Friedrich Theodor
Vischer The Symbol
Translated by Abstract
Holly A. Yanacek
Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s essay “The Symbol” considers empathy in
First published in German as aesthetics in relation to meaning. He outlines three modalities of the
Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Das symbol. The first points to a conflation of the image and its meaning.
Symbol,” in Philosophische
Aufsätze. Eduard Zeller zu seinem At the other extreme, the image and its meaning are set apart from one
fünfzigjährigen Doctor-Jubiläum another. Finally, there is the linkage “with reservation” between image
gewidmet (Leipzig: Fue’s Verlag, and meaning, in which the beholder knows that the image and that
1887), 153–193.
to which it refers are distinct. Vischer’s discussion of the symbol was
influential on twentieth-century art historians, such as Aby Warburg
418 Friedrich Theodor Vischer
and Edgar Wind. His study of symbols is still relevant to conceptual

questions that drive the study of images today.
KEYWORDS: empathy, art and philosophy, aesthetics, art theory,

symbol, sign; meaning, German art history
Introduction by Josh Ellenbogen (University of

Pittsburgh)
The history of empathy theory in aesthetics currently enjoys a renais-

sance of scholarly interest. Along with his son, Robert Vischer, Friedrich
Theodor Vischer remains the most important source for understand-
ing the origins and significance of empathy theory in nineteenth-cen-
tury German thought. First touched on in Friedrich Theodor’s “Kritik
meiner Ästhetik” [Critique of my Aesthetics]1 and then developed in
Robert Vischer’s “Über das optische Formgefühl” [On the Optical
Sense of Form],2 empathy theory receives a treatment in the present
essay that contemporary audiences will find especially enlightening.
“Das Symbol” (The Symbol), in addition to making clear how empathy
theory developed out of the broader intellectual currents of Germany in
the 1860s, 70s, and 80s, also enjoys palpable relations to art historical
thinkers whose work possesses the greatest significance. Of these, the
most important is doubtless Heinrich Wölfflin, whose writings on archi-
tecture, above all “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur”
[Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture],3 followed the contours
they did because of Wölfflin’s familiarity with empathy theory.
At the same time as it sheds light on empathy theory most broadly,
“Das Symbol” takes the vital step of considering empathy in aesthet-
ics in relation to sign theory, and it is this move that does the most to
establish the continuing value of the essay. Friedrich Theodor Vischer
here sketches three modalities of the symbol. In the first case, we have
a primordial, magical species of relation, in which the image and its
meaning become confused (the image of the bull, meant to signify the
divine, becomes worshipped as divine itself). At the other extreme, we
have a situation in which the image and its meaning are rigorously set
apart from one another, in which no confusion between signifier and
signified is permitted (this is a way of understanding images that many
observers have associated with modern societies). Finally, we have the
linkage “with reservation” between image and meaning, in which the
beholder knows that the image and that to which it refers are distinct,
but nonetheless permits himself or herself to be compelled by the sen-
suous power of the living image, to dwell in between the two poles
delineated earlier.
The Symbol 419
Because Vischer attempted to explicate relations between empathy

theory and these modalities of the sign, his work became one of the main
venues by which empathy theory exerted continuing power over twenti-
eth-century discussions. As the great art historian Edgar Wind noted, for
example, Aby Warburg’s historical method remained deeply indebted to
Vischer’s discussion of symbols, and cannot properly be understood in
isolation from it (see his “Warburg’s Concept of Kulturwissenchaft,”4
as well as Warburg’s own “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual”).5 Indeed,
Wind’s own work in art history enjoyed intimate links with Vischer’s
account of signs, which become especially apparent in his famous Art
and Anarchy6 (see chapter 2 and its discussion of “participation”).
Finally, leaving aside authors directly informed by Vischer’s treatment,

the kinds of questions on which his study of symbols hinges have endur-
ing significance to conceptual questions that drive the study of images
today, from questions of idolatry, to substitution, to how images func-
tion as agents, to the anthropology of images most broadly.
Notes To Introduction
1. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Kritik meiner Ästhetik” in Kritische

Gänge 5 (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1866), 1–156.
2. Originally published in German as Robert Vischer, “Über das
optische Formgefühl: Ein Beitrag zur Ästhetik,” (Leipzig: Hermann
Credner, 1873). Translated as Robert Vischer, “On the Optical Sense
of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics,” in Harry Francis Mallgrave
and Eleftherios Ikonomou (ed. and trans.) Empathy, Form, and
Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893 (Santa Monica,
CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994),
89–123.
3. Originally published in German as “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie
der Architektur,” 1886. Doctoral dissertation, Universität München.
Reprinted in Heinrich Wölfflin, Kleine Schriften (1886–1933), ed.
Joseph Gantner (Basel: B. Schwabe, 1946), 13–47. Translated as
Heinrich Wölfflin, “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture,”
in Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (ed and
trans.) Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics,
1873–1893 (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art
and the Humanities, 1994), 149-190.
4. Edgar Wind, “Warburg’s Concept of Kulturwissenschaft and Its
Meaning for Aesthetics (1931),” in Edgar Wind, The Eloquence of
Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1983), 21–36.
5. Aby Warburg, “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual (1923),” trans. W. F.
Mainland, in Journal of the Warburg Institute 2.4 (1939): 277–292.
6. Edgar Wind, Art and Anarchy (New York: Knopf, 1964).
The Symbol by Friedrich Theodor Vischer
I remark in advance that the broad subject cannot be covered exten-

sively here in all of its parts. This will only happen to a limited extent;
the rest will be given in mere outline.
The symbol concept has been taken up with renewed interest.
Though it was highly regarded in scholarship during the Romantic
period, it was never approached with the sobriety that we now demand.
Its fundamental importance in aesthetics in particular is now more
clearly recognized. Johannes Volkelt has explored the concept exten-
sively with fine judgment in the work Der Symbolbegriff in der neuesten
Aesthetik [The Symbol Concept in the Newest Aesthetic] (1876). The

work begins with the proposition: “The concept of the symbol stands
at the center of the development of the newest aesthetic.” I, too, have
already stated in Kritische Gänge [Critical Path] (New Series, Issue 5,
pages 136–137) that the doctrine of the symbol should be taken as
the beginning of a system of aesthetics, not moved to the realm of the
imagination [Phantasie], because here lies the decision as to whether
or not the formalist school is right. Volkelt bases this proposition on
a presentation and critique of the more significant interpretations that
the essence of the symbol has undergone in aesthetic literature since
Hegel. My view, both the original one and its later transformation, is
also being cited and criticized. In the following, this substantial study
will be given the consideration it deserves.
The concept is tricky, a mutable Proteus, difficult to grasp and
capture.
At first, the matter seems simple. The symbol is merely an external
linkage of image and content through a point of comparison. In our
linguistic usage, however, the word image [Bild] has a double meaning,
which must not cause confusion. At times, it simply means a sensu-
ous thing that represents itself, a viewed illustration. At other times, it
expresses something secondary or something thought (in the undefined,
broad sense of this word—for the sake of brevity, it signifies for the
time being only general content or meaning), and it does this through a
point of comparison. If one says: a symbol is merely an external linkage
of image and content through a point of comparison, then the word
image is meant in the first of the two senses. If an image expresses con-
tent through this point of comparison, i.e. the tertium comparationis,
it upholds the second of the two meanings. The image in the first sense
speaks directly or literally; the image in the second sense speaks indi-
rectly or metaphorically. If one praises beautiful images in a poem, this
can simply mean “beautiful ideas,” but it can also mean “beautiful com-
parisons.” These are two very different things. There would be much to
say about the neglect of this difference, but we cannot go into that here.
Enough, image in the sense of “something illustrative” becomes image
The Symbol 421
in the following sense through the symbol: “something illustrative serv-

ing to express a thought.” It depends on the meaning. One could use
the German word Sinnbild [symbol] instead of the Greek word, but
this poses the difficulty that one could not Germanize the word form
“symbolism” [Symbolik] without circuitousness.
In rhetoric and poetics, in the doctrine of tropes, one distinguishes
between metaphor and simile [Vergleichung]. The latter admits,
through “like” and “as,” that it is only a comparison. The former does
not admit this but ventures the illusion [Schein] that it identifies content
and image, even though the image refers to the content only through
one of its qualities. It is very similar with the symbol. In the symbol
an image is displayed before our senses—initially we say: before our

eyes, whether hearing applies still remains undecided—an image which
appears to say: here is a tree, a lotus flower, a star, a ship, a bundle of
arrows, a sword, an eagle, a lion. Yet, without explanatory tutoring, the
image really wants to signify: the elementary force of nature’s existence,
the formation of the world, rising luck, the Christian Church, unity,
power and division, bold aspiration, courage or magnanimity. Yet the
metaphor is very different from the symbol; it [the metaphor] belongs
to speech and through the word presents an image, which depicts
and means something else. But this occurs in a context, in which the
subject of the image is already established and disclosed; we already
know what is being interchanged and confused. Whenever the villain in
Shakespeare’s Richard III is called a venomous toad or a bottled spider,
the reason for the comparison, e.g. ugliness, malice, or an ensnaring
ploy, is not stated, but we effortlessly understand the meaning when he
stands before us. Moreover, the intellectual transparency of the word
facilitates everything here; it betrays and demands and stimulates rapid
reconsideration and making connections between ideas. The metaphor
is a beautiful audacity, which is easily comprehended by those who have
wit [Geist]. The symbol, by contrast, is offered to the senses, to the eye.
There is no speaker, whose lively speech carries and lifts me so that I
automatically understand his bold word, and contrasting of the subject
being compared is not given to me in advance. I pause at first and stand
before a puzzle. It greatly depends on whether I find the meaning with
ease or with difficulty. Most symbols link meaning to the image more
by way of convention than as something obvious in itself. Everything
depends on whether the point of comparison is felicitous. We can eas-
ily guess that a wing signifies swiftness. Yet I would not realize that a
ship signifies the Christian Church if I did not already know this, and
a lion traditionally signifies magnanimity more frequently than courage
even though it is not especially magnanimous. In order to avoid confu-
sion, we must note that the symbol need not always be offered to the
outer senses; it can also be shown to the inner eye, to the imagination
[Vorstellung], through speech. At the beginning of his Divine Comedy,
Dante speaks of a dark forest in which he got lost and of a spotted
panther that he encountered. These are not metaphors but symbols, and
readers have racked their brains over them because the images are only
shown to the imagination [Vorstellung] without the aid of the moments
given in metaphor. Only through suggestions that are weakly and
remotely supported by the means of discourse does the reader know
that it deals with the dangers of a human life searching for its spiritual
goal.—Whether one should instead call images such as these allegories
is a question that can be justifiably set aside at this point; they can only
be labeled as allegories if one uses the word imprecisely.
Regardless of whether the puzzle-like quality of the symbol is easy
and quick to solve or difficult and slow, indeed barely solvable in its
entirety, it follows that an incommensurability [Unangemessenheit], as

