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Juneteenth: Beloved in the Context of Radical Empathy
For those who may require background on this new federal holiday, June 19th – Juneteenth – it was the date in 1865 that US Major General Gordon Granger proclaimed freedom for enslaved people in Texas some two and a half years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Later, the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution definitively established this enshrining of freedom as the law of the land and, in addition, the 14th Amendment extended human rights to all people, especially formerly enslaved ones. This blog post is not so much a book review of Beloved as a further inquiry into the themes of survival, transformation, liberty, trauma – and empathy. (By is a slightly updated version of an article that was published on June 27, 2023.)
“Beloved” is the name of a person. Toni Morrison builds on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved person, who escaped with her two children even while pregnant with a third, succeeding in reaching freedom across the Ohio River in 1854. However, shortly thereafter, slave catchers (“bounty hunters”) arrived with the local sheriff under the so-called fugitive slave act to return Margaret and her children to slavery. Rather than submit to re-enslavement, Margaret tried to kill the children, also planning then to kill herself. She succeeded in killing one, before being overpowered. The historical Margaret received support from the abolitionist movement, even becoming a cause celebre. The historical Margaret is named Sethe in the novel. The story grabs the reader by the throat – at first relatively gently but with steadily increasing compression – and then rips the reader’s guts out. The story is complex, powerful, and not for the faint of heart.
The risks to the reader’s emotional equilibrium of engaging with such a text should not be underestimated. G. H. Hartman is not intentionally describing the challenge encountered by the reader of Beloved in his widely-noted “Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” but he might have been:
“The more we try to animate books, the more they reveal their resemblance to the dead who are made to address us in epitaphs or whom we address in thought or dream. Every time we read we are in danger of waking the dead, whose return can be ghoulish as well as comforting. It is, in any case, always the reader who is alive and the book that is dead, and must be resurrected by the reader” (Hartman 1995: 548).
Waking the dead indeed! Though technically Morrison’s work has a gothic aspect – it is a ghost story – yet it is neither ghoulish nor sensational, and treats supernatural events rather the way Gabriel Garcia Marquez does – as a magical or miraculous realism. Credible deniability or redescription of the returned ghost as a slave who escaped from years-long sexual incarceration is maintained for a hundred pages (though ultimately just allowed to fade away). Morrison takes Margaret/Sethe’s narrative in a different direction than the historical facts, though the infanticide remains a central issue along with how to recover the self after searing trauma and supernatural events beyond trauma. The murdered infant had the single word “Beloved” chiseled on her tombstone, and even then the mother had to compensate the stone mason with non-consensual sex. An explanation will be both too much and too little; but the minimal empathic response is to try to say something that will advance the conversation in the direction of closure, the integration of unclaimed experience (to use Cathy Carruth’s incisive phrase), and recovery from trauma. Let us take a step back.
Morrison is a master of conversational implicature. What is that? “Conversational implicature” is an indirect speech act that suggests an idea or thought, even though the thought is not literally expressed. Conversational implicature lets the empathy in – and out – to be expressed. Such implicature expands the power and provocation of communication precisely by not saying something explicitly but hinting at what happened. The information is incomplete and the reader is challenged to feel her/his way forward using the available micro-expressions, clues, and hints. Instead of saying “she was raped and the house was haunted by a ghost,” one must gather the implications. One reads: “Not only did she have to live out her years in a house palsied by the baby’s fury at having its throat cut, but those ten minutes she spent pressed up against dawn-colored stone studded with star chips, her knees wide open as the grave, were longer than life, more alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil” (Morrison 1987: 5–6). Note the advice above about “not for the faint of heart.”
The reader does a double-take. What just happened? Then a causal conversation resumes in the story about getting a different house as the reader tries to integrate what just happened into a semi-coherent narrative. Yet why should a narrative of incomprehensibly inhumane events make more sense than the events themselves? No good reason – except that humans inevitably try to make sense of the incomprehensible.“Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief” (1987: 6). One of the effects is to get the reader to think about the network of implications in which are expressed the puzzles and provocations of what really matters at a fundamental level. (For more on conversational implicature see Levinson 1983: 9 –165.)
In a bold statement of the obvious, this reviewer agrees with the Nobel Committee, who awarded Morrison the Novel Prize in 1988 for this work. This review accepts the high literary qualities of the work and proposes to look at three things. These include: (1) how the traumatic violence, pain, suffering, inhumanity, drama, heroics, and compassion of the of the events depicted (consider this all one set), interact with trauma and are transformed into moral trauma; (2) how the text itself exemplifies empathy between the characters, bringing empathy forth and making it present for the reader’s apprehension; (3) the encounter of the reader with the trauma of the text transform and/or limit the practice of empathizing itself from standard empathy to radical empathy.
So far as I know, no one has brought Morrison’s work into connection with the action of the Jewish Zealots at Masada (73 CE). The latter, it may be recalled, committed what was in effect mass suicide rather than be sold into slavery after being militarily defeated and about-to-be-taken-prisoner by the Roman army. The 960 Zealots drew lots to kill one another and their wives and children, since suicide technically was against the Jewish religion.
On further background, after the fall of Jerusalem as the Emperor Titus put down the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 73 CE, a group of Jewish Zealots escaped to a nearly impregnable fortress at Masada on the top of a steep mountain. (Note Masada was a television miniseries starring Peter O’Toole (Sagal 1981).) Nevertheless, Roman engineers built a ramp and siege tower and eventually succeeding in breaching the walls. The next day the Roman soldiers entered the citadel and found the defenders and their wives and children all dead at their own hands. Josephus, the Jewish historian, reported that he received a detailed account of the siege from two Jewish women who survived by hiding in the vast drain/cistern – in effect, tunnels – that served as the fortress’ source of water.
The example of the Jewish resistance at Masada provides a template for those facing enslavement, but it does not solve the dilemma that killing one’s family and then committing suicide is a leap into the abyss at the bottom of which may lie oblivion or the molten center of the earth’s core, a version of Dante’s Inferno. So all the necessary disclaimers apply. This reviewer does not claim to second guess the tough, indeed impossible, decisions that those in extreme situations have to make. One is up against all the debates and the arguments about suicide.
Here is the casuistical consideration – when life is reduced from being a human being to being a slave who is treated as a beast of burden and whose orifices are routinely penetrated for the homo- and heteroerotic pleasure of the master, then one is faced with tough choices. No one is saying what the Zealots did was right – and two wrongs do not make a right – but it is also not obvious that what they did was wrong in the way killing an innocent person is wrong, who might otherwise have a life going about their business gardening, baking bread, or fishing. This is the rock and the hard place, the devil and deep blue sea, the frying pan or the fire, the Trolley Car dilemma (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem). This is Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, who after the unsuccessful attempt in June 1944 to assassinate Hitler (of which Rommel apparently had knowledge but took no action), was allowed by the Nazi authorities to take the cyanide pill. This is Colonel George Armstrong Custer with one bullet left surrounded by angry Dakota warriors who would like to slow cook him over hot coals. Nor as far as I know is the bloody case of Margaret Garner ever in the vast body of criticism brought into connection with the suicides of Cicero and Seneca (and other Roman Stoics) in the face of mad perpetrations of the psychopathic Emperor Nero. This is a decision that no one should have to make; a decision that no one can make; and yet a decision that the individual in the dilemma has to make, for doing nothing is also a decision. In short, this is moral trauma.
A short Ted Talk on trauma theory is appropriate. Beloved is so dense with trauma that a sharp critical knife is needed to cut through it. In addition to standard trauma and complex trauma, Beloved points to a special kind of trauma, namely, moral trauma or as it sometimes also called moral injury, that has not been much recognized (though it is receiving increasing attention in the context of war veterans (e.g. Shay 2014)). “Moral trauma (injury)” is not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), any edition, of the American Psychiatric Association, nor is it even clear that it belongs there, since the DSM is not a moral treatise. Without pretending to do justice to the vast details and research, “trauma” is variously conceived as an event that threatens the person’s life and limb, making the individual feel he or she is going to die or be gravely injured (which would include rape). The blue roadside signs here in the USA that guide the ambulance to the “Trauma Center” (emergency department that has staff on call at all times), suggest an urgent emergency, in this case usually but not always, a physical injury.
