Denkende Einfühlung — thinking empathy — denotes an epistemic stance in which thinking and feeling operate not separately but as a unity. Not mere sympathy that remains with the other person, and not abstract analysis that dissects its subject, but a thinking that attunes itself to the essence of the other, and a feeling that presses toward clarity.
What Thinking Empathy Means
Those encountering the concept for the first time may think of empathy: the ability to feel what others feel. Thinking empathy goes a step further. It is not merely an interpersonal skill but an epistemological stance — a way of reaching what is actually at work in another person. The starting point is phenomenological: What do I actually perceive from the first-person perspective?
At its centre lies the distinction between living and dead thoughts. Dead thoughts are purely cerebral, systematic, abstract — they lack embodiment, the felt dimension. This is not directed against abstraction as such, for thinking requires abstraction. But there is a thinking that merely circles in the intellect, without being felt, sensed or bodily effective. Living thoughts, by contrast, are embodied — they take hold, they become palpable, something arises from them. Thinking empathy is directed at living thoughts: at what is actually at work, not at what is merely thought.
The result is a whole-body impression. Thinking is not present as an abstract procedure but in feeling. One senses what is said and tests it internally for coherence and dissonance. This impression is the foundation of philosophical work: not an interpretation from outside, not a diagnostic classification, but an inner resonance that remains inaccessible to pure intellect alone.
Where the Concept Comes From
The distinction between living and dead thoughts appears among the Kogi people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, who place the difference between a thinking that is vitally connected to the world and a thinking that has lost this connection at the centre of their worldview. Schelling (1775–1854) articulated a related insight from the European tradition: he opposed a philosophy that divides the living work of the human spirit into dead faculties (Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie, 1795). For Schelling, the separation of thinking and feeling was the fundamental error of abstract rationalism.
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 is a thinking, my thinking a perceiving (Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort, 1823). The anschauende Urteilskraft (perceptive power of judgement) he described means the capacity not to judge things from outside but to know from within the act of perception.
The specific combination that Gwendolin Kirchhoff calls thinking empathy is not adopted from any single source. She brings together phenomenological attention, the Kogi distinction, Schelling’s insight and Goethe’s thinking perception into an epistemic stance that has emerged from her own practice.
Thinking Empathy in Practice
In philosophical accompaniment, thinking empathy manifests as a particular quality of conversation. The practitioner does not merely listen — she receives an impression of the other, present in feeling, that searches for words. The work consists in finding language for this impression while continually testing for inner coherence.
Three approaches can be distinguished. The first is logical in nature: examining the conceptual structure of a statement, revealing contradictions, making hidden premises visible. The second is somatic: following a thought as it shows itself in the body — where it sits, whether it has a form, a surface, a colour. A client 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. 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.
What therapeutic empathy achieves — that hidden material surfaces and is processed — happens here too. The path is different: not diagnostic categories and disorder concepts guiding perception, but the thought itself is directly raised. The philosopher engages with the thought that is at work and brings in the larger context — ontological, social, intellectual-historical — that a purely biographical approach would not open up.
Related Concepts
Thinking empathy is closely connected to the layer model (Schichtmodell), the principle that truth lies one layer deeper than what is initially spoken. It presupposes the Raumorgan (space-organ), that inner organ of reception which Jochen Kirchhoff described as the precondition for spiritual perception — one that activates only in ethical openness and in letting go of the need to be right. In philosophical accompaniment (Philosophische Begleitung), thinking empathy is the sustaining stance that makes the conversation possible — not as a technique to be learned, but as a form of knowing that arises when two thinking beings truly meet.