Hegel called it, lies in the symbol. The reason was already stated in
the previous remarks and is easy to understand. The image has many
qualities, however apparently simple the object that it presents may be.
If the meaning [Sinn] also, upon closer examination, includes a plu-
rality of conceptual moments [Begriffsmomente], then the meaning is
simple when compared to that variety and abstract when compared
to the concrete. They do not correspond. Magnanimity, for example,
is a movement or constant quality of the soul that has more than just
one meaning: e.g. self-assurance, feeling for the other, or overcoming of
the ego. But the lion—granted that he is magnanimous—is much more
aside from that: ravenous, wild, bold, beautiful, maned, and so forth,
and, compared to this multiplicity, the term magnanimity is simple.—So
once again: incommensurate.
We are not examining here the difference between that which sim-
ply exists in the external world and the artistic symbol [Kunstsymbol],
which depicts the given form or furthermore variously reshapes it for
the purpose of the explication of meaning. In spite of this purpose, the
incommensurability is not lifted, since the transformation [Umbildung]
creates new hesitations and puzzles, except for cases in which meaning
is brought nearer through the magnification or proliferation of [bodily]
organs, as happens, for example, whenever the myth sinks back into the
symbol and the arms of a figure multiply.
But still very little has been said with these definitions. Link-
ing through one point of comparison, only an extrinsic bond exists
between image and meaning: these are still superficial descriptions.
“Bond”—that is of course not a thing, it is an act, an act of the link-
ing mind [des verbindenden Geistes]. But the mind [Geist] works in
various forms. For the present field we distinguish first between its
behavior as a clear-thinking mind [helldenkender Geist] and as a mere
apprehending soul [nur ahnende Seele]. This distinction is still poor.
Clarity of thought has various degrees, intuition [Ahnung] various
depths. The task is to draw lines in a fog, put plainly, to distinguish
the main types of connection between image and meaning. The
assumption: incommensurability will be shaken in the process. Will it
The Symbol 423
topple entirely? That is the question and its answer is not straightfor-
ward.
We begin with the type of connection that we will call dark and
bound [dunkel und unfrei]. It belongs to religious consciousness and
is designated as historical because it was especially at home in natural
religions. Yet it is an equally enduring form, not only because natural
religions still exist, but also because Christianity (like the Mosaic reli-
gion), although, incidentally, not a natural religion, still clings to it.
First, the basic concept must still be supplemented with an important
additional factor. If one uses the basic concept precisely, the domain of
the objects from which the symbolic image is taken remains restricted
to the impersonal: inorganic nature, artifact, plant, or animal. But a

supplement is immediately required: acts of persons also come into
view here; but, they are not acts and persons in the image, but the real
actions of real persons that are performed with the image, namely, litur-
gical acts.
I have already characterized the symbol in this sense in Aesthetics
§426. Image and meaning are confused. Consciousness only has a faint
inkling of the meaning; it seeks in the dark. The image is a temporary
help for the word, which would have to grasp meaning in thought-form
[Gedankenform], and this creates the deception [Täuschung] that this
substitute for the word is the thing itself: identification. Since meaning
essentially belongs to the sphere of the absolute, since apprehension
[Ahnung]1 seeks something infinite, the object thus becomes sacred
through the confusion. So, for example, through the point of compar-
ison of its strength and virility, a bull becomes a symbol of elemental
force, but is then mistaken for it: and a tree, like the ash Yggdrasil, is the
image of the mysterious life of the universe. The former is sacred and
worshipped in Egypt, the latter in Scandinavia. We must also remember
Christian symbols, although the unconscious confusion of very con-
scious knowledge is enclosed within an edifice of (spurious) reasons [mit
einem Zaune von Gründen umhengt]. At the Last Supper with his disci-
ples, Jesus says that they should remember his death henceforth through
the breaking of the bread and the pouring of the wine. He says it in the
familiar metaphor: “this is” et cetera. In the course of time, his subse-
quent death, which becomes linked to the symbol concept of sacrifice, is
interpreted as an act of atonement for the sins of humanity. Now a new
idea comes along and the matter changes. Originally one only had to
keep in mind the image [Bild] of the breaking of bread and the pouring
of wine and the meaning [Sinn] of a martyr’s death on the cross. Now
it concerns the appropriation of the impact of the sacrificial death and
the forgiveness of sins, and herewith the emphasis is placed on eating
and drinking. This is certainly a fitting symbol for appropriation since,
through their consumption, food and drink are indeed entirely appro-
priated by the body and converted into bodily fluids and blood. Though
this bodily appropriation in itself has nothing to do with the spiritual
appropriation of a boundless spiritual benefaction per se, the bond

between the former and the latter is the sole point of comparison. But
comparison becomes confusion. Further emphasis is necessarily placed
on the bread and wine, which were previously neutral substances. They
do not merely signify that the self-sacrificing Christ descends into them
and converts them into himself. This requires—a further implication—a
person, whose word has the magical power to effect this substance
transformation: the priest. There can be no more striking example for
the proposition that the religious imagination takes the symbol at face
value and, out of the mere point of comparison, creates a substantive
immanence [substanzielles Einwohnen], a physical—and yet not phys-
ical, transcendental—entering of the being [Wesenheit], to which the

point of comparison simply refers, into the object from which the point
of comparison is taken. One can call this transformation in all its forms
transubstantiation. Baptismal water, holy water, and oil are transformed
in the same manner. At a marriage ceremony, the priest lays his hand
on the hands that are joined together, or, as it is done in some places,
weaves a band around them. This is simply a symbol of the truth that
the church should add an expression of moral perfection to the bour-
geois marriage ceremony. But this is taken magically, as if the marriage
were only made real through a miraculous force of nature.
Here is the key to understanding all positive religion, how it was,
is, and will be. Religiously bound consciousness will probably always
insist on this confusion of the symbol with the thing symbolized. Image
and content grow into each other and become inseparable. He who uses
the knife of analysis to cut into this nut, whose kernel does not want
to be prized from its shell, looks like a blasphemer to the dark minds.
What Voltaire let the thinking Fréret in “The Dinner of Count de Bou-
lainvilliers” say about the irrefutable physiological consequence of eat-
ing and drinking during the Eucharist is simply true; but Voltaire—the
honest deist for whom this is bright, warm earnestness—is not in the
least notorious as a monster of flippancy because of this passage. If he
is frivolous, it is in another regard, in other things.
In Aesthetics, I limited the symbol concept to this form, the religious,
darkly confusing form, but since then I have given up this limitation
and articulated this in various places. Yet before we go into the neces-
sary expansion, we must address a concept that raises the question of
whether or not we should also abandon the concept of the symbol. This
is the myth concept. The myth must be mentioned at this point because
it shares believed existence [Geglaubtsein] with the bound symbol, and,
with the symbol, belongs to bound religious belief. The question of
whether myth itself would still fall under the symbol concept must first,
however, be answered in the negative. This has long been recognized
and established in the study of religion and aesthetics. “To see man-
kind in nature, to suspect beating hearts in springs, mountains, stars,
ocean, and sky is not symbolic” (Aesthetics § 427; compare the further
The Symbol 425
a rguments here). Myth is religious personification. What is only mean-