Cathy Caruth (1996) concisely defines trauma in terms of an experience that is registered but not experienced, a truth or reality that is not available to the survivor as a standard experience, “unclaimed experience.”The person (for example) was factually, objectively present when the head on collision occurred, but, even if the person has memories, and would acknowledge the event, paradoxically, the person does not experience it as something the person experienced. The survivor experiences dissociated, repetitive nightmares, flashbacks, and depersonalization. At the risk of oversimplification, Caruth’s work aligns with that of Bessel van der Kolk (2014). Van der Kolk emphasizes an account that redescribes in neuro-cognitive terms a traumatic event that gets registered in the body – burned into the neurons, so to speak, but remains sequestered – split off or quarantined – from the person’s everyday going on being and ordinary sense of self. For both Caruth and van der Kolk, the survivor is suffering from an unintegrated experience of self-annihilating magnitude for which the treatment – whether working through, witnessing, or (note well) artistic expression – consists in reintegrating that which was split off because it was simply too much to bear.
For Dominick LaCapra (1999), the historian, “trauma” means the Holocaust or Apartheid (add: enslavement to the list). LaCapra engages with how to express in writing such confronting events that the words of historical writing and literature become inadequate. The words breakdown, fail, seem fake no matter how authentic. And yet the necessity of engaging with the events, inadequately described as “traumatic,” is compelling and unavoidable. Thus, LaCapra (1999: 700) notes: “Something of the past always remains, if only as a haunting presence or revenant.” Without intending to do so, this describes Beloved, where the infant of the infanticide is literally reincarnated, reborn, in the person named “Beloved.” For LaCapra, working through such traumatic events is necessary for the survivors (and the entire community) in order to get their power back over their lives and open up the possibility of a future of flourishing. This “working through” is key for it excludes denial, repression, suppression, and, in contrast, advocates for positive inquiry into the possibility of transformation in the service of life. Yet the attempt at working through of the experiences, memories, nightmares, and consequences of such traumatic events often result in repetition, acting out, and “empathic unsettlement.” Key term: empathic unsettlement. From a place of safety and security, the survivor has to do precisely that which she or he is least inclined to do – engage with the trauma, talk about it, try to integrate and overcome it. Such unsettlement is also a challenge and an obstacle for the witness, therapist, or friend providing a gracious and generous listening.
LaCapra points to a challenging result. The empathic unsettlement points to the possibility that the vicarious experience of the trauma on the part of the witness leaves the witness unwilling to complete the working through, lest it “betray” the survivor, invalidate the survivor’s suffering or accomplishment in surviving. “Those traumatized by extreme events as well as those empathizing with them, may resist working through because of what might almost be termed a fidelity to trauma, a feeling that one must somehow keep faith with it” (DeCapra 2001: 22). This “unsettlement” is a way that empathy may breakdown, misfire, go off the rails. It points to the need for standard empathy to become radical empathy in the face of extreme situations of trauma, granted what that all means requires further clarification.
For Ruth Leys (2000) the distinction “trauma” itself is inherently unstable oscillating between historical trauma – what really happened, which, however, is hard if not impossible to access accurately – and, paradoxically, historical and literary language bearing witness by a failure of witnessing. The trauma events are “performed” in being written up as history or made the subject of an literary artwork. But the words, however authentic, true, or artistic, often seem inadequate, even fake. The “trauma” as brought forth as a distinction in language is ultimately inadequate to the pain and suffering that the survivor has endured, which “pain and suffering” (as Kant might say) are honored with the title of “the real.” Yet the literary or historical work is a performance that may give the survivor access to their experience.
The traumatic experience is transformed – even “transfigured” – without necessarily being made intelligible or sensible by reenacting the experience in words that are historical writing or drawing a picture (visual art) or dancing or writing a poem or bringing forth a literary masterpiece such as Beloved. The representational gesture – whether a history or a true story or fiction – starts the process of working through the trauma, enabling the survivor to reintegrate the trauma into life, getting power back over it, at least to the extent that s/he can go on being and becoming. In successful instances of working through, the reintegrated trauma becomes a resource to the survivor rather than a burden or (one might dare say) a cross to bear. To stay with the metaphor, the cross becomes an ornament hanging from a light chain of silver metal on one’s neck rather than the site of one’s ongoing torture and execution. Much work and working through is required to arrive at such an outcome.
Though Beloved has generated a vast amount of critical discussion, it has been little noted that the events in Belovedrapidly put the reader in the presence of moral trauma (also called “moral injury”). Though allusion was made above to the DSM, the devil is in the details. Two levels of trauma (and the resulting post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)) are concisely distinguished (for example by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual(5th edition) of the American Psychiatric Association (2013). There is standard trauma – one survives a life changing railroad or auto accident and has nightmares and flashbacks (and a checklist of other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)). There is repeated trauma, trauma embedded in trauma, double-bind embedded in double bind. One is abused – and it happens multiple times over a course of months or years and, especially, it may happen before one has an abiding structure for cognition such as a stable acquisition of language (say to a two-year-old) or happens in such a way or such a degree that words are not available as the victim is blamed while being abused – resulting in complex trauma and the corresponding complex PTSD.
But this distinction, standard versus complex trauma (and the correlated PTSD), is inadequate in the case of moral trauma, where the person is both a survivor and a perpetrator.
Thus, an escaped slave makes it to freedom. One Margaret Garner is pursued and about to be apprehended under the Fugitive Slave Act. She tries to kill herself and her children rather than be returned to slavey. She succeeds in killing one of the girls. Now this soldier’s choice is completely different than the choice faced by Margaret/Sethe, and rather like the inverse of it, dependent on not enough information rather than a first-hand, all-too-knowledgeable acquaintance with the evils of enslavement from having survived it (so far). Yet the structural similarities are striking. Morrison says of Sethe/Margarent might also said of the soldier, “[…][S]he could do and survive things they believed she should neither do nor survive […]” (Morrison 1987: 67). Yet one significant difference between the soldier and Sethe (and the Jewish Zealots) is their answer to the question when human life ceases to be human. A casuistical clarification is in order. If human life is an unconditional good, then, when confronted with an irreversible loss of the humanness, life itself may not be an unconditional good. Life versus human life. The distinction dear to Stoic philosophy, that worse things exist than death, gets traction – worse things such as slavery, cowardice in the face of death, betraying one’s core integrity. The solder is no stoic; Sethe is. Yet both are suffering humanity.
However, one may object, even if one’s own human life may be put into play, it is a flat-out contradiction to improve the humanity of one’s children by ending their humanity. The events are so beyond making sense, yet one cannot stop oneself from trying to make sense of them. So far, we are engaged with the initial triggering event, the infanticide. No doubt a traumatic event; and arguably calling forth moral trauma. But what about trauma that is so traumatic, so pervasive, that it is the very form defining the person’s experiences. Trauma that it is not merely “unclaimed, split off” experience (as Caruth says). For example, the person who grows up in slavery – as did Sethe – has never known any other form of experience – this is just the way things are – things have always been that way – and one cannot imagine anything else (though some inevitably will and do). This is soul murder. So we have moral trauma in a context of soul murder. Soul murder is defined by Shengold (1989) as loss of the ability to love, though the individuals in Beloved retain that ability, however fragmented and imperfect it may be. Rather the proposal here is to expand the definition of soul murder to include the loss of the power spontaneously to begin something new – the loss of the possibility of possibility of the self, leaving the self without boundaries and without aliveness, vitality, an emotional and practical Zombie. In addition, as a medical professional, Shengold (1989) makes an important note: “Soul murder is a crime, not a diagnosis.” Though Morrison does not say so, and though she might or might not agree, enslavement is soul murder.
