taken from: Empathy and Sympathy as Tactile Encounter by Edith Wyschogrod

Touch and the Other
Ordinary language attests this account of the tactile body and provides
a link between touch, empathy, and sympathy. When we say,
colloquially, ‘‘X is touchy,’’ we mean that X is hypersensitive, vulnerable
to injury. When ‘‘I am touched by Y’s kindness,’’ I mean that Y
has compelled me to let down my guard, has drawn close so that I
cannot remain indifferent to him. To remain untouched by another is
to refuse to engage in a feeling-act that brings to light the other’s
plight, to refuse to empathize with the other. The active deployment
of tactility is expressed in such colloquialisms as ‘‘I feel for you,’’ by
which we mean my body substitutes for yours, I take on your pain.
In empathy I do not merge with the others but retrace the lines of
the other’s affect. Thus Martin Buber writes:
Empathy means to glide with one’s own feeling into the dynamic
structure of an object, a pillar or a crystal or the branch
of a tree or even of an animal or a man and as it were to trace it
from within, understanding the formation and motoriality of the
object with the perception of one’s own muscles. Thus it means
the exclusion of one’s own concreteness, the extinguishing of
the actual situation of life, the absorption in pure aestheticism
of the reality in which one participates.