ing in the symbol becomes, in the god, the soul and will of a personality
with its form. The meaning conveys an event through a power: this
event now becomes will, purpose, action, (and suffering) of this person-
ality. Personality implies a multiplicity of qualities, of which meaning is
only one. Thus, it could actually do without this multiplicity, but since
personality has become soul and will, what would logically be an excess
is posited as a complex or a sounding board, without which this soul
would not be a soul. Only in a profound spirit does the content of the
symbol grow warm and become the felt, the desired. It is also essential
that the higher, political, ethical, and cultural significance in general be
inscribed in the original, natural meaning of the gods. The gods are now
benefactors but also punishing judges; they require a whole soul for this
purpose. We will find something different in the allegory, since a per-
sonality is specified yet the wealth of qualities assigned to it is omitted.
Allegory is thus a mere container, a bag into which a concept is stuffed.
The difference between myth and symbol becomes especially clear
in the formations that arise whenever the imagination [Phantasie] half
executes the step from symbol to myth and half falls back to the sym-
bol or remains stuck in it, for example, in the Egyptian images of the
gods with human forms and animal heads. In Indian mythology, the
multiplication of arms is added to the top half of the deities. On this
commingling, let us compare the section in Hegel’s discussion of sym-
bolism, “The Actual Symbolism” [“Die eigentliche Symbolik”], and my
Aesthetik § 427.
But I have subsequently changed my view to the extent that I estab-
lished that the myth could also be considered symbolic after all. See
Critical Path New Series, Issue 5, p. 137. “Linguistic usage also calls
both mythical and allegorical personification symbolic. It is better to
follow the linguistic usage and expand the term ‘symbolic’ to all forms
included therein.”
Volkelt (loc. cit. p. 11 ff.) disputes this. He says that since, according
to my words, meaning [Bedeutung] inheres in the god as its own soul,
meaning [Sinn] and image correspond here, while they do not corre-
spond in the symbol.
Here we must make a clear distinction between the believer in myth
and the one who sees it in his imagination [Vorstellen] or consciousness.
Although the latter lacks actual belief, he recognizes the value of myth
and uses it as an aesthetic motif for art, poetry, and the embellishment
of life and speech. For the former, gods (along with geniuses, spirits,
and legendary heroes) are real beings, their actions and experiences are
historical. For the latter these beings do not contain factual truth; he
simply likes to put himself in the place of the believer in myth. He is
fully aware that such lively phantasmata could only originate through
such belief. We call this displacement “poetic belief,” but poetic belief
is neither actual nor historical belief. Alongside or behind this poetic
belief, clear consciousness maintains that these constructs are the work
of the imagination [Phantasiewerk]. This kind of belief, this non-be-
lief and nevertheless belief, is not, however, a gratuitous desire to be
deceived. The work of the imagination is not empty: it has lasting mean-
ing, not outer (factual, historical), but inner truth. Poetic belief has a
core here because its object has a core. If the free thinker, who sees
through the myth but believes in it poetically, who therefore loves and
readily employs myth were to express this through his behavior, what
should he say? He cannot say: “I do not believe in these people and
events historically, but rather mythically.” When he says: “mythically,”
he only reemphasizes in the second part of the proposition what the first
part already indicated, namely, that these people and events are not, for
him, part of history. Admittedly, he adds something to the simple nega-
tion, namely, the concept of the work of the imagination [Phantasiew-
erk] implied in “mythical,” but this does not acknowledge that the work
of the imagination contains a kernel of inner truth. He would therefore
have to say: historically, I do not believe in these people and events,
rather I see in them only the work of the imagination, but this work
of the imagination is not empty, and, in this sense, I believe in them.
How must he speak? Symbolically, not otherwise. And that is quite right
because he now removes the meaning from its coalescence with the
image of a living person and action, despite the aesthetic beauty, and so
the meaning no longer coincides with this image as it does in the imagi-
nation [Vorstellung] of the believer. Some examples! For us, the Mother
of Jesus is not a being removed from natural law, nor the Mother of
God, nor ascended into heaven, nor Queen of Heaven; nevertheless,
whoever stands unmoved before a work of art such as Titian’s Assunta
must be completely devoid of fantasy and feeling. All earthly suffering,
all deep woe that can penetrate a human heart, and all yearning for a
pure, free, blessed existence breathes and gazes out of that wonderful
female countenance. A spark of joy, emanating from the smoke of life,
flows through the moving limbs, the folds of the garment. We are the
lingering, gazing followers, yearning to be free from our heavy earthly
bonds. Above, the reachable, humanlike God the Father and his angels
do not appear strange to us, they are necessary for the reception of
the person ascending and embodiments of boundless existence.—Or
we step before Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. Every feature of this face
appears to say: no word, no tongue mentions the ecstasies of the blessed
world, from which I float down to you. The wide-eyed, apprehensive
boy on her arm continues to dream of these heavenly delights; a gentle
breeze from above plays in his locks and we believe we hear the rustling
of the mother’s garment from the movement of the descent. Saint Sixtus
points out and down below to his congregation, for whom he implored
the heavenly visitation. Saint Barbara, rapturous over the granting of
the request, looks down with pure shared joy [Mitfreude] to the blessed
world below. And the two putti, which the artist painted on only later,
The Symbol 427
look out to us from this unique, visionary image with the same expres-
sion of sincere indulgence in the child-like countenance, as further wit-
nesses of the inexpressible heavenly joy.
The Madonna-Ideal has the enduring meaning for us of an image of
pure femininity even. Still virginal as a mother: this has deep meaning
and truth apart from any church doctrine. The creation of this ideal is
the work and expression of the softened soul of the Middle Ages, which
sees all kindness and reconciliation, all pure grace manifest in the wom-
an—“the eternal feminine.”
Now, as already stated, we have no other term except “symbolic” for
the truth that these mythical constructs impress upon those who still do
not believe in the myth.

The rich fantasy world, which has created such forms and works
of art, as well as the festive splendor of the Mass, has already moved
many Protestants to convert to the Church of the Middle Ages. This
weakness must be discussed here because it pertains precisely to our
issue. A lack of discrimination, an omission of the distinction estab-
lished here, underlies it; it is overlooked that the inner truth depicted
in the mythical image is perceived symbolically by the non-believer,
it is not factual truth. A beautiful image in the second sense is not a
true image. To be sure, everything beautiful must contain truth, but
general human truth and real, genuinely possible or transpired events
are two different things. Powerful, moving music can enrapture, but it
does not follow that the lyrics are true. The abundance of motifs, which
the Catholic belief system offers to art and, through it, to the devout,
is frequently invoked as proof of its truth-value. The Greek religion
offers even more beauty and its myths are not meaningless: should we
therefore worship Zeus and his Olympian circle? Julian the Apostate of
course implemented this erroneous conclusion.—The Prometheus myth
is one of the most profound legends of humanity; should we therefore
build Prometheus a heroon and idolize him?
Neither our art and poetry, nor our entire life of ideas, thought, and
speech could do without the wealth of myths, which has been passed
down to us with the beliefs of classical antiquity, of the Germanic tribes, of
the Celts, and of the entire religious and phantasmical world of the Mid-
dle Ages. We would have much to believe if wanted to believe everything
not merely poetically, but in non-pictorial earnestness. What about the
devil? Doesn’t he embody a truth? Who is the imbecile who still believes
in him for that reason? But could we do without him? Where would that
put Goethe’s Faust? Mephistopheles has tangibly real life, which the myth
revealed to the poet, and yet he is only a symbol for the poet and for us.
Apparitions in profound literature are especially usefully for our
logical purpose. What I said about Banquo’s ghost in Shakespeare’s
Macbeth (in “Old and New” Issue 1, pp. 206–207) is applicable in
the present context. We do not know whether Shakespeare believed in
ghosts; on the one hand, it is possible, since the whole world believed
in them during his time. As a child, at least, he must have experienced

every horror that flows from complete belief. On the other hand, a poet
who remained entirely stuck in this belief could hardly have shaped it
into such a harrowingly true image of conscience. This ghastly vision of
conscience is now the apparition for those of us who no longer share
this belief in ghosts. But it is not abstract—every shudder of a believed
spirit world surrounds this apparition; we tremble like children before
a ghost, we fully assume the position of a believer and yet we are com-
pletely free from actual belief. Here is a poetically animated, believable
being and yet, like Faust’s satanic companion, it is only a symbol for us.
So to reiterate: once-believed myths that are not factually believed
yet, with animated transference back to this belief, are assumed and
accepted as free aesthetic simulacra, which are not empty but meaning-
ful, shall be called symbolic.
It may now seem that we have now left our sequence. We began
with the type of association between meaning and image that can be
described as dark and bound. But if we call the mythical in a certain
sense symbolic, we are talking about clear and free consciousness. But
this matter has two sides. The creation of myths as such, although com-
pletely different from the confusion of an impersonal image with its
meaning, belongs to the dark and bound form of consciousness since it
does not believe in its imaginary creation merely poetically. Thus, in this
respect, the creation of myth has its place next to the symbol as it has
hitherto been conceived, the bound confused—it is admittedly separate
and yet parallel to it. But now we must establish why the predicate
symbolic should nevertheless be applied to the mythical, and we have
found that symbolic is the mythical for the learned, free consciousness.
There, symbolic is understood in a different sense. There is also a clear,
free form of symbolism. It was necessary to point to this form, which
in itself belongs to another world, namely, the dark world, and it would
not be appropriate to make a real transition out of this anticipation. It
could indeed appear differently: a clear contrast would be won; but a
stronger reason speaks for specifying the form that lies in the middle
between free and bound, clear and dark, as the second main form, and
only then letting the completely free and clear form follow as the third.
The middle belongs in the middle, the exit at the exit. Since the exit is
this latter form, it is an easing, a step toward loosening the aesthetic
bonds; it will thus be rightly moved to the conclusion.
The middle—: one can also call the matter being dealt with now a
peculiar twilight. It is the instinctive and nevertheless free, unconscious
and yet in a certain sense conscious ensoulment of nature [Naturbe-
seelung], the lending act, through which we attribute our soul and
its moods to the inanimate. I have already presented this mental act
objectively in Aesthetics (Part 2 § 240 p. 27), where I discuss how the
observer, out of the appearances and movements of nature, lets his
moods and mind’s passions [Leidenschaften seines Gemüths] become
The Symbol 429
visible. In the section on the symbol, I did not yet recognize that it can
be a particular form, and, for that reason, I erroneously limited the
meaning of the symbol to the bound, dark form. I touched upon the
teaching of music without having worked out a specific setting and
compilation; it is clearly stated in the section on landscape painting
(§ 698 ff.) that it is the collaboration of the whole towards a mood of
the soul [Seelenstimmung] which distinguishes the work of the artist
from that of the veduta painter, but I did not find the right words there,
either. This mistake was corrected in the Critical Path (New Series,
Issue 5, p. 140 ff.). The symbol concept was addressed again in the
essay “On Goethe’s Faust: New Contributions to the Critique of the
Poem” and the form in question is distinguished from the other mean-
ings (p. 122).
An example to start with! The poet tells of the setting sun: “Close
he had wrapped himself round with clouds portending a tempest. Out
from the veil, now here and now there, with fiery flashes, gleaming over
the field shot forth the ominous lightning.”2 Every reader knows that
such illumination is simply a soulless, purely physical appearance of
light in darkness, to which a premonition cannot by any means actu-
ally be attached, but no reader with any imagination [Phantasie] will
say this to himself while reading devotedly. Willingly and without any
objection, we let ourselves be drawn into the beautiful mental picture
[Vorstellung]. Afterwards, at another time, when it is necessary to ana-
lyze, then, in a prosaic mood, we do not deny that the poet deceives us,
but we do not dispraise this deception [Täuschung], we applaud it. It
must lie in the nature of the human soul that the soul itself and its con-
ditions are confronted with and placed in forms of existence that have
nothing to do with them per se, and the poet has proceeded according
to this nature. Even those who are not poets proceed in this manner, as
long as they are not entirely spiritless [geistlos]. The entire language is
infused with poeticizing expressions that touch on this free-essential
deception [frei-nothwendigen Täuschung]: the morning smiles, the trees
whisper, the thunder grumbles, the thunder clouds threaten, the wild
waves rage. Inanimate objects of every kind are endowed with voli-
tion: the grapes want warmth, the nail does not want to come out of
the board, the package does not want to go in the bag. If the rifleman
says: the bullet wants wood, he attributes to it the wish or the desire to
hit the wooden target. Language in itself, wherever it seems completely
non-pictorial, is nonetheless thoroughly pictorial in this sense. There is
no word of spiritual importance [von geistiger Bedeutung] that could
not have originally meant the sensuous: Seele, Geist, animus, spiritus,
Ruach (Hebrew: soul). All of these words designate waving, breathing,
spraying.—This dark-light, free-bound act is symbolic: the connection
is accomplished through the link of a point of comparison. We will
come back to that when it is necessary to go into detail. For the time
being, the proposition can be postulated without argument, since it can
hardly be met with doubt. The one example above already proves this
proposition: it is easy to see that between the two things that are foreign
to each other—optical flashing of light and dark on the one hand, and
foreboding on the other hand—lies a uniting point of comparison. The
physically dark can be compared to the unknown, and, consequently,
to the unconscious as well. In the condition of foreboding, conscious-
ness and unconsciousness come together in an indeterminate, hovering
manner, as when light flashes through darkness. It is certain, however,
that in the moments when we carry out this symbolic linkage in the
imagination, we definitely do not say that it is merely symbolic. And
this is only a lack, that is, a lack of understanding from the viewpoint
of analytic contemplation. For appraisal with the measuring stick of the