Beloved contains actual murders. Once again this is not for the fainto of heart. For example, Sethe’s friend and slave Sixo from the time of their mutual enslavement is about to be burned alive by the local vigilantes, and he gets the perpetrators to shoot him (and kill him) by singing in a loud, happy, annoying voice. He fakes “not givin’ a damn,” taking away the perpetrators’ enjoyment of his misery. It works well enough in the moment. His last. Nor is it like one murder is better (or worse) than another. However, in a pervasive context of soul murder, Sethe’s infanticide is an action taken by a person whose ability to choose -sometime called “agency” – is compromised by extreme powerlessness. Yet in that moment of decision her power is uncompromised by all the compromising circumstances and momentarily retored – whether for the better is that about which we are debating, bodly assuming the matter is debateable. One continues to try and justify and/or make sense out of what cannot have any sense. Sethe is presented with a choice (read it again – and again) that no one should have to make – that no one can make (even though the person makes the choice because doing nothing is also a choice). This is the same situation that the characters in classic Greek tragedy face, though a combination of information asymmetries, personal failings, and double-binds. Above all – double-binds. This is why tragedy was invented (which deserves further exploration, not engaged here).
Now bring empathy to moral trauma in the context of soul murder. Anyone out there in the reading audience experiencing “empathic unsettlement” (as LaCapra incisively put it)? Anyone experiencing empathic distress? If the reader is not, then that itself is concerning. “Empathic unsettlement” is made present in the reader’s experience by the powerful artistry deployed by Beloved. Yet this may be an instance in which empathy is best described, not as an on-off switch, but as a dial that one can dial up or down in the face of one’s own limitations and humanness. This is tough stuff, which deserves to be read and discussed. If one is starting to break out in a sweat, if one’s mouth is getting dry, if the pump in one’s chest is starting to accelerate its pumping, and one is thinking about putting the book down, rather than become hard-hearted, the coaching is temporarily to dial down one’s practice of empathy. While one is going to experience suffering and pain in reading about the suffering and pain of another, it will inevitably and by definition be a vicarious experience – a sample – a representation – a trace affect – not the overwhelming annihilation that would make one a survivor. Dial the empathy down in so far as a person can do that; don’t turn it off. Admittedly, this is easier said than done, but with practice, the practitioner gets expanded power over the practice of empathizing.
As noted, Morrison is a master of conversational implicature. Conversational implicature allows the empathy to get in – become present in the text and become present for the reader engaging with the text. The conversational implicature expresses and brings to presence the infanticide without describing the act itself by which the baby is killed. Less is more, though the matter is handled graphically enough. The results of the bloody deed are described – “a “woman holding a blood soaked child to her chest with one hand” (Morrison 1987: 124) – but not the bloody action of inflicting the fatal wound itself. “Writing the wound” sometimes dances artistically around expressing the wound, sometimes, not.
Returning to the story itself, Morrison describes the moment at which the authorities arrive to attempt to enforce the fugitive slave act: “When the four horsemen came – schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sheriff – the house on Bluestone Road was so quiet they thought they were too late” (Morrison 1987: 124). Conversational implicature meets intertextuality in the Book of Revelation of the New Testament. The four horsemen of the apocalypse herald the end of the world as we know it and the end of the world is what comes down on Sethe at this point. Perhaps not unlike the Zealots at Masada, she makes a fatal decision. Literally. As Hannah Arendt (1970) pointed out in a different political context, power and force (violence) stand in an inverse relation: when power is reduced to zero, then force – violence – comes forth. The slaves power is zero, if not a negative number. Though Sethe tries to kill all the children, she succeeds only in one instance. In the fictional account, the boys recover from their injuries and, in the case of Denver (Sethe’s daughter named after Amy Denver, the white girl who helped Sethe), Sethe’s hand is stayed at the last moment.
Beloved is a text rich in empathy. This includes exemplifications of empathy in the text, which in turn call forth empathy in the reader. The following discussion now joins the standard four aspects of standard empathy – empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, empathic interpretation, and empathic responsiveness. The challenge to the practice of empathy is that with a text and topic such as this one, does the practice of standard empathy need to be expanded, modified, or transformed from standard to radical empathy? What would that even mean? Empathy is empathy. A short definition of radical empathy is proposed: Empathy is committed to empathizing in the face of empathic distress, even if the latter is incurred, and empathy, even in breakdown, acknowledges the commitment to expanding empathy in the individual and the community.
We start with a straightforward example of empathic receptivity – affect matching. No radical empathy is required here. An example of standard empathic receptivity is provided in the text, and the dance between Denver and Beloved is performed (1987: 87 – 88):
“Beloved took Denver’s hand and place another on Denver’s shoulder. They danced then. Round and round the tiny room and it may have been dizziness, or feeling light and icy at once, that made Denver laugh so hard. A catching laugh that Beloved caught. The two of them, merry as kittens, swung to and fro, to and fro, until exhausted they sat on the floor. “
The contagious laughter is entry level empathic receptivity. Empathy degree zero, so to speak. This opening between the two leads to further intimate engagement with empathic possibility. But the possibility is blocked of further empathizing in the moment is blocked by a surprising discovery. At this point, Denver “gets it” – that Beloved is from the other side – she has died and come back – and Denver asks her, “What’s it like over there, where you were before?” But since she was killed as a baby, the answer is not very informative: “I’m small in that place. I’m like this here.” (1987: 88) Beloved, the person who returns to haunt the family, is the age she would have been had she lived.
The narrative skips in no particular order from empathic receptivity to empathic understanding. “Understanding” is used in the extended sense of understanding of possibilities for being in the world (e.g., Heidegger 1927: 188 (H148); 192 (H151)): “In the projecting of the understanding, beings [such as human beings] are disclosed in their possibility.” Empathic understanding is the understanding of possibility. What does the reader’s empathy make present as possible for the person in her or his life and circumstance? What is possible in slavery is being a beast of burden, pain, suffering, and early death – the possibility of no possibility of human flourishing. In contrast, when Paul D (a former slave who knew Sethe in enslavement) makes his way to the house of Sethe and Denver (and, unknown to him, the ghost of the baby), the possibility of family comes forth. In the story, there’s a carnival in town and Paul D, who knew Sethe before both managed to escape from the plantation (“Sweet Home”), takes her and Denver to the carnival. “Having a life” means many things. One of them is family. The possibility of family is made present in the text and the reader. That is the moment of empathic understanding of possibility:
“They were not holding hands, but their shadows were. Sethe looked to her left and all three of them were gliding over the dust hold hands. Maybe he [Paul D] was right. A life. Watching their hand-holding shadows [. . . ] because she could do and survive things they believed she should neither do nor survive [. . . .] [A]ll the time the three shadows that shot out of their feet to the left held hands. Nobody noticed but Sethe and she stopped looking after she decided that it was a good sign. A life. Could be.” (Morrison 1987: 67)
Within the story, Sethe has her own justification for her bloody deed. She is rendering her children safe and sending them on ahead to “the other side” where she will soon join them. “I took and put my babies where they’d be safe” (Morrison 1987: 193). The only problem with this argument, if there is a problem with it, is that it makes sense out of what she did. Most readers are likely to align with Paul D (a key character in the story and a “romantic” interest of Sethe’s), who at first does not know about the infanticide. Paul D learns the details of Sethe’s act from Stamp Paid, the person who is the former underground rail road coordinator, who knows just about everything that goes on, because he was a hub for the exchange of all-manner of information in helping run-away and would-be run-away slaves to survive.
