Philosophy of aesthetics and beauty has traditionally prioritized the sense of vision while deprioritizing the more basic-bodily and thus less “noble” sense of touch. This paper examines bodily aspects of how beauty appears in the experience of visual art and motivates the view that touch is fundamental to such experiences. We appeal to Merleau-Ponty to show the relevance given to touch in his phenomenology of aesthetics, to unfold the meaning of touch as “reversible,” and to understand how vision can be (...) conceptualized as a form of touch. Further, we present four cases of feeling touched by beauty in experiences of visual art collected through interviews with art museum visitors. The descriptions of these experiences show that when people open themselves to an artwork they also open themselves to themselves. Based on the qualitative descriptions, we discuss how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of touch is revelatory of the meaning of feeling “touched” in experiences of beauty. (shrink)

_Purpose._ In the article, the author questions rethinking the phenomena of empathy and self-empathy as modes of self-understanding of humanity and the inner intention to self-exploration of human spirituality. _Theoretical basis._ The research is based on the phenomenological dimension of modern anthropology and axiology. _Originality._ The change of the traditional intersubjective approach in the understanding of empathy to an introsubjective one and the affirmation of self-empathy as one of the defining existences in human beings, which is adjusted by the altruism-egoism (...) value scale and forms the skills of unconditional empathic action towards the Other as a mode of self-exploration in the spiritual essence of a person are argued. _Conclusions._ The commonplace in a wide palette of research views on empathy is the construct for the Self – Other disposition and the intersubjective approach emphasizing the object of empathy. Transformation of the intention vector of empathic consciousness from the object to the subject of empathic action opens up deep possibilities of spiritual improvement as a way of self-awareness in the human essence. The transformation of the intention vector of empathic consciousness from intersubjective (I in the Other) to introsubjective (I through the Other) has the potential for spiritual development according to the altruism-egoism value scale. Empathy as an introsubjective position of self-exploration is inseparably connected with self-empathy, which in the mutual integration of its three main components – benevolence towards oneself, reflexivity towards one’s own experience and a tendency to understand one’s fate as common to all mankind – forms an important regulator of self-understanding of a person’s spiritual potential and the possibility of the practical extrapolation for these skills to an empathic way of communication at all levels of anthropo-being. Anthropological accentuation on the inner essence and meanings of human existence is carried out through intuition and self-altruism as the fading of pragmatic interest in the socially conditioned Self (Ego) and immersion in the essential Self – the bearer of the universal spiritual in a person. Self-empathy is considered in the context of the ideas of Stoicism as a deep self-immersion in the human essence and sensitivity to immediate emotional internal states, as a construct of emotional intelligence and a way of realizing individual uniqueness in the context of the metamodern concept of atopy. Self-empathy is defined as one of the key existences in human beings, which forms the skill of altruistic (unconditional) implementation of empathy. (shrink)