imagination and its value, it is a great merit, a force of the powers of
the image [Energie des Bildvermögens]. The incommensurability of the
symbol, revealed in the way it combines through a mere tertium com-
parationis, disappears in the depths and interiority of the act. Indeed,
one can say it is truer that we ourselves are not conscious of the lack of
understanding because essential acts of the soul [Seelen-Acte] are, after
all, a kind of truth, like everything ideal. The deception therein is truth
in a higher sense than the truth about which we deceive ourselves. This
leads to a point that we must pursue elsewhere: the truth of all truth lies
behind deception and declares that the universe, nature, and spirit must
be one at root.—Thus, a contradiction: symbolic, and yet not symbolic
in the sense that deception about the merely symbolic has the truth of
ideal validity in the process—and this contradiction lives and persists.
It is illuminating that this act positions itself on the side of the behav-
ior of religiously bound symbolism, which we have presented as the first
form, the confusion of image and meaning. But only on the side. The
bound consciousness is entirely and absolutely serious about its confu-
sion; but now we are talking about free consciousness, which, through
the transference of its own soul into an object, is—how should I put
it?—half-serious, only wavering seriousness, serious only in moments
of the aesthetic mood. With myth, we have distinguished poetic belief
from such belief that is ready to assert what it believes with prosaic
earnestness and mistakes imaginative poetry for history. Here we are
also simply talking about poetic belief. I have (Critical Path, New Series,
Issue 5, p. 138, 141) called the freedom from deception, which persists
in this form in the midst of deception, a reservation [Vorbehalten]: the
distinction between image and meaning, the insight into the link as a
merely symbolic one remains reserved. This term might serve as the
most suitable makeshift.
Here we must again remember the myth. What we are considering
now is the intermediate form of the symbolic, indeed we are standing at
its very root. Myth rests on the entry of a human soul into something
impersonal, but religious consciousness, to which myth belongs, imme-
diately takes another path. Religious consciousness wants to explain
The Symbol 431
all of existence; thus, the self that is projected into natural phenomena
becomes for it an infinitely greater, divine self. Though in human form,
the god is for religious consciousness simply a living other, external to
and high above it. The imagination of this consciousness then contin-
ues to poeticize it and thus creates a supernatural story, the myth. The
act of lending the soul [Seelenleihung] remains a necessary and distinc-
tive trait of humanity, even when it has long since outgrown the myth.
But now to what we call reservation [Vorbehalt]. So then, too, the self
that is attributed to impersonal nature does not become a godhead.
For that reason, this self is not poeticized further and it gives rise to no
myths—it perhaps gives rise to something similar to myth, but this does
not belong in the present context, but rather in one concerning decep-
tion-free, light symbolism.
How should we describe the act in question here? Karl Köstlin has
already called it symbolism of form [Formsymbolik], but we should find
a term that also reveals the intimacy of the behavior. So, for instance:
intimate symbolism [die innige Symbolik]? This sounds too sentimen-
tal. Would a term from a dead language be preferable? So: personal
symbolism [die intime Symbolik]? The best option seems to come from
a work that Volkelt saved from undeserved neglect and from which he
extracted the word empathy [Einfühlung].3
Here we return to the commendable treatment of the symbol con-
cept, which I already called attention to in the opening. As already men-
tioned, Volkelt goes to work critically. Along with Robert Zimmerman,
he leads the way as the main proponent of formalist aesthetics because
he proceeds from the very true premise that the decision about the right-
ness or wrongness of its principles rests with the symbol concept. We
simply reference the assessment that Robert Zimmermann’s extremely
forced conception of this term experiences with Volkert. From there,
Volkert first goes back to Hegel. As we know, Hegel initially uses the
symbol in the first of the meanings previously mentioned, and traces it
through the forms that it assumed in the natural religions of the Per-
sians, Indians, and Egyptians. This is a particularly thoughtful section
of Hegel’s Aesthetics. He shows how the still darkly incubating spirit
[Geist], searching for light across the world-riddle [Welträthsel], and
struggling blindly to free itself from nature, cannot find the answer in
the image of man, but rather in abstract general determinants (power,
becoming, passing away, etc., higher as well as individual ethical con-
cepts that it has in mind). It is merely comparing, yet not aware of its
simple comparing and attaches to an impersonal thing. A blind explor-
ing and searching changes and reshapes the given form of nature, mul-
tiplies organs, and drives the masses into the monstrous, and, in the
process, raises itself halfway to the mythical, that is, to the beholding of
the mystery of the world in the form of the person. Yet, at the same time,
it lingers in the symbol and connects human body and animal body.
But now a disturbing combination arises in Hegel, a cross between the
historical and the logical: for him, symbolism is an essentially historical

development, and yet still-enduring and existing art forms are included
in this category, even though they must be assigned to the doctrine of
the arts. The symbolic art form is mentioned in section one of the sec-
ond part of the system, which deals with the development of the ideal
into the special forms of the beauty of art [Formen des Kunstschönen].
Unconscious symbolism (Persians, Indians, Egyptians) is presented in
the first chapter of that section, “Symbolism of the Sublime” (Indian
and Mohammedan poetry, Christian mysticism, Jewish monotheism) in
the second, and in the third chapter titled “Conscious Symbolism of the
Comparative Art Form,” poetic forms that have always existed and will
continue to exist as long as there is literature (fable, parable, etc.) find

their place, as if they were only part of history. Once again, a difficulty
arises in the major classification of the arts, namely, with architecture.
Its character in the Orient and in Egypt was a darkly symbolic search-
ing. But such searching (Part 2, p. 257) is expressed by this art in gen-
eral (because of the abstractness of its forms). Indeed, all architecture
has a symbolic character, albeit in one sense with the Orientals, and in
another with the Greeks and in all styles that followed. According to
Hegel, Oriental architecture was darkly symbolic in a particular sense
because it wanted to speak independently. Greek architecture becomes
clear because it only wants to serve (so that inside, in the form of the
god, the purpose of the whole is expressed). Yet this was also symbolic,
only in a different, more general sense. In which sense?—this leads to
the point. In addition to the unfree, dark symbol, Hegel knows about
the light symbol, as the aforementioned section “Conscious Symbolism
of the Comparative Art Form” proves. But he knows only these two
forms, not the intermediate one, where we now stand: the symbolism of
“empathy” [Einfühlung]. Had he this key, the sense in which abstract
architectural forms, lines, surfaces, etc.,—after they are no longer darkly
symbolic in the sense of wanting to speak for themselves [Fürsichspre-
chenwollen] as in the Orient, but rather once the clear sculpture-image
of the god and the liturgy inside the building dictate their final forms—
still remain inherently symbolic would not have remained unexplained.
What is more, we need not think about the mystical-dogmatic number
symbolism as it was applied to the Gothic, just about the act through
which the beholder puts himself in the position of the inanimate, as
though he were therein himself with his vital force and soul, and could
move, lift, float up and down, and expand in width. In short, we must
simply keep in mind the act of empathizing [Act der Einfühlung].
Like I said, I did not previously recognize this form of symbolism
in its determinacy, but I later filled in the gap. Volkelt approves of this
development, but he challenges me on two points. The first one has
already been discussed: it is the question whether and in which case the
mythical could also be called symbolic. The second concerns the ques-
tion whether real representation in art could also be called symbolic
The Symbol 433
under certain conditions. This point does not belong here, however; it
would disturb the order if I were to respond to it here.
Karl Köstlin’s view on this is discussed. His subtle observations
about mood-lending symbolism—about the psychological effect of light
and color, but particularly of sounds—are given due recognition. It will
be shown, however, that the inner connection—the actual tie that the
subject weaves between the object and the act of psychological lend-
ing—first requires a more detailed analysis. Secondly, it will be shown
that Köstlin has not considered the consequence that results from intro-
ducing this form into aesthetics: namely, for the principle itself, for the
fundamental concept of the beautiful. At the very outset we said that
the decision about whether or not the formalist school is right rests with
the symbol concept. If the inanimate is thus animated through empathy
[Einfühlung], it can be concluded that empathy also extends to what
this school calls pure form [die reine Form]. Köstlin does not reach
this conclusion, and, because he recognizes the act of symbolization
[Symbolisierungsact], he slides into a dualism: two worlds of the beau-
tiful; the one is expressive, the other is mere form. We will come back
to this. The first shortcoming in Köstlin’s thoughtful remarks about
symbolic form [Formsymbolik], namely, the omission of a more precise
analysis, also results in the lack of a clear distinction between what
we call Einfühlung and so-called associative representation [associative
Vorstellung]. The latter is a more external operation; one can admit it
and yet insist on formalism. Had Köstlin engaged in this closer analysis
and, as a result, made this distinction, it probably would have shaken
his dualistic standpoint.
The analysis, which was lacking until then, is carried out in the
work from which we have taken the name Einfühlung for the deeper
form: “Das optische Formgefühl: Ein Beitrag zur Ästhetik” [“The Opti-
cal Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics”] by Robert Vischer
(1873). In the act in question, the gathering [Beiziehung] of accompa-
nying representations [Vorstellungen]—and this is, as the name already
suggests, the association—converges into one through an incomparably
more intimate and initially imperceptible process. It produces a summa-
tion. It has long been recognized that the beautiful is in no way some-
thing simple like a chemical element. The beautiful, that is, the act, the
contract between subject and object, through which what we call the
beautiful or beauty emerges, is an interpenetration [Ineinander] of mul-
tiple acts. Thus, one of its main forms, the transference of the soul from
the subject into an inanimate object, will be such an interpenetration,
a summation, and analysis must reveal how a more intimate process
of inscribing inner life in the given object differs from a more superfi-
cial one. We will get to know this second process (the merely associa-
tive) more thoroughly, and examples will show its difference from the
first process more precisely, if we follow the author’s analysis. Volkelt
r eproduces the same, and we could reference his rendition if there were
not remarks to add on at certain points.
First, we must mention additional precursors, to whom Robert Vis-
cher owes closer inspiration, as he says in the preface. These are Völker:
Analyse und Symbolik: Hypothesen aus der Formenwelt [Analysis and
Symbolism: Hypotheses from the World of Form] (1861), a “thought-
ful” work in spite of a certain lack of more focused abstraction, and
Scherner: Das Leben des Traums [The Life of the Dream] (1861). He
extracted fruitful seeds for the further development of thought from the
latter work, especially in relation to the symbolic in the act in question,
and to the difference between the mere associative imagination [asso-
ciative Vorstellung] and direct transference [Versetzung]. This work