Stamp feels that Paul D ought to know, though he later regrets his decision. Stamp tells Paul D about the infanticide – showing him the newspaper clipping as evidence and explaining the words that Paul D (who is illiterate) cannot read. Paul D is overwhelmed. He cannot handle it. He denies that the sketch (or photo) is Sethe, saying it does not look like her – the mouth does not match. Stamp tries to convince Paul D: “She ain’t crazy. She love those children. She was trying to out hurt the hurter” (1987: 276). Paul D asks Sethe about the infanticide reported in the news clipping, and she provides her justification (see above). Paul D is finally convinced that she did what she did, yet unconvinced it was the thing to do and a thunderhead of judgment issues the verdict: “You got two feet, Sethe, not four […] and right then a forest sprung up between them trackless and quiet” (1987: 194).[1] Paul D experiences something he cannot handle.
Standard empathy misfires as empathic distress. Standard empathy chokes on moral judgment. Paul D moves out of the house where he is living with Sethe, Denver, and Beloved. Standard empathy does not stretch into radical empathy. In a breakdown of empathic receptivity, Paul D takes on Sethe’s shame, and instead of a decision to talk about the matter with her, perhaps agreeing to exit the relationship for cause, Paul D runs away from both Sethe and his own emotional and moral conflicts, making an escape. Stamp blames himself for driving Paul D away by disclosing the infanticide to him (of which he had been unaware), and tries to go to explain it to Sethe. Seeking the honey of self-knowledge results in the stings of enraged distortion and disguise. Paul D finds the door is closed and locked against him. Relationships are in breakdown.
At this point the isolation of the women – Sethe, Denver, Beloved – inspires a kind of “mad scene” – or at least a carnival of emotion. Empathic interpretation occurs as dynamic and shifting points of view. The rapid-fire changing of perspectives occurs in the three sections beginning, “Beloved, she my daughter”; “Beloved is my sister”; “I am Beloved and she is mine” (Morrison 1987: 236; 242; 248). These express the hunger for relatedness, healing, and family that each of the women experience. For this reader, encountering the voices has the rhythmic effect of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. The voices are disembodied, though they address one another rather than the reader (as was also the case in Woolf). The first-person reflections slip and slide into a free verse poem of call and response. The rapid-fire, dynamic changing of perspectives results in the merger of the selves, which, strictly speaking, is a breakdown of empathic boundaries. There is no punctuation in the text of Beloved’s contribution to the back-and-forth, because Beloved is a phantom, albeit an embodied one, without the standard limits of boundaries in space/time such as are provided by standard punctuation.
This analysis has provided examples of empathic receptivity, understanding, and interpretation. One aspect of the process of empathy remains. In a flashback of empathic responsiveness: Sethe is on the run, having escaped enslavement at Sweet Home Plantation. She is far along in her pregnancy, alone, on foot, barefoot, and is nearly incapacitated by labor pains. A white girl comes along and they challenge one another. The white girl is named Amy Denver, though the reader does not learn that at first, and she is going to Boston (which becomes a running joke). What is not a joke is that Sethe and Amy Denver are two lost souls on the road of life if there ever were any. Amy is barely more safe or secure than Amy, though she has the distinct advantage that men with guns and dogs are not in hot pursuit of her. Sethe dissembles about her own name, telling Amy it is “Lu.” It is as if the Good Samaritan – in this case, Amy – had also been waylaid by robbers, only not beaten as badly as the man going up to Jerusalem, who is rescored by the Samaritan. Amy is good with sick people, as she notes, and practices her arts on Sethe/Lu. Sethe/Lu is flat on her back and in attempt to help her stand up, Amy massages her feet. But Sethe/Lu’s back hurts. In a moment of empathic responsiveness, Amy describes to Sethe/Lu the state of her (Sethe’s) back, which has endured a whipping with a raw hide whip shortly before the plan to escape was executed. Amy tells her:
“It’s a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here’s the trunk – it’s red and spit wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain’t blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom. What god have in mind I wonder, I had me some whippings, but I don’t remember nothing like this” (1987: 93).
This satisfies the definition of empathic responsiveness – in Amy’s description to Lu of what Amy sees on Lu’s back, Amy gives to Lu her (Amy’s) experience of the state of Lu’s back. Amy’s response to her (Lu) allows / causes Lu to “get” that Amy has experienced what her (Lu’s) experience is. Lu (Sethe) of course cannot see her own back and the result of the rawhide whipping which is being described to her. On background, early in the story, Sethe tells Paul D: “Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher [actually a teacher, but mostly a Simon Legree type slave owner, and the brother of Mrs Garner’s late husband] made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still” (1987:20). The reader wonders, What is she talking about? “Made a tree”? The conversational implicature – clear to the participants in the story, but less so to the reader – lets the suspense – and the empathy – come out. The “tree” finally becomes clear in the above-cited passage. One has to address whether this attempt succeeds artistically to transform the trauma of the whipping into an artistic integration and transfiguration of pain and suffering. Nothing is lacking from Morrison’s artistry, yet the description gave this reader a vicarious experience of nausea, empathic receptivity, especially with the white puss. Once again, not for the faint of heart. This a “transfiguring” of the traumatic.
A further reflection on “transfiguring” is required. If one takes the term literally – transforming the figure into another form without making it more or less meaningful, sensible, or significant, then one has a chance of escaping the aporias and paradoxes into a state of masterful and resonant ambiguity. For example, in another context, when the painter Caravaggio (1571–1610) makes two rondos of Medusa, the Gorgon with snakes for hair, whose sight turns the viewer to stone, was he not transfiguring something horrid and ugly into a work or art? The debate is joined. The inaccessible trauma – what happened cannot be accurately remembered, though it keeps appearing in nightmares and flashback – is the inaccessible real, like Kant’s thing in itself. The performing of the trauma, the work of art – Caravaggio’s self-portrait as the Medusa[2] or the encounter of Amy and Sethe/Lu or Morrison’s Beloved in its entirety – renders the trauma accessible, expressible, and so able to be worked through, integrated, and transformed into a resource that at least allows one to keep going on being and possibly succeed in recovery and flourishing. Once again, the intention is a transfiguring of the traumatic. However, the myth of the Medusa itself suggests a solution, albeit a figurative one. In the face of soul murder embedded within moral trauma, the challenge to standard empathy is to expand, unfold, develop, into radical empathy. That does not add another feature to empathy in addition to receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness, but it raises the bar (so to speak) on the practice of all of these. Radical empathy is committed to the practice of empathizing in the face of empathic distress. What does empathic distress look like? It looks like the reaction to the traumatic vision of the snake-haired Gorgon that turns to stone the people who encounter it. It looks like the tree on Sethe/Lu’s back, the decision that Sethe/Margarent should not have to make, but that she nevertheless makes, staring into her image of the Medusa, who show up as the four horsemen. This is to chase the trauma upstream in the opposite direction from the would-be artistic transfiguration. A
This points immediately to Nietzsche’s answer to Plato’s banning of tragic poetry from the just city (the Republic), namely, that humans cannot bear so much truth (1883: §39):
“Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence, that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could barely still endure, or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.“
And again, with admirable conciseness, Nietzsche (1888/1901: Aphorism 822): “We have art, lest we perish of the truth.” Here “truth” is not a semantic definition such as Davidson’s (1973, 1974) use of Tarksi (loosely a correspondence between language and world), but the truth that life is filled with struggle and effort—not fair—that not only are people who arrive early and work hard all day in the vineyard paid a full day’s wages, but so are people who arrive late and barely work also get paid a full day’s wages; that, according to the Buddha, pain is an illusion, but when one is sitting in the dentist chair, the pain is a very compelling illusion; not only old people get sick and die, but so do children. While the universe may indeed be a well-ordered cosmos, according to the available empirical evidence, the planet Earth seems to be in a local whorl in its galaxy where chaos predominates; power corrupts and might makes right; good guys do not always finish last, but they rarely finish first, based alone on goodness.
