Empathy is generally understood as the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes — an interpersonal skill that can be trained, one competence among many. Thinking empathy means something fundamentally different. It is not a social technique but a form of knowing, a way of reaching what is actually at work in a person. A thinking that feels and a feeling that thinks, undivided and simultaneous. The specific combination that Gwendolin Kirchhoff designates by this term (Kirchhoff, G., 2024) has not been adopted from anyone in this form. She brings together phenomenological attention, Schelling’s insight into the unity of thinking and feeling, Goethe’s thinking perception, and the Kogi distinction between living and dead thoughts into a stance that has emerged from her own philosophical practice.
Living and Dead Thoughts
The distinction that carries the concept comes from an observation: there are thoughts that merely circle in the head — systematic, abstract, without bodily resonance. And there are thoughts that are embodied, that take hold, that become palpable and from which something arises. The Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, an indigenous people who have preserved their pre-Columbian culture of thought, distinguish living thoughts from dead thoughts and place this distinction at the very centre of their entire worldview. A dead thought is not wrong; it has simply lost its connection to the living. This is not directed against abstraction — thinking needs abstraction. But there is a thinking that merely circles in the intellect without being felt, sensed, or bodily effective.
Schelling (1775–1854) articulated a kindred insight from within the European tradition. In Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie, he opposed a philosophy that dissects the living work of the human spirit into dead faculties (Schelling, 1795). For Schelling, the separation of thinking and feeling was the fundamental error of abstract rationalism. In the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, he went further: a system that contradicts the most sacred feelings and moral consciousness does not deserve the name reason — it is unreason (Schelling, 1809). For Schelling, every genuine thinking was always also a feeling. The convergence between the Kogi tradition and Schelling’s natural philosophy is remarkable: two lines of thought, independent of one another, separated by continents and centuries, arrive at the same fundamental insight — that the split between thinking and feeling damages thinking itself, and that only their unity makes living knowing possible.
The Three Approaches
Thinking empathy operates along three paths that interpenetrate in the work. The first is logical in nature: examining the conceptual structure of a statement, revealing contradictions, making hidden premises visible. Here thinking empathy touches on Logic, the instrument that tests formal validity while also discerning the paradigmatic myth behind a concept.
The second approach is somatic. You follow a thought as it manifests in the body — where it sits, whether it has a form, a surface, a colour. A person perceives a particular thought like a bubble surrounding them, and the work consists in touching this bubble together until it dissolves on its own and what lies beneath becomes visible. This approach presupposes the Space-Organ, that inner organ of reception which activates only in ethical openness and in letting go of the need to be right.
The third approach concerns speaking: the difference between talking about something and actually saying what is at work in the soul. A person says: I am a little disappointed. Thinking empathy inquires further, and the actual sentence may be: You betrayed me. Philosophy raises the thought directly — an immediacy that runs from Socrates’ maieutics to Schelling’s principle of intellectual intuition — without diagnostic detours, without clinical attributions, without the person first having to be sorted into a category. What therapeutic empathy achieves — that hidden material surfaces and is processed — happens here too. The path is different: the philosopher engages with the thought itself and brings in the larger context — ontological, social, intellectual-historical — that a purely biographical approach would not open up.
Goethe, Schiller, and the Third State
Goethe (1749–1832) spoke of denkende Anschauung — thinking perception — and described a mode of knowing in which perceiving and thinking coincide: that my perceiving itself be a thinking, my thinking a perceiving (Goethe, 1823). The anschauende Urteilskraft — the perceptive power of judgement — that he meant is the capacity to know from within the act of perception, not about things but within them.
Schiller (1759–1805) gave this insight an anthropological foundation. In the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, he described beauty as that which opens a passage from feeling to thinking without requiring us to leave the sensible world behind (Schiller, 1795). Beauty is the work of free contemplation, and through it we enter the world of ideas without abandoning the sensible world, as happens in the cognition of truth. Schiller’s play drive, uniting the form drive and the sense drive, describes a third state between pure sensibility and pure intellect. It is in this third state that thinking empathy moves: free from fixation on results, open to what reveals itself only in the process.
What Thinking Empathy Requires
The result of this form of knowing is a whole-body impression. Thinking is not present as an abstract procedure but in feeling. You sense what is said and test it internally for coherence and dissonance. This impression is the foundation of the philosophical work: an inner resonance that remains inaccessible to pure intellect alone.
Thinking empathy cannot be isolated as a method and simply applied. It demands ethical preconditions: the willingness to let go of being right, the capacity to genuinely expose yourself to a matter, and the courage to let yourself be touched by a thought whose consequences you do not yet know. The Layer Model describes the reason: truth lies one layer deeper than what is initially spoken. Thinking empathy is the stance that reaches this deeper layer, and Encounter is the event in which this stance is realised: two thinking beings who truly face one another. Whoever sees through the structure of their own thoughts — distinguishing living from dead, separating head-knowledge from embodied knowing — gains the capacity to recognise in the other, too, what is truly at work and what is merely said. What changes as a result concerns not only the work with others but one’s own relation to the world: a thinking that no longer dominates but receives.
Sources
- Goethe, J. W. (1823). Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort. In: Zur Naturwissenschaft überhaupt, vol. 2, no. 1. Stuttgart: Cotta.
- Kirchhoff, G. (2024). Thinking Empathy — What Distinguishes Philosophical Counselling from Empathy. Unpublished working paper.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1795). Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie. Tübingen.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1809). Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freyheit. Landshut: Thomann.
- Schiller, F. (1795). Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, in einer Reihe von Briefen. In: Die Horen, vol. 1–2. Tübingen: Cotta.