should not be absolved from the admixture of the fantastic and from
the overestimation of dream life that flows from it, yet it cultivates deep
thought and draws distinctions from rich observation, for which psy-
chology must be grateful (compare my report on Volkelt’s work: Die
Traumphantasie [The Fantasy of Dreams], in Altes und Neues [Old and
New] Issue 1, pp. 189–190). Robert Vischer was not yet acquainted
with Hermann Lotze’s profound and subtle glimpse into the micro-
cosm and the history of aesthetics when he wrote his study (see the
explanatory note in the preface, p. VII). Lotze, like we ourselves, closely
observes that our soul, with its physical feeling and bodily perception,
extends its forms and movements into the object. Robert Vischer con-
curs completely with Lotze in his way of thinking, but his specific task
implies that he systematically classifies, further develops, and utilizes
what Lotze—led by his own, broader task—disperses at various places
and does not pursue to its consequences. Volkelt groups Lotze together
with Robert Vischer in Chapter 5 of his work.
As the first, general distinction in the coalescence, the bundle of acts
that flows together into one act, Robert Vischer accurately postulates an
initial sensing [empfindend] and then a feeling [fühlend] behavior. The
former is already relatively psychological, but the latter is psychologi-
cally intensified and involves the projection of the self and its contents
into the object. It is imperative to further differentiate within this main
distinction, however. For this purpose, Robert Vischer takes his radical
basis of classification from the physiological opposition of sensory and
motor neural stimuli. This opposition applies to both areas of the main
division.
It is presupposed that mere seeing [Sehen], through which the eye
absorbs the image of the object, intensifies itself as looking [Schauen].
In the latter act, the muscles of the eyes, which are more intensely active,
are already primed for deeper assessment so that the gaze follows
the dimensions and again synthesizes them into a totality.—We must
already discern a double in this more active behavior: either the eye
follows the outlines linearly, just as whenever one traces them with the
fingertip, and thus behaves graphically, or it grasps the complete form
The Symbol 435
in the illuminated planes, swellings, recesses, and all pathways, and

thus remodels the forms more plastically [plastisch nachmodellirend].
There is a difference between looking more at the contours of a moun-
tain or at its formations within its outlines; this distinction becomes
clearer when one compares silhouette and relief. Both things result in an
incomparably more sharply segmented and unified image, and thus, a
more conscious image than what normal seeing yields. There is no artist
without this kind of vision. Think of the intrinsic connection between
seeing [Sehen] and touching [Tasten]. Neither graspable form nor rela-
tions of distance can be recognized without the aid of the latter. If the
actually touching hand [die wirklich tastende Hand] assisted the eye,
then it continues to have an effect in its activity as inner feeling [inneres

Tasten]. The artist’s eye accomplishes this far more keenly than the ordi-
nary eye; hence, the artist knows how to represent the formations of a
mountain and the shapes of a head from memory much more precisely
than the non-artist.
Now we shall consider sensation [Empfindung] and how it accompa-
nies this act of vision. We cannot speak of a charmless, indifferent view
in this context; here it is a matter of emphatic sensation, of pleasure and
displeasure. Pleasant sensation [angenehme Empfindung] will accom-
pany stimuli that are adequate for the nerve, i.e. that cause habitual and
simple movements; unpleasant sensation [unangenehme Empfindung]
will arise with stimuli that compel it to inadequate, i.e. unusual, difficult
movements. A third can also take place: first inadequate or unpleasant
sensation, and then, elevated through the contrast, adequate, pleasant
sensation.—Sensation manifests itself differently depending on whether
the sensory nerve function or the motor nerve function dominates; the
difference is only relative, yet essential. The author calls the behavior
and condition with sensory stimuli “initial sensation” [Zuempfindung]
and with motor stimuli “responsive sensation” [Nachempfindung].4 A
more detailed explanation will follow.
Light is presupposed in all seeing and gazing, and along with light,
color. It relies on airwaves, and thus, on movement. Pleasant or unpleas-
ant sensation depends on whether or not the oscillations of the optic
nerves are uniformly stimulated, on whether they thereby move com-
fortably or uncomfortably. The eye makes demands, as we know; it
demands the wholeness of colors and therefore supplements that which
is missing whenever wholeness is absent and creates responsive colors
[Nachfarben].
We shall add the body in its determinacy and its solid forms; here
we are likewise concerned with adequate or inadequate nerve func-
tions and how they ensue from the muscle movements of the eye. For
example, the body is comfortable with horizontal planes because our
eyes are positioned horizontally. The vertical disagrees with this con-
struction in that it necessitates a more complicated function. However,
the more strained operation carries a power stimulus [Kraftreiz], and,
depending on the combination, this seems soothing. Roundness has

a pleasant effect because it corresponds to the roundness of the eye.
(This is admittedly too bold a proposition; Volkelt denies it and instead
justifiably searches for the reason behind the pleasant sensation in the
curvedness of the movement (pp. 60–61).—The repetition of a specific
form in the same intervals, especially if it is interrupted through partial
forms [Theilformen] that methodically appear in between, brings with
it “the blissful whole sensation of a harmonic succession of felicitous
movements of the self.” This is the pleasure of the rhythmic.
The author goes into the laws of regularity, symmetry, and pro-
portion here, and alludes to Zeising’s theory of the Golden Ratio. In
accordance with the ongoing idea, he postulates that here it is not a

matter of the sense of sight alone, but rather of a sensation in the whole
body. If we do not allow the senses to be isolated at all, blue feels cold
and yellow feels warm. The same occurs with forms: “In rooms with
low ceilings our whole body feels the sensation of weight and pressure;
walls that have become crooked with age can offend our basic sense of
physical stability.” I cite the following as an example of such sympathy
[Mitempfindung] in the whole body: a child was placed before a tall,
moveable mirror. As the child looked into it, it was quickly moved and
he fell over.—“In truth there is no strict localization in the body; every
emphatic sensation thus ultimately leads to either an enhancement or
a weakening of the general vital sensation [Vitalempfindung].” The
example elucidates how these processes react to the difference between
initial sensation [Zuempfindung] and responsive sensation [Nachemp-
findung]. The first takes place if the object is regarded more as a unity
of light and colors, since here the sensory neural stimuli predominate.
These, too, have a disposition to movement [Bewegungscharakter],
but only relatively in contrast to the motor neural stimuli, which pre-
vail when the eye follows the pathways of form: the latter type or side
of perception shall be called responsive sensation. The author distin-
guishes empathetic sensation [Einempfindung] from these two and, by
this term, he means the simple, central transference into the object and
its plastic formation: e.g., the sensation of a spherical shape, of every
inorganic natural form as such.
This whole behavior is but the first level, the much more purely sen-
suous and only relatively psychological level. If the more substantial
level should emerge, then a higher factor, the imagination [Phantasie],
must join in. It is the imagination that the author first introduces in
this passage as the mental act that conditions all others,—not yet in its
fuller, creative action, at first simply as fancy [Einbildung] or “pictorial
representation” [Bildvorstellung]. Through it, an image of the object
remains internally even in the absence of the object; for his purpose
the author proceeds without delay to a curious combination of two
types of representations [Vorstellungen] as they appear in dreams. The
one is the object-representation [Objectsvorstellung], the other the
The Symbol 437
self-representation [Selbstvorstellung], i.e. here: the representation of

my own body. On the occasion of a bodily stimulus, the dream readily
confuses object-representation and subject-representation in a way that
is symbolically confounding. Scherner’s work The Life of the Dream
addresses this sensation [Empfindung] in the dream is generally known
to be neither external nor internal, i.e. entirely contained in the stimuli
originating in one’s own body. From sensations these stimuli become
representations [Vorstellungen]; they are not yet images of the thing
itself [Bildern der Sache selbst], but rather of an object that bears some
resemblance to the body and the organs, whose present condition
brought about a stimulus. The whole body is frequently represented
as a house. With congestion and headaches, the vision of a blaze in

the upper floor appears; if my head hangs over the side of the bed dur-
ing sleep, I dream about an oriel window that overhangs dangerously.
It is especially interesting to dream while having a toothache, which
Scherner invokes: the dreamer has in mind a semicircular room in a
mill, in which sacks are arranged in a semicircle. One of the sacks is
torn: an image of the oral cavity, the teeth, and the damaged tooth caus-
ing the pain. An overstuffed stomach is reflected in the image of a pipe
or another container that is crammed full. Motor stimuli, e.g. stoppages
in the bloodstream, readily appear as images of an alarming hindrance
in activities, as everyone knows. Here, self-representation [Selbstvorstel-
lung] occurs, i.e. the dreamer does not represent a part of the inside of
his body symbolically, but rather represents his whole person unsym-
bolically. But the symbolic is attributed to situations with a surrounding
area: climbing stairs, putting on clothes, wanting to fight and not being
able to, and the like. Yet sometimes a person other than the one who is
inhibited is represented, and the image becomes objective: I see some-
one plummet from a tower, falling stars, and the like.—Thus, a transpo-
sition occurs, through which I slide my sensing self into an unfamiliar
body as into a frock. The author says that similar things also happen
while awake in conditions of half-conscious immersion in thought. It
must be noted that this happens very rarely. We can perhaps only say:
we find an analogy of symbolic form [Formsymbolik] in the dream of
physical stimuli [Leibreiztraum] for what occurs during waking hours.
The dream imagination [Traumphantasie] takes an image from the
impersonal world (from the memory’s pictures left behind) and uses
it as a symbol of the dreamer’s body and organs, and yet the dreamer
himself is completely unaware of this disguise. The task, however, is
to explain a waking act that is probably involuntary but not entirely
so, one that is plainly unconscious and possibly inevitable, yet not so
simply bound, an act which leaves the external world and puts the soul
and its mood into it. In waking life, there is still an area of involuntary
symbolism [unwillkürliche Symbolik], whose analogy with this act is a
closer one, and from which we can gain more insight into the present
topic than we can from the dark dream realm. I indicate here in advance
that we will investigate a work that covers this area later on.—We now
return to the author’s path. He does not ignore the fact that the play
of representations [Vorstellungen] in the dream is just the faculty of
fancy [Einbildungskraft]. Sensation has now expanded and deepened
since it links itself to a self-generated image, but this dark linkage is not
yet what we call imagination [Phantasie], with the familiar distinction
assumed whenever the deeper act in question should occur. This act
implements a soulful, non-arbitrary, and free (and yet conforming to
natural law) transformation into an unfamiliar guise.
The spirit world [Geistwelt] must appear first. This particular inves-
tigation is not concerned with showing its coming-into-being. It will be
left to psychology and ethics to explain how the individual immerses