On background, the reader may recall that the hero Perseus succeeded in defeating this Medusa without looking at her. Anyone who sees the Medusa straight on is turned to stone. Perseus would have been traumatized by the traumatic image and rendered an emotional zombie – lacking in aliveness, energy, strength, or vitality – turned to stone. Beyond empathic unsettlement and empathic distress, moral trauma (moral injury) and soul murder stop one dead – not necessarily literally but emotionally, cognitively and practically. That is the challenge of the paradox and seeming contradiction: how to continue empathizing in the face of empathic distress. Is there a method of continuing to practice empathizing in the face of such distressing unsettlement? At least initially, the solution is a narrative proposal. Recall that Perseus used a shield, which was also a magic reflective mirror, indirectly to see the Medusa as a reflection without being turned to stone and, thus seeing her, being able to fight and defeat her. The shield acted as a defense against the trauma represented by the Medusa, enabling Perseus to get up close and personal without succumbing to the toxic affects and effects. There is no other way to put it – the artistic treatment of trauma is the shield of Perseus. It both provides access to the trauma and defends against the most negative consequences of engaging with it. The shield does not necessarily render the trauma sensible or meaningful in a way of words, yet the shield takes away the power of the Gorgon/trauma, rending it unable to turn one to stone. In the real-world practice of trauma therapy, this means rendering the trauma less powerful. The real world does not have the niceness of the narrative, where the Gorgon is decapitated – one and done! One gradually – by repeated working through – gets one’s power back as the trauma shrinks, gets smaller, without, however, completely disappearing. The trauma no longer controls the survivor’s life.
The question for this inquiry into Beloved is what happens when one brings literary language, refined language, artistic language, beautiful language, to painful events, appalling events, ugly events, dehumanizing events, traumatic events? The literary language has to dance around the traumatic event, which is made precisely present with expanded power by avoiding being named, leaving an absence. The traumatic events that happened were such that the language of witnessing includes the breakdown of the language of witnessing. As Hartman notes in his widely quoted study:
It is interesting that in neoclassical aesthetic theory what Aristotle called the scene of pathos (a potentially traumatizing scene showing extreme suffering) was not allowed to be represented on stage. It could be introduced only through narration (as in the famous recits [narrative] of Racinian tragedy) (Hartman 1995: 560 ftnt 30).
The messenger arrives and narrates the awful event, which today in a streaming series would be depicted in graphic detail using special effects and enhanced color pallet. One might say that Sophocles lacked special effects, but it is that he really “got it” – less is more. The absence of the most violent defining moment increases its impact. Note this does not mean – avoid talking about it (the trauma). It means the engagement is not going to be a head on encounter and attack, but a flanking movement. In the context of narrative, this does not prevent the reader from engaging with the infanticide. On the contrary, it creates a suspense that hooks the reader like a fish with the rest of the narrative reeling in the reader. The absence makes the engagement a challenge, mobilizing the reader’s imagination to fill in the blank in such a way that it recreates the event as a palpable vicarious event. It is necessary to raise the ghost prior to exorcising it, and the absentee implication does just that.
If this artistic engagement with trauma is not “writing trauma” in LaCapra’s sense, then I would not know it:
“Trauma indicates a shattering break or caesura in experience which has belated effects. Writing trauma would be one of those telling after-effects in what I termed traumatic and post-traumatic writing (or signifying practice in general). It involves processes of acting out, working over, and to some extent working through in analyzing and ‘giving voice’ to [it] [. . . ] – processes of coming to terms with traumatic ‘experiences,’ limit events, and their symptomatic effects that achieve articulation in different combinations and hybridized forms. Writing trauma is often seen in terms of enacting it, which may at times be equated with acting (or playing) it out in performative discourse or artistic practice” (LaCapra 2001: 186–187).
If the writing (and reading) of the traumatic events is a part of working through the pain and suffering of the survivors (and acknowledging the memory of the victims), then the result for the individual and the community is expanded well-being, expanded possibilities for aliveness, vitality, relatedness, and living a life of satisfaction and fulfillment. Instead of being ruled by intrusive flashbacks and nightmares, the survivor expands her/his power over the events that were survived. This especially includes the readers engaging with the text who are survivors of other related traumatic events, dealing with their own personal issues, which may be indistinguishable from those of fellow-travelers in trauma. That is the situation at the end of Beloved when Paul D returns to Sethe and Denver (Sethe’s daughter) after the community has exorcised the ghost of Beloved. It takes a village – a community – to bring up a child; it also takes a village to exorcise the ghost of one.
References
Anonymous. (2012). Trolley problem (The trolley dilemma). Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem [checked on 2023-06-25]
Hannah Arendt. (1970). On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Caty Caruth. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Donald Davidson. (1974). On the very idea of a conceptual scheme. In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2001: 183–198.
Geoffrey H Hartman. (1995). On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies New Literary History , Summer, 1995, Vol. 26, No. 3, Higher Education (Summer, 1995): 537 – 563 .
Martin Heidegger. (1927). Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trs.). New York: Harper and Row, 1963.s
Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin. (1988). The Abuse of Casuistry. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dominick LaCapra. (1999). Trauma, absence, loss. Critical Inquiry, Summer, 1999, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Summer, 1999): 696–727
Dominick LaCapra. (2001). Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, John Hopkins Unviersity Press.
Stephen Levinson. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Toni Morrison. (1987). Beloved. New York: Vintage Int.
Friedrich Nietzsche. (1883). Thus Spoke Zarathustra, R. J. Hollingdale (tr.). Baltimore: Penguin Press, 1961.
________________. (1888/1901). The Will to Power, R. J. Hollingdale (tr.). New York: Vintage, 1968.
Ruth Leys. (2000). Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Boris Sagal, Director. (1981). Masade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masada_(miniseries) [checked on 2023-06-25).
J. Shay, (2014). Moral injury. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31(2), 182-191. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036090
Leonard Shengold. (1989). Soul Murder Revisited: Thoughts About Therapy, Hate, Love, and Memory. Hartford: Yale University Press.
Bessel van der Kolk. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Penguin.
[1] For those readers wondering how Sethe regained her freedom after being arrested for murder (infanticide), Beloved provides no information as to the sequence. During the historical trial an argument was made that as a free woman, Margaret Garner should be tried and convicted of murder, so that the Abolitionist governor of Ohio could then pardon her, returning here to freedom. Something like that needs to be understood in the story, though it is a fiction. It is a fiction, since in real life, Garner and her children were indeed returned to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act. Moral trauma within soul murder indeed.
[2] Caravaggio was a good looking fellow, and he uses himself as a model for the face of the Medusa. This does not decide anything. Arguably, Caravaggio was arguably memorializing – transfiguring – his own life traumas, which were many and often self-inflicted as befits a notorious manic-depressive.
© Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empathy Lessons, 2nd Edition, is now available as an ebook…
The release of the ebook version of Empathy: Lessons ,2nd Edition, coincided with a major astronomical event – the total solar eclipse that traversed North America on Monday April 8, 2024. The gods are watching and winking at us humans to encourage expanding our empathic humanism!
Empathy is oxygen for the soul (see Chapter 6: Evidence-based empathy training). So, if you are short of breath due to life stress, get the expanded empathy delivered in this book. Just as the body needs oxygen to live physically, the soul needs empathy to live emotionally. Most people are naturally empathic, but the cynicism and denial needed to survive everyday life drives empathy away. Remove the obstacles to empathy and empathy naturally develops and grows. That is the empathy lesson in a nutshell without all the guidance and practice needed to succeed. Find out how to take your empathy to the next level.
In addition to all the features of the First Edition—a readiness assessment for empathy, tips on overcoming resistance to empathy, evidence-based empathy training, empathic techniques of stress reduction, applications to dealing with bullying, healthy well-being, and capitalism—the enlarged Second Edition includes new chapters on rhetorical empathy in politics, the limitations of empathy (and what to do about them), and an expanded chapter on empathy as a lens on love and romance. Not to be missed!
