This is the work that gave the final blow to classicism in visual art. German expressionism stems from the writing, and Wyndham Lewis, the founder of Vorticism, read Worringer's works and was hugely inspired by them.

By arguing for the case of Abstraction, the visual arts of the Western tradition were finally led back to their Platonic tradition from the Aristotelian classicism, and beyond that, by tracing the origin of forms in art to artistic will.

It is also a work that should be regarded as proto-psychoanalysis. Even if Freud had already founded the discipline named "psychoanalysis" by then, now it should be clear that psychoanalysis is a result of the confluence of several strands, one of which is the aesthetics in the tradition of Schiller and Nietzsche. Abstraction and Empathy fully employs the psychologizing tendency of the German thought of the days, and should be regarded as a milestone that manifestly exhibits psychoanalytical arguments and speculations, and hence becomes implicitly metaphysical in its perspective by adopting a Hartmann-ish and Schellingian undertone.