himself in this world, strives for spiritual being, and not only perceives
himself, but thinks as a self, and how this thought resonates as self-con-
sciousness [Selbstgefühl] through the echo within, but also how, by
thinking of the whole and breaking self-will out of its own egotistical
aloofness, self-consciousness expands, softens, and warms, becoming
species-consciousness [Gattungsgefühl]. Only now will it be possible
to put oneself in the place of other individuals and other things—what
we shall call real soul contact [Seelencontact] or disposition [Gemüth].
In this thawed emotional life, pleasure and displeasure are now called
mood, psychological mood [seelische Stimmung]. Having said this, we
must not think only of ideal, ethical values. Omitting the world of pas-
sions would yield too narrow a viewpoint, but its sting is lost through
the form-act in question. We must remember Lotze again here, as
Volkelt does not fail to do. In general, Lotze comprehends the beautiful
too directly from the viewpoint of the good, as well as in the realm of
form symbolism. Ethical values, moral will, and love are undoubtedly
involved, albeit indirectly, as rising to the beautiful and bound, wilder
sentiments of the soul no less so. But this occurs in a way that, as I said
before, the sting, the pathological nature is removed from them, and,
moreover, a development takes place in an aesthetic whole, through
which they are referred to as mere moments.―We return to the form-
act as such, the lighter act, and how it is executed while awake, when the
control of reality already keeps watch over the image life of the mind.
If the self, imbued with substance, substitutes itself [sich unterschieben]
for the figures of the inanimate world, then it is now a personality that
projects itself with its content. Now empathetic sensation [Einempfind-
ung] has become empathy [Einfühlung]. In addition, Robert Vischer
provided a supplement in the journal: Die Literatur [Literature] (Editor
Wislicenus), “Der ästhetische Act und die reine Form” [“The Aesthetic
Act and Pure Form”] (Nr. 29 July 1874), in which self-representation
[Selbstvorstellung], as it combines with object-representation [Objekt-
vorstellung] in this act, is qualified as follows: the self that empathizes
with an object conceives of itself as freer, more liberated from matter,
and more perfect than it is in reality. This being can swim, float, fly, soar,
The Symbol 439
coil, spread out, contract, reach high and far, and metamorphose like
a protean in ways that no human body can. Its feelings, its passions,
its wants and abilities grow ad infinitum. This is surely an appropriate
addition; the subject takes this lifting of its barriers from the act itself:
light, fire, air, water, earth, plant, and animal lend him their qualities,
powers, and formations, and lend the works of human hands their lines,
volumes, and extensions.
We have already used the term Einfühlung for the totality of this
deeper act of the soul and would like to leave it at that for the sake
of simplicity. The author himself differentiates three types of behav-
ior understood in this totality and calls only one of these Einfühlung.
He again, and in good order, implements the motif of distinction—sen-

sory and motor—and thus the classification results: attentive feeling
[Anfühlung] or immediate feeling [Zufühlung], and responsive feeling
[Nachfühlung] and empathy [Einfühlung]. In relation to the object, the
first two move more from the outside to the inside, while Einfühlung
comprehends the object from the inside to the outside, puts itself cen-
trally in the position of the same, and slips the feeling self into its forms
as into a frock, or rather as into one’s own body. As the psychologi-
cally deepened immediate sensation [Zuempfindung], immediate feeling
[Zufühlung], like the former, comes to life in the manifestations of light
and colors in particular. I recall the “ominous lightning” (Goethe); con-
sider further moonlight, the redness of a sunset, lightning, chiaroscuro,
the blue of the sea, and how the mood, which they symbolically excite,
comes toward us so that we attribute the name of our mood to the
objective appearance: yearning, melancholy, mild, hopeful, angry, wild,
brooding, etc. Goethe already considered colors from this viewpoint:
“the sensual-moral effect of colors” [“sinnlich sittliche Wirkung der
Farben”]. Aesthetics must elaborate on this; it suffices here to remem-
ber how we call blue cold and yellow and red warm as if these were
their moods. By contrast, responsive feeling [Nachfühlung], as deepened
psychological responsive sensation [Nachempfindung], moves like the
latter along the contours and borders of an object with the pleasure of
felicitous self-motion. These contours and borders appear to flow, run,
wind, curve, and I with them; with a moving object such as a wave or
a bird, we swing, plummet, climb, spring, and fly. But real, total projec-
tion [Hineinversetzung] into the object is only now called Einfühlung;
only now do I reside in the object with my whole mood. I wrap its forms
around me and its movements are mine.
I thunderously roll myself in a cloud, proudly tower in a fir tree,

jubilantly boast and rise up in the wave. I am likewise the many
forms of the breakwater, which strikes and lashes at the cliff, and
at the same moment the cliff, which defies the surge. I nod and
beckon spring, which I am again, in a wavering flower.
How easily we could continue with examples: I sadly bow over the
stream with the willow tree, I defiantly stretch myself up with the
cliffs, I ascend with the missile, I angrily and unflinchingly burst forth
with the shot (“The cannons have their bowels full of wrath” Shake-
speare).—Since this act attains its actual depth and power in the third
form, Einfühlung, it will be permissible to refer to the entire act as such.
The word Einfühlung then acquires a broader and a narrower sense; it
denotes the entire act in the broader sense and the most intense of its
forms in the narrower sense.
Before we proceed with the author, it is necessary to introduce the
work, whose importance I mentioned above without citing it. I said that
in waking life there is a sphere of involuntary symbolism [unwillkürli-

che Symbolik], from which we can gain more insight into the present
question than we can from the dark realm of dreams. The text I am
thinking of is Mimik und Physiognomik [Mimic and Physiognomy]
by Theodor Piderit (second, revised edition 1886), the work of a keen
observer and pragmatic thinker, who remains in the bright world of
waking life and yet illuminates an unknown side of the same with the
light we require. He posits the following as the fundamental theorem
of imitation [Mimik]: since every representation [Vorstellung] seems
objective to the mind, the mimetic muscular movements induced by the
arousal of the imagination [Vorstellungserregungen] refer to imaginary
objects. The muscular movements are pleasant or unpleasant, depending
on whether the stimuli function harmoniously or inharmoniously. The
result is that, to the mind, pleasant or unpleasant representations [Vor-
stellungen] appear to be pleasant or unpleasant objects. In this regard,
the author recalls that language has no terms for pleasant [angenehm] or
unpleasant [unangenehm] mental representations other than those that
have been taken from pleasant and unpleasant sensory impressions (bit-
ter, sweet, and others). The second fundamental theorem reads: mimetic
muscular movements caused by pleasant or unpleasant representations
refer to harmonious (pleasant) or inharmonious (unpleasant) sensory
impressions. In other words, mimetic muscular movements brought
about by pleasant representations are such that the intake of harmo-
nious sensory impressions should be facilitated and supported; those
generated by unpleasant representations are such that the intake of
inharmonious sensory impressions should be complicated and hindered.
We will now go through the movements of the facial muscles ana-
tomically and call attention to their meaning from this standpoint. Illus-
trations assist us in this endeavor. We will single out individual ones for
our purpose. The theorem transfers into physiognomy; physiognomic
qualities (with limitations, of course) should be seen as mimetic ones
that have become permanent.
It appears that the bond between imaginary sensory impressions and
mental representations underlying mimetic expression is a symbolic
one, but a profoundly symbolic one, since the representation of the
The Symbol 441
similar becomes immediately active. Mental phenomena [Geistiges] are

actually felt physically or conversely; the leading basic principle would
not be as extraordinarily fruitful for aesthetics as it really is if it did not
lead much further than the association of parallel-running representa-
tions also recognized by the formalists.
Take a closer look at what has been gained therewith. Some kind
of mental, psychological representation accompanied by pleasure or
displeasure prompts me to express it spontaneously without any reflec-
tion through miens, which actually serve to express an analogous phys-
ical sensation. I unfurrow my brow when experiencing serene mental
images [Vorstellungen] as with sensuous well-being, I wrinkle my fore-
head in the case of upsetting mental images and strained thought as

with unpleasant facial expressions, I cry at the thought of painful men-
tal images as with physical pain. This is a subjective process, a move-
ment from the inside to the outside. The area of aesthetics in question
is something entirely different at first; it concerns the perception of the
inanimate part of the surrounding world: an objective behavior for the
time being. But now further: in this area, phenomena befall me that are
akin to those mimetic ones in the subjective sphere. An overcast sky
reminds us of a furrowed brow; a cloudless sky, of a smooth forehead;
alternation between the shining and hiding of the sun, of blinking; rain,
of tears; lightning, of a darting flash of anger. If I already have a nat-
ural inclination to bring my soul into the outside world, then I have
already jumped to the unconscious conclusion that a sinister, friendly,
shy (blinking), grieving, threatening soul faces me,—a conclusion from
the outside to the inside. It was an objective process, an objective gazing
[Schauen], but it becomes subjective. I rediscover a soul like mine, that
is, myself, behind the exterior—as an eternal, heighted self, though not
with the gods as in the myth. An inversion: imitation of its inner con-
dition = A, mien as symbolic expression of it = B. Then, in a seemingly
very different behavior, the view of nature: a manifestation of forms
and colors in the exterior world = A, behind it, transferred from me:
a soul and its mood = B. But precisely because these forms and colors
appear to be the expression of the soul and its mood, as with facial
expressions, this soul—since the subject of the expression is the first
and the expression is the second—now becomes A and the expression
becomes B as in the aforementioned first, subjective process. Under-
standing can be facilitated further if one imagines a second subject, an
observer, while initially ignoring the external nature again to look at the
subject and its miens. This observer infers the mood of the first subject
from the smoothness of the brow and so on. In the symbolic conception
of nature, nature becomes what is here the examined subject. Highly
remarkable: subject and its object, nature,—but both, like two individ-
uals, in which one finds itself in the other—and hereby—: a human, a
spiritual creature, and across from him, inanimate nature,—yet both are
one being, the human finding himself—perhaps not merely semblance
[Schein]? At this point, it is difficult not to respond to the question of