The empathy lessons include how—
To perform a readiness assessment; establish a set up for success in cleaning up inauthenticities that block empathy so that empathy can expand and flourish;
Empathy is not an “on–off” switch but a tuner (a dial) that expands or contracts in accessing the vicarious experience of the other person;
Empathy works as a method of data gathering about the other person, providing a vicarious experience of the other person without being flooded by the experience;
Introspection, vicarious experience, listening to one’s own “voice over” and radical acceptance are the royal road to empathic receptivity;
Empathic receptivity overcomes emotional contagion, creating a set up for clear communication of feelings and experiences;
Empathic understanding overcomes conformity and enables shifting out of stuckness into contribution, transformation, and leadership, including satisfying and flourishing relationships;
Empathic interpretation overcomes projection and is the folk definition of empathy, walking in another’s shoes, adding “top down” empathy to “bottom up,” empathic receptivity;
Empathic responsiveness drives out anger and rage, acting as a soothing balm to suffering and emotional upset, deescalating conflict and aggression;
Scientific, peer-reviewed, evidence-based research confirms that empathy reduces inflammation and stress;
Relationships get “weaponized” in bullying and, coming from empathy, how to overcome bullying, reestablishing boundaries: recommendations to students, teachers, administrators on how to stop bullying (including cyber-bullying) and promote empathy;
“Corporate empathy” is not a contradiction in terms, “CEO” now means “chief empathy officer,” and empathy is now the ultimate “capitalist tool”;
In rhetorical empathy, the speaker’s words address the listening of the audience in such a way as to leave the audience with the experience of having been heard. The speaker articulates the experience the audience is hiding harboring in their hearts yet have been unable to express.
To expand empathy, start with and stick with integrity and authenticity – start with creating a safe space of acceptance and toleration. Fake in; fake out. Empathy is based on integrity and being straight with the other person to and with whom one is trying to relate.
Decline the choice between empathy and compassion, between expanding empathy and fighting and reducing the empire of prejudice, imperialism, the pathologies of capitalism, and violence.
Some have tried to force a choice between compassion and empathy. The world needs both more compassion and expanded empathy.
My colleagues and friends are telling me, “Louis, you are sooo 20th Century – no one is reading hard copy books anymore! Electronic publishing is the way to go.” Following my own guidance about empathy, I have heard you, dear reader. The electronic versions of all three books, Empathy Lessons, 2nd Edition, Empathy: A Lazy Person’s Guide, and A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy – drum roll please – are now available.
Feeling like you are thrown “under the bus” again and it’s getting crowded under there? Get the empathy you need to fight back and flourish in this book. Get expanded empathy here!
Order from author’s page: Empathy Lessons, 2nd Edition: https://tinyurl.com/29rd53nt
Order from author’s page: Empathy: A Lazy Person’s Guide: https://tinyurl.com/29rd53nt
Order from author’s page: A Critical Review of Philosophy of Empathy: https://tinyurl.com/29rd53nt
Read a review of the 1st edition of Empathy Lessons – note the list of the Top 30 Empathy Lessons is now (2024) expanded to the Top 40 Empathy Lessons: https://tinyurl.com/yvtwy2w6
Read a review of A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy: https://tinyurl.com/49p6du8p
Above: Cover art: Empathy Lessons, 2nd Edition, illustration by Alex Zonis, original oil paint on board, entitled “Memory blocks: Shimon”
Order from author’s page: A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy: https://tinyurl.com/mfb4xf4f
Above: Cover art: A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy, illustration by Alex Zonis
In conclusion, let me again say a word on behalf of hard copy books – they too live and are handy to take to the beach where they can be read without the risk of sand getting into the hardware, screen glare, and your notes in the margin are easy to access. Is this a great country or what – your choice of pixels or paper!?!
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Paul Ricoeur, Philosopher of Empathy
This article on Paul Ricoeur, empathy, and the hermeneutics of suspicion in literature will be engaging to students of Ricoeur and empathy alike. One can download the PDF directly from the journal Etudes Ricœeurienne / Ricoeur Studies website: http://ricoeur.pitt.edu/ojs/ricoeur/article/view/628
The article is in English and an abstract is cited below at the bottom. If the above link does not work for any reason, then scroll to the bottom, where one can download the PDF within this blog post.
Meanwhile, I offer a recollection of my personal encounter with Professor Ricœur starting when I was a third year undergraduate at the UChicago. (This is an excerpt from a pending manuscript on empathy in the context of literature.)
By the time I was an undergraduate in my junior year in college, Paul Ricoeur had just arrived at the University of Chicago. Professor Ricoeur had attempted to play a conciliatory role in listening to and addressing student grievances in the face of entrenched method of lecturing by ex cathedra by mandarin professors at the Sorbonne, Paris, France, and related schools in the system. Though Ricoeur did not use the word “empathy” in his role as administrator at the University of Nanterre, he was attempting to play a role in conflict mediation, during the strike of student and workers in Paris in May 1968, a role in which empathy is famously on the critical path.
[Photo: Paul Ricoeur, circa 1970 upon his arrival at the University of Chicago, looking for all the world like the Hollywood icon, James Dean. University of Chicago News office: Detailed photo credit below.]
Ricœur’s intervention in the dynamics of academic politics and expanding the community of scholars the way he had done in setting up a kind of philosophy university in the German prisoner of war camp for his fellow French prisoners in 1941 did not work as well as he had hoped. Though it would not be fair to anyone (or to be taken out of context), the Germans (at that moment) were less violent than the striking French students and Peugeot workers in 1968. The French students threw tomatoes at Ricœur and called him a “old clown”; whereas the University of Chicago “threw” at him a prestigious named professorship. He liked the latter better. Ricœur’s courses were open to undergraduates who got permission, too, so I signed up for two of them – Hermeneutics and The Religious Philosophies of Kant / Hegel. Insert here a mind-bending blur of hundreds of pages of reading interspersed with dynamic and engaging presentations of the material. After the somewhat softball oral exams, for which he charitably gave me a pass, my head was spinning, and I needed to take a year off from school to regroup. I am not making this up. I worked as a parking lot attendant selling parking passes, which was an ideal job, since I could read a lot—you know, German-English facing pagination of two separate philosophical texts. This interruption also gave me time to go out for theatre to work on overcoming my painful social awkwardness and try and get a date with a girl. This “therapy” worked well enough, though, like most socially inept undergraduates, I had no skill at small talk and tended to utter what I had to say out of the blue and without creating any context. When I returned to school the next year to finish up, I proposed doing a bachelor’s thesis on Kant’s Refutation of Idealism, and I went into Professor Ricoeur’s office to make my proposal. Ricoeur was team teaching “Myth and Symbolism” with Mircea Eliade, and the “Imagination and Kant’s Third Critique” with Ted Cohen. Without any introductory remarks—I don’t think I even said my name—I presented the idea for my bachelor’s thesis. Without further chit-chit, raising one finger in the air for emphasis and smiling broadly, the first thing he said to me was: “An internal temporal flux implies an external spatial permanence.” With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, I consider this a suitably empathic response, albeit an unconventional one. My paper eventually got published in the proceedings of the Acts of the 5th International Kant Congress. Fast forward a couple of years, comprehensive written exams in philosophy, and I proposed to write a PhD dissertation in philosophy on empathy [Einfühlung] and interpretation. Max Scheler’s Essence and Forms of Feelings of Sympathy [Wesen und Formen der Sympathiegefühl] contains significant material on empathy, and is (arguably) an early version of C. Daniel Batson’s collection of empathically-related phenomena. I was reading it with Professor Ricœur. Meanwhile, a psychoanalysis named Heinz Kohut, MD, like so many, a refugee from the Nazis, was innovating in empathy in the context of what was to become Self Psychology. I told one of the faculty at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis who was a mentor to me (and a colleague of Kohut), Arnold Goldberg, MD, about Ricœur’s Freud and Philosophy. Whether at my instigation or on Dr Goldberg’s own initiative (Ricoeur really needed no introduction from me), Dr Goldberg introduced Professor Ricoeur to the editors at the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA) and the result was Ricœur’s publication “The Question of Proof In Freud’s Psychoanalytic Writings” in JAPA August 1977 [Volume 25, Issue 4 6517702500404]. Using graduate students as a good occasion for a conversation to build relationships, we all then had dinner at the Casbah, a middle eastern restaurant on Diversey near Seminary Avenues in Chicago’s Old Town.
