Empathy, imagination, and dramaturgy – a means of society in eighteenth-century theory
pp. 203-221
in: Vanessa Lux, Sigrid Weigel (eds), Empathy, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
In the eighteenth-century thinking, the concepts of empathy (Einfühlung) and sympathy or compassion (Mitleid) were essential for the formation of a new social body based on a community of equals. However, they also created a link between the new social theory and dramaturgical theory in contemporary theater. The new stage experience that evolved from the middle of the century was based on the idea of arousing the spectator's empathy or compassion through the protagonists' actions, mainly in tragedy. It gave the new, inherently abstract social body its own concrete representation through imagination. Thus, Diderot and Lessing with their dramaturgical concerns were no less important than Hume, Smith, and Rousseau in shaping the genuinely modern notion of a society based on equality and, ideally, even universality.