pantheism already touched on in the preceding analysis, particularly to
Karl Christian Planck’s main idea, but we must forego this in the pres-
ent context. It belongs at the end.
If we are not to greatly exceed the scope of this single article, we
must break off the extensive treatment here. Likewise, we cannot pursue
Robert Vischer’s work further, even though it ties a series of substantial
ideas to the analysis of the symbolic act. It proceeds to the creation of
myth and the inscription of ethical-political meaning in the myths of
nature, and shows how the religious, ideal worldview develops in con-
nection with Einfühlung. Then it follows the imagination [Phantasie]
in artistic activity, takes up the question of the imitation of nature and

idealization, and, for the purpose of answering this question in depth,
considers the organization of the artistic spirit [Künstlergeist]. From
this focal point, the issue is whether it is possible to tackle the ques-
tions about the individual style of the lone artist and the opposition
of so-called realistic and idealistic styles in order to clear and settle the
confusion surrounding them. It seems to me that the work developed
from the concept of Einfühlung with the right vision, which emerges
from the concept like a fruitful seed. Vision [Blick]: this will be the
appropriate name for it; having vision is, after all, the first condition for
all theories of the beautiful and art.
In brief, I will provide an overview of the subject matter worth
addressing further.
For the middle form of symbolism—the dark-light, bound-free
form—it would first be especially important to take up the domain of
sound, and herewith the question of the essence of music. I mention
Eduard von Hartmann’s treatment in “Zur Aesthetik der Tonkunst [On
the Aesthetics of the Musical Arts],” which cursorily extracts from the
paragraphs on the essence of the musical arts in my Aesthetics what I
later, though already in 1873 in the Critical Path (New Series Issue 5,
143–144), said about symbolism in the world of sound. Hartmann does
not quote these sections, and he brings symbolism into the discussion
of Lazarus’ view (“Psychologische Analyse der Auffassung der Musik
[Psychological Analysis of the Conception of Music],” in Volume 3 of
the work Das Leben der Seele [The Life of the Soul]), as if he were
the first to apply this concept to music. I repeat here only the proposi-
tion that concluded my comments there: music is the acoustic sign lan-
guage of feeling [akustische Gebärdensprache des Gefühls], the gesture
[Gebärde] is also nothing other than a symbolism of mental acts and so
forth.—It is also worth expanding on how the emotional tone accom-
panies the word in language in order to illustrate the symbolic through
music. An older work is of importance here: Die Melodie der Sprache
in ihrer Anwendung besonders auf das Lied und die Oper [The Melody
of Speech in Its Application Especially to the Song and the Opera] by L.
Köhler 1853. Among new works, I mention Dr. Heinrich Adolf K östlin:
The Symbol 443
Die Tonkunst: Einführung in die Aesthetik der Musik [The Musical

Arts: Introduction to the Aesthetics of Music] (1879). He is a strict
formalist, but admits that “the movement of notes has something anal-
ogous to the mood of the imagination,” that it “reminds” us of these;
he also uses the word allegory [Gleichnis], albeit with the qualification
“at best.” Music is “at best” an allegory, but never the sufficient expres-
sion of the mood. What he acknowledges with these words can only be
examined and developed more precisely; he hereby concedes everything
that he disputes in his nonetheless sensitive work.
At this stage, the difference between Einfühlung and mere associa-
tive representation [associative Vorstellung] should be examined more
closely. I have already mentioned that Robert Vischer is the first to have
drawn this distinction with precision. The association is secondary; the
linked mental image attracts something else and places it next to the
given mental image. With the color red, blood and anger come to mind;
with the color green, the sprouting vegetation of spring. Italy crosses
my mind when I see an orange, and with gold and marble, their value;
with the moon, I think perhaps of lovers: all of this is merely accom-
panying memory [begleitende Erinnerung], not Einfühlung. But these
auxiliary mental images [Nebenvorstellungen] associate closely with it
and considerably increase the summation that constitutes the aesthetic
act. In his evaluation of Fechner, Volkelt investigates this side with the
thoroughness that it requires.
Fechner admits that half of aesthetics depends on association. More
than half depends on Einfühlung. The examination must now proceed
up to the formalists’ actual fortress and more precisely contemplate
a main point, which has not been emphasized strongly enough hith-
erto and which I indeed took up yet did not exhaust in Critical Path
(loc. cit. p. 144 ff.). Can the delight in pure forms, the mathematically
determined harmonic proportions also be explained symbolically? Met-
rics and music are all about lines, planes, geometric forms, regularity,
symmetry, proportion, temporal and numerical orders. According to
Fechner, this is the “half” of aesthetics that remains if half of the same
depends on the association. The question is how things stand if one
distinguishes intimate symbolism, i.e. Einfühlung, from association and
yet invokes Einfühlung. Formalism will say: there is a remainder that
does not merge into Einfühlung; of all concrete formations on which it
is to be employed, the pure relationships, the harmonic orders must be
distinguished as such, and there is nothing to symbolize there. I can only
present my conviction without proof here: even this remainder, which
does not seem to merge into symbolism, opens itself to symbolism.
These are relations of unity in multiplicity. How can unity in multiplic-
ity please aesthetically? In itself, it is something purely abstract, which,
as such, leaves the soul, psychological sensuousness, ice-cold. If the soul
feels something thereby, namely, desire, aesthetic desire, it can only be
because the soul itself, with its nerves and entire body, is a unity in
multiplicity, and it rediscovers itself where it finds the same. Counting,

calculating, and measuring and feeling aesthetically [Ästhetischfühlen]
are once and for all two different things. That is to say: the beautiful
contains one side that is mathematically determinable in one part of the
arts (but no longer determinable in the greater part) and has a support
that is apparently purely abstract and yet likewise aestheticized through
a specific kind of Einfühlung—Einfühlung of the human being as a mul-
tiplicity ordered into unity. The first shepherd to discover a chord was
offered much more from the relation of tones than an abstract order:
a kind of compliance or good order of the soul. Karl Köstlin adhered
to his dualism in a later publication: Ueber den Schönheitsbegriff [On
the Concept of the Beautiful]. He maintains that there are two kinds
of beauty: beauty that pleases through the expression of life and the
soul, and beauty that only pleases through regularity and harmony (also
grandeur). He gives the example of a building site, on which, next to
raw material, one sees other material that has already been formed. In
contradistinction to the former, the latter simply delights. I cite Goethe’s
splendid poem “Der Wanderer” [“The Wanderer”] in response. The
wanderer sees an architrave lying in the bushes near a rustic cottage
and calls out: “Not by thee these stones were joined, Nature, who so
freely scattered!”5 Man has made this form and placed inside it the
good order within himself; he finds the human therein.—We are faced
with a fundamental question. Should aesthetics be developed from one
principle or two? After everything that has been stated, we can call
the principles harmony [Harmonik] and imitation [Mimik]. Imitation
is partly indirect (the symbolic in the case of an inanimate object) and
partly direct (in the case of an animate object). Although there is no
need for symbolic lending, direct imitation does not discover its object
aesthetically; an act of the imagination is required through which the
soul appears in the object more perfectly. Is the establishment of har-
mony as pure form and this act, which either animates symbolically or
does so in a higher form without a symbol, one act or two? Köstlin will
say: two, and we will say: one. The beautiful is unified harmony and
imitation in the sense that “unified” expresses real, living unity because
(symbolic) imitation also underlies harmony, only in its own manner
that is different from imitation in the case of concrete shape and mean-
ingfully formative abstract orders. One realizes this with meter, for
example: it must be clearly distinguished from the poetic content of
words, which it brings under control, and yet it expresses mood in itself,
the pace of mood. Robert Vischer’s work, likewise the aforementioned
journal essay and recently the studies in art history also contain fruitful
thoughts about this, which we can no longer go into here.
Hitherto, we first discussed the bound, dark symbol, whereby the
myth also had to come up for discussion, then the middle form, in
which bondage and darkness connects with freedom and brightness in
the manner described. We shall now cross over to the third form, the
The Symbol 445
simply light and free symbol. The awareness that image and meaning
are only connected through one tertium comparationis is not merely
reserved here, but rather presently in mind. Think about an anchor,
a palm tree, an olive branch, an eagle, a bundle of arrows, and about
acts like giving bread and salt or cutting a tablecloth (Count Eberhard)
and their familiar meanings. Aesthetic value is not excluded because an
image is still available, but it is limited to a moderate amount because
the brightness is essentially clarity of mind, awareness of purposiveness
[Zweckmässigkeit]: the latter is true only if the tertium is reasonably
chosen. Yet, if this is not the case, one is directed all the more to the
sphere of understanding [Verstandesgebiet] in order to seek, to ven-
ture a guess. The allegory now positions itself opposite to the myth.
An impersonal image is occasionally called allegorical, but it is more
correct to call only a personal image allegorical, be it simply arranged
or set into operation. The difference from the myth lies in the fact that
personification is an act of the imagination [Phantasie] purely in the
service of thought, like the selection of an impersonal image in the case
of the light, conscious symbol. Concerning the question of how these
two can win aesthetic vitality, of how allegory then becomes similar to
myth, I only briefly refer here to the remarks in Critical Path, Issue 5, p.
148, which admittedly require supplementation.
An important point is still overdue, which can only be mentioned at
this time although it pertains neither to the rational symbol, nor to the
allegory. In the work Goethe’s Faust: Neue Beiträge [Goethe’s Faust:
New Contributions], I attributed the predicate “symbolic” to direct,
actual artistic and poetic depiction, when the depiction is clear and gen-
erally meaningful, works out general human content with the energy
abiding in a realistic entity, and holds up as characteristic of all time (p.
123 ff.). Volkelt disagrees with this and finds it confusing (loc. cit. 32
ff.). I must adhere to my position. Goethe and Schiller are on my side
with their use of language, and they have found successors; the use of
language has arisen and can no longer be invalidated. We will always
call types such as Faust, Macbeth, Lear, and Richard III symbolic when-
ever we want to indicate how profoundly and universally true they are.
I have spoken of a certain tangible surplus of meaning in the image,
despite it being very clear, and I know of no better formulation even
now. It is not possible to go into detail here. We could cite and exam-
ine even more examples for this purpose; I have mentioned Valentin in
Faust as an example of a figure, who, although typical, should not be
called symbolic in such a broad sense of the word. Volkelt says I should
have subsumed Valentin under Schwertlein [sic.] along with Gretchen
and Marthe. This appears doubtful to me; if we choose the expression
“highly symbolic” [hochsymbolisch] for the symbolic in the present
sense, one will find my doubt justified.—Something dangerous lies in
this linguistic usage, however. A style that diminishes the energy and
determinacy of the individual for the sake of universality of meaning
can lean on this linguistic usage, make it a motto, and cover itself with
it. It is certainly with Goethe’s approval that Schiller calls Die natürliche
Tochter [The Natural Daughter] highly symbolic, a drama which is not,
as some have said, as smooth and cold as marble, but rather appears as
cold as marble because it is as smooth as marble.—Goethe’s growing
penchant for the real, pure allegory in old age is related to this.
An exhaustive treatment of the whole field of terms pertinent here
must also finally bring in the doctrine of tropes and figures. If we atten-
tively survey all forms encompassed by this doctrine, we get the follow-
ing result: all these forms amount to animating the physical world and
embodying the spiritual. These forms, in the variety of their expressions,
all stem from the urge to look inside the mind and nature, and thus,
together with all forms of the symbol and myth, they serve to present
the universe to the mind and imagination as one thing. Robert Vischer
pointed out how much can be extracted for this study from the work by
Karl Konrad Hense: Poetische Personification in griechischen Dichtun-
gen mit Berücksichtigung lateinischer Dichter und Shakespeare’s [Poetic
Personification in Greek Poetry with Reference to Latin Poets and to
Shakespeare] (1868).
Hermann Siebeck developed a proposition from my Aesthetics into
a leading basic concept for aesthetic intuition [ästhetische Anschauung]
as a whole in his work: Das Wesen der ästhetischen Anschauung: Psy-
chologische Untersuchungen zur Theorie des Schönen und der Kunst
[The Essence of Aesthetic Intuition: Psychological Examinations of
the Theory of the Beautiful and of Art] (1875). This fundamental idea
appears in §19 of the first part: the beautiful is personal and all preced-
ing levels signify that personality is nascent. (We can explain the second
part of this proposition from the context: impersonal nature already
announces the human.) Siebeck’s principle theorem regarding inani-
mate nature reads:
We are given aesthetic intuition when a sensuous thing acts in the