It always seemed to me that Professor Ricoeur was a teacher of incomparable empathy, though he rarely used the word, at least until I started working on my dissertation on the subject of empathy and interpretation. I am pleased, indeed honored, to be able to elaborate the case here, while also defending Ricœur’s hermeneutics of suspicion from a misunderstanding that has shadowed the term since Toril Moi’s discussion (2017) of it at the University of Chicago colloquium on the topic shortly before the pandemic, the details of which are recounted in the article.
ricouerempathyinthecontextofsuspicionDownload
ABSTRACT: This essay defends Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion against Toril Moi’s debunking of it as a misguided interpretation of the practice of critical inquiry, and we relate the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy to the hermeneutics of suspicion. For Ricoeur, empathy would not be a mere psychological mechanism by which one subject transiently identifies with another, but the ontological presence of the self with the Other as a way of being —listening as a human action that is a fundamental way of being with the Other in which “hermeneutics can stand on the authority of the resources of past ontologies.” In a rational reconstruction of what a Ricoeur-friendly approach to empathy would entail, a logical space can be made for empathy to avoid the epistemological paradoxes of Husserl and the ethical enthusiasms of Levinas. How this reconstruction of empathy would apply to empathic understanding, empathic responsiveness, empathic interpretation, and empathic receptivity is elaborated from a Ricoeurian perspective.
Photo credit: University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf digital item number, e.g., apf12345], Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
This blog post and web site (c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Review: The varieties of empathy in Richard Wright’s (1940) novel Native Son
Review: The varieties of empathy in Richard Wright’s (1940) novel Native Son(New York: Harper Perennial 504 pp + end matter)
The varieties of empathy and empathic experiences extend from authentic empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, and empathic responsiveness, all the way to fake empathy and mutilated empathy. Wright’s novel, Native Son, provides abundant examples of how empathy breaks down into emotional contagion, conformity, projection, and communications getting lost in translation. Of course, once empathy breaks down and fails, strictly speaking, it is no longer empathy and calls for a response to “clean up” the misunderstanding out of which a rigorous and critical empathy is restored and reestablished. Nevertheless, the varieties of empathically related phenomena that are constellated makes Wright’s classic work a study in empathy in all its diverse forms.
Native Son is as powerful and timely as it was when Richard Wright first published it in 1940. Though it has aspects of tragedy and traffics in ruin and wreck, in the final analysis, it has as much in common with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as it does with ancient Greek tragedy by Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides.
The novel has not changed since 1940, but the world has – becoming both better and worse. To open up the reader’s historical empathy, a background report will be useful and is provided. This report also provides a chapter in African American history. The engagement with Native Son will be interspersed in this review with historical details that bring to life the power of the story in ways that might not be appreciated without a firm historical grounding. This is not a digression but of the essence, lest we forget how far we have come, and how far we still have to go to expand empathy and attain social justice.
The world has become better in that the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown versus the Board of Education (1954) that separate, segregated education in grammar and high schools is inherently
unequal. That is worth repeating: Separate but equal is inherently unequal. The world has become better in that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act (1965/1965) were passed by a super majority of Congress. These outlawed segregation by law, also called “Jim Crow”; these enabled county and congressional districts in the South (or anywhere) with majority black populations to register to vote and elect black sheriffs and local officials. Why could they not do so previously? There were discriminatory poll taxes, which the impoverished people could not afford to pay; there were written tests (including trick questions) which people who lacked reading skills or merely had a grammar school education were unable to pass; there were other bureaucratic obstacles including the need to present state issued documents that were hard to obtain, putting the would-be voter in a double bind. One hastens to add that the struggle for social and political justice continues, with the US Supreme Court (2023) requiring Alabama and Georgia to redraw their gerrymandered congressional districts to allow for majority black districts. Under backward steps, the so-called “war on drugs” – espoused by Nancy Reagan and implemented by the Clinton administration, resulted in the incarceration (still ongoing) of a generation of young black men for relatively victimless crimes involving using crack cocaine.
Meanwhile, schools of all kinds continue to be under stress because of mass casualty gun violence. Teaching is a tough job, especially elementary and middle schools and it has gotten tougher; the bureaucratic requirements to present politically correct curriculum has pushed out fundamental skills of critical thinking along with skills such as the three R-s – reading, writing and (a)rithmetic. These have been replaced by the need for librarians and administrators to act in the role of surveillance state capitalism (see Zuboff 2018), overseeing whether some text refers to “gay,” “trans,” the name of a sex organ, and so on, and that someone – especially a parent – might be made to feel uncomfortable. To be sure, parents and educators need to be sensitive to the stages of child development and present material that fits the stage at which the growing child is maturing.
While Jim Crow is a historical reference and black empowerment is advancing, at times haltingly, the number of unarmed black people who end up dead after encounters with the local police has astonished everyone – everyone except black people who have known all about it all along. Today the number of black CEOs of major corporations is some 5.9 % out of an overall black population of 13.6% (US Census). That is progress since 1940 when Wright’s work was published, at which time the percentage was essentially zero. Johnson Publications, the publisher of Ebony magazine (among others), would not be founded until 1942. Yet a case can be made that, though many of the social and legal details are different, the need for struggle and protest is as powerful today as it was in 1940. We are not living in a post racial society, notwithstanding fact of having had a black president. All this and more may usefully inform our reading of Native Son.
Now to the narrative. The protagonist, Bigger Thomas (henceforth referred to as “BT”), completes the 8thgrade. He is too poor to continue school, nor is he motivated to do so. He experiences segregation and prejudice wherever he turns, as indeed do all black people. BT says, “Hell, it’s a Jim Crow army. All they want a black man for is to dig ditches. And in the navy, all I can do is wash dishes and scrub floors” (1940: 353). BT is not allowed to become a pilot or a tank driver or a professional. “I wanted to be an aviator once. But they wouldn’t let me go to the school where I was suppose’ to learn it. They built a big school and then drew a line around it and said that nobody could go to it but those who lived within the line. That kept all the colored boys out” (1940: 353). It is true there were a few exceptions – some black people go to college and become doctors, lawyers, or engineers, though how they pulled that off is not for the faint of heart.
However, basically, the form of life under segregation (Jim Crow) does not just lack possibility – the possibility of possibility itself is missing. Possibility is not even defined. What does that mean? For example, as soon as Barak Obama was elected US President, the media went to middle schools and interviewed black ten-year-old children about what they wanted to be when they grew up. They immediately knew they wanted to be President. Now this little different than wanting to be a cowboy or a fireman or a doctor, a child’s fantasy. The point is that prior to Obama’s election the possibility could not even be imagined by black children, excepting perhaps some weird science fiction scenario. That is what is meant by the possibility of possibility. BT lacks the possibility of possibility.
What happens in the narrative after BT serendipitously gets a “good job” as a chauffeur with a wealthy white family, shows that BT still does not “get” – understand or experience – the possibility of possibility. BT is so constantly in survival mode that, in trying to survive, he does the very thing that causes his tragic undoing. It is a well-known stereotype that whenever a black man is lynched or otherwise “taken down” socially, he is initially accused of assaulting or trying sexually to molest a white woman.
