Gotthold Ephraim Lessing on Laocoön: Empathy, Motor Imagery, and Predictive Processing

This study examines Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s aesthetic treatise Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) from an experimental aesthetic perspective. In his wide-ranging discussion of the relationship between the visual arts and poetry, Lessing assigns a critical role to the beholder’s imagination in aesthetic response. As Lessing maintains, the beholder of a painting or sculpture—such as the statue Laocoön and His Sons (c. 150 BC)—is able to anticipate subsequent events, including actions, gestures, and sounds. Recent achievements in the cognitive neurosciences can shed new light on Lessing’s insights about the way viewers engage with works of art. Such breakthroughs include the discovery of mirror neurons and the development of concepts such as embodied simulation, empathy, intersubjectivity, motor imagery, and predictive processing. According to empirical studies, the perception of human actions, postures, gestures, and physiognomic expressions can enable observers to understand the emotions and intentions of others. Therefore, it is now possible to address the question of how biological processes underlie the observation of body movements, gestures, postures, and expressions and their implications for the aesthetic experience of—and empathy toward—images that depict human figures in movement, thus bringing Lessing’s insights up to date.