general form of the expression of personality; aesthetic intuition
extracts its natural (organic) character from the object and, by
perceiving the formal purposiveness of the exterior features, caus-
es the object to appear self-contained on account of its exterior
and as an analogon personalitatis that depicts a mood finding
expression in the external form.
Siebeck proceeds in his sophisticated investigation on a Herbartian

foundation and with a Herbartian method. Volkelt proves that, on the
basis of the dualistic viewpoint that here forms the foundation, we can-
not arrive at a concept of a truly animate gazing-into [Ineinsschauen]
the seemingly quite separate halves of the world. This raises the ques-
tion whether all of aesthetics could be built on another foundation as
the development and justification of the proposition: the beautiful is
The Symbol 447
personal. By “another foundation,” I understand the postulate of the

unity of nature and spirit, the all-encompassing unity [Alleinheit]. And
couldn’t aesthetics do the service of proving that this unity is more than
a postulate? Schelling described the beautiful as a document of the truth
of the unity of the ideal and real. If the imagination [Phantasie] sees the
human in everything, then imagination is not justified to begin with.
This is self-evident and has already been stated above, where it was
established that even the form we call Einfühlung is essentially only
symbolic. It is not the case, as it appeared to us there, that spirit and
nature are one; of course, a human does not actually look out at us
from the air, a cloud, a mountain, a cliff, or a plant. Yet the strong sem-
blance [Schein] would not be possible if everything impersonal and even

inorganic were not already a real preliminary stage of the spirit [Geist].
The doctrine of the symbol confirms Fichte’s proposition: “Art makes
the transcendental viewpoint the common one.” His transcendental
standpoint was subjective idealism. We can conceive of the unity of
the universe as something other than a physical reality, and still all the
more view art, aesthetic intuition [ästhetische Anschauung], and, above
all, the intimate form of symbolism, as the manifest appearance and
attestation of this unity. Volkelt also holds this view, as we can already
see from what was cited above. It is the basic principle throughout his
work, which I have not pursued in all of its parts, that the symbolizing
act of the soul is only properly understood as an emanation [Ausfluss]
and acknowledgement of the unity of the world [Welteinheit]. It would
be in the interest of this study to respond to the question of which met-
aphysical version of the same would be the most welcome in aesthetics.
I mentioned Karl Planck above, but our limits of scope demand closure.
Translator’s Notes
1. Friedrich Theodor Vischer uses the German term Ahnung

(apprehension; intuition; hunch) here, not the Kantian Anschauung,
which is usually translated into English as “intuition.”
2. The English translation of this passage from Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe’s epic poem Hermann und Dorothea is cited from
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hermann and Dorothea, trans. Ellen
Frothingham, The Harvard Classics, vol. 19, ed. Charles W. Eliot
(New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909), 395.
3. The German noun Einfühlung literally translates into “in-feeling”
or “feeling into” and refers to the manner in which a beholder
comprehends an artwork by projecting himself or herself into its
forms. The verb form sich einfühlen can be traced further back
to Johann Gottfried Herder and Novalis. Although Einfühlung is
usually translated as “empathy,” the English term that was introduced
by Edward Titchener in 1909, it is important to distinguish between
aesthetic empathy (Einfühlung) and the psychological sense of

empathy that implies the sharing of another individual’s perspective
or emotional state. In this translation of Vischer’s “Das Symbol,”
“empathy” always refers to Einfühlung or aesthetic empathy.
4. I have preserved the English translations of Robert Vischer’s terms
(Zuempfindung, Nachempfindung, Einempfindung, Anfühlung,
Zufühlung, and Nachfühlung) that are already familiar in the field
thanks to the work of Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios
Ikonomou in Robert Vischer, “On the Optical Sense of Form:
A Contribution to Aesthetics,” in Harry Francis Mallgrave and
Eleftherios Ikonomou (ed. and trans.), Empathy, Form, and Space:

Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893 (Santa Monica, CA:
Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994),
96–107.
5. The English translation of the original lines from Goethe’s poem
“Der Wanderer” are cited from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The
Wanderer,” in The Poems of Goethe Translated in the Original
Metres, trans. Edgar Alfred Bowring (Boston: Cassino, 1882), 247.
Orcid
Holly A. Yanacek http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9028-6177

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Art in Translation

ISSN: (Print) 1756-1310 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfat20

Friedrich Theodor Vischer & Holly A. Yanacek

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17561310.2015.1107314

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and Edgar Wind. His study of symbols is still relevant to conceptual

KEYWORDS: empathy, art and philosophy, aesthetics, art theory,

Introduction by Josh Ellenbogen (University of

The history of empathy theory in aesthetics currently enjoys a renais-

Because Vischer attempted to explicate relations between empathy

Finally, leaving aside authors directly informed by Vischer’s treatment,

1. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Kritik meiner Ästhetik” in Kritische

The Symbol by Friedrich Theodor Vischer

I remark in advance that the broad subject cannot be covered exten-

Aesthetik [The Symbol Concept in the Newest Aesthetic] (1876). The

in the following sense through the symbol: “something illustrative serv-

an image is displayed before our senses—initially we say: before our

entirety, it follows that an incommensurability [Unangemessenheit], as

to the impersonal: inorganic nature, artifact, plant, or animal. But a

appropriation of a boundless spiritual benefaction per se, the bond

ical, transcendental—entering of the being [Wesenheit], to which the

a­ rguments here). Myth is religious personification. What is only mean-

not believe in the myth.

in them during his time. As a child, at least, he must have experienced

of analytic contemplation. For appraisal with the measuring stick of the

historical and the logical: for him, symbolism is an essentially historical

continue to exist as long as there is literature (fable, parable, etc.) find

ciative Vorstellung] and direct transference [Versetzung]. This work

in the ­illuminated planes, swellings, recesses, and all pathways, and

then it continues to have an effect in its activity as inner feeling [inneres

depending on the combination, this seems soothing. Roundness has

accordance with the ongoing idea, he postulates that here it is not a

self-representation [Selbstvorstellung], i.e. here: the representation of

as a house. With congestion and headaches, the vision of a blaze in

left to psychology and ethics to explain how the individual immerses

He again, and in good order, implements the motif of distinction—sen-

I thunderously roll myself in a cloud, proudly tower in a fir tree,

in waking life there is a sphere of involuntary symbolism [unwillkürli-

similar becomes immediately active. Mental phenomena [Geistiges] are

head in the case of upsetting mental images and strained thought as

[Schein]? At this point, it is difficult not to respond to the question of

in artistic activity, takes up the question of the imitation of nature and

Die Tonkunst: Einführung in die Aesthetik der Musik [The Musical

multiplicity, and it rediscovers itself where it finds the same. Counting,

We are given aesthetic intuition when a sensuous thing acts in the

Siebeck proceeds in his sophisticated investigation on a Herbartian

personal. By “another foundation,” I understand the postulate of the

blance [Schein] would not be possible if everything impersonal and even

1.  Friedrich Theodor Vischer uses the German term Ahnung

aesthetic empathy (Einfühlung) and the psychological sense of

Eleftherios Ikonomou (ed. and trans.), Empathy, Form, and Space:

Holly A. Yanacek http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9028-6177

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1. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Kritik meiner Ästhetik” in Kritische

a rguments here). Myth is religious personification. What is only mean-

in the illuminated planes, swellings, recesses, and all pathways, and

1. Friedrich Theodor Vischer uses the German term Ahnung