Joseph R. Metz, on empathy, aesthetics, Bücher, Stifter, and Rilke

is Associate Professor, Department of World Languages and Cultures, and author of .

Metz’s book examines the emergence of “empathy” from nineteenth-century German aesthetics. Moving from the 1873 coinage of Einfuehlung—the projection of human feeling into inanimate forms—Metz traces how this aesthetic concept migrated into psychology and ethics, reshaping how we imagine our relations to others, to art, and to the material world. Close readings of Georg Büchner, Adalbert Stifter, and Rainer Maria Rilke, uncover surprising links between aesthetic and interpersonal empathy. Metz also shows how these early debates anticipate contemporary questions in affect theory, AI, object-oriented ontology, and media aesthetics.

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