Who Is BT as a person and as a possibility at the start of the story? He is bully and a petty criminal. Malcolm Little, who became Malcolm X, was eleven years old when Wright began working on Native Son in 1936. Both BT and Malcolm, each in their own way, started out as petty criminals. Malcolm was arrested and went to prison. Malcom was the only person I ever heard of who said that prison made him better – indeed saved his life – because he met a follower of a version of strict Islam that enabled him to turn his life around, channeling his intelligence and leadership skills into black empowerment (though, ultimately, it also eventually led to his undoing in a tragedy of betrayal).
Meanwhile, in Native Son, Mary Dalton is the young adult daughter of the wealthy Henry Dalton, who has given some $5 million dollars to the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) while continuing to operate inner city slums overcrowded with blacks who are unable to rent or buy in other neighborhoods due to red lining and restrictive covenants (contracts) that prevent selling to black people. Moral ambiguities and flat-out hypocrisy are front and center. Henry’s wife is blind – she cannot see – and walks about the mansion dressed in white like a ghost. Everyone else in the novel – black and white – can see well enough – are visually unimpaired – but have blind-spots and unconscious biases sufficient to sink the Titanic. They do. Full speed ahead into the field of ice bergs!
Mary is an undergraduate at the local university near their mansion on Drexel Blvd. As a part of her late adolescent rebellion, she goes for the kind of boyfriends most calculated to shock her parents. She likes those “bad boys.” In this case, that would be the left wing radical and card carrying communist, Jan. On background, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti – Sacco and Vanzetti – were executed in the electric chair in 1927 for being anarchists, amid anti-Italian and anti-immigrant hysteria, not for the robbery and murder of which they were convicted and did not commit.
Wright was authoring at a time (circa 1936) when the Great Depression was still very much an economic reality. The Mayor was a machine boss, who would respond to crime waves by rounding up Communists and Negros. The Governor would call out the National Guard to put down workers who tried to form a union and go out on strike. The blacklisting of workers, both white and black (but mostly white because the blacks did not have jobs), who attempted to form unions was common, which meant they could not find work. Corporations stockpiled tear gas, vomit gas, ammunition and machine guns for armed strike breakers to use against railroad, steel, and manufacturing workers who dared to go out on strike. The National Labor Relations Board was not even validated by the US Supreme Court until 1937 in NLRB v. Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation, 301 U.S. 1 (1937). The forty-hour work week did not become law until the Fair Labor Standards Act (29 U.S. Code Chapter 8) was first enacted in 1938 under President Roosevelt’s New Deal.
This was a different world from 2023 and being a “Communist” meant something different than it does today, when, in the wake of the success of the trade union movement, much of what the original movement sought to accomplish (such as the 40 hour work week, sick leave, paid overtime, etc.) is part of standard legal labor law practice, rendering The Party irrelevant. Nevertheless, Mary and her boyfriend, Jan, a committed Communist, saw a common cause between the oppressed workers and the oppressed black people, and in this they were accurate enough, but naïve and idealistic, even utopian, in what it was going to take to make a difference.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions – and fake empathy. The privileged daughter, Mary, of the wealthy real estate tycoon (Mr Dalton), wants something from her new chauffeur. Remember, BT has just got a new, good paying job as the chauffeur. Mary wants him (BT) to ignore orders from her father, BT’s employer, and drive her around town with her boyfriend instead of to the University. Mary uses him (BT) as she would any extension of her own self-interest. For Mary, BT is an extension of her narcissism. BT later reports on his first encounter with Mary:
“She acted and talked in a way that made me [BT] hate her [Mary]. She made me feel like a dog. I was so mad I wanted to cry [. . . .] Mr Max, we’re all split up. What you say is kind ain’t kind at all. I didn’t know nothing about that woman. All I knew was that they kill us for women like that. We live apart. And then she comes and acts like that to me” (1940: 35).
The “acted like that” is the fake empathy – it seems kind enough on the surface in that the language does not have any devaluing words; yet there is a subtext – a soft violence, a quiet aggression, a conversational implicature that wrappers the relationship in BT’s subordination. “Acted like that” may also have a seductive aspect to it in that “being nice” in a situation where “no contact” is the norm may easily be misinterpreted as romantic flirting. The latter is not explicit in the text, but one thing is clear: BT and Mary Dalton really are the moth and the flame. Naivete and innocence are abundant on all sides. The moth has an automatic, hypnotic-like attraction to the flame. Little does the moth know what awaits. Does the flame have empathy for the moth? No, the flame is just the flame, towards which the moth has a luminously-based incentive that is its incineration. On background, the US Supreme Court finally ruled in Loving v Virginia in 1967 that anti-miscegenation laws, prohibiting marriage between whites and blacks (among others), were unconstitutional.
BT has survived on the street among white people by saying “Yessum; it’s all right with me” (1940: 64) and doing as he is told, and (in effect) justifying it by saying he was following orders. Recall, this is 1938 and that statement will come to have a different meaning in 1963 as Hannah Arendt reports for The New Yorker magazine on the trial of one Adolph Eichmann, who said something similar regarding the Holocaust. “I was just following orders.” There is nothing wrong with a chauffeur following orders, yet, in this case, “following orders” from Mary because she is white is an integrity outage in relation to his employment agreement with Mr Dalton to drive Mary to school. BT’s relationship to his word is as “fast and loose” as a rabbit randomly zig-zagging to try to survive by escaping a predatory fox.
Mary tells him “After all, I’m on your side” (1940: 64), and BT was not even aware of the possibility that changing side was imaginable – that there was a gate in the wall between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, employed and unemployed – mostly white and black. BT is getting $25 dollars a week and a pound of pork chops costs 5 cents ($.05), so that is a good wage. BT is in touch with his own self-interest, which is to keep his job so he can help himself and his mother and siblings. Yet something is off:
“Now, what did that mean? She was on his side. What side was he on? Did she mean that she liked colored people? Well, he [BT] had heard that about her whole family. Was she really crazy? How much did her folks know of how she acted? But if she were really crazy, why did Mr Dalton let him drive her out? [….]
“She was an odd girl, all right. He [BT] felt something in her over and above the fear she inspired in him. She responded to him as if he were human, as if he lived in the same world as she. And he had never felt that before in a white person. But why? Was this some kind of a game? The guarded feeling of freedom he had while listening to her was tangled with the hard fact that she was white and rich, a part of the world of people who told him what he could and could not do” (1940: 64, 65).
If someone tells you something that is too good to be true, it probably is. The ancient Greeks besieging Troy give up, sail off, and leave behind a giant horse as a gift to the gods. Casandra throws a spear at it, and it makes a hollow sound – thwomp! “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!” No one believes her. Things do not work out well for the Trojans. “After all, I’m on your side.” The blind Mrs Dalton, walking around the mansion in her ghostly white gown, is the ineffective prophet, representing the blindness of all the players.
“Fake empathy” is defined here as a form of empathic responsiveness in which the person(s) claiming to be empathic towards the Other believe their own BS (bunkum, baloney, balderdash), endorse their own malarky, and, in effect, are sincerely self-deceived about the conflict of interest in which they are engaged. In another context, “fake empathy” could mean being intentionally deceptive as when a used car salesman knows the auto is defective but represents it as being in excellent shape. In most cases, the problematic sales person believes his or her own lies and could pass a lie detector test, which, of course, does not detect lies, but merely physiological arousal due to the stress of trying to deceive.
Mary wants BT to hide the facts from her father (that she is not gong to night school but out on the town with her “bad boy” community friend Jan). This puts BT at risk of losing his job. Mary acts in such a way as to claim to be on BT’s side, which is accurate enough in that she endorses racial integration and rights for workers, while seemingly remaining uninformed about the monopoly rents collected from black people by her father’s South Side Real Estate Corporation. Yet how could she not know? Another blind spot. More deception and self-deception.
If a further example is needed, Mary’s fake empathy continues as an expression of naivete and projection:
“You know, Bigger [BT], I’ve long wanted to go into these houses,” she said, pointing to the tall, dark apartment buildings looming to either side of them, “and just see how your people live. You know what I mean? I’ve been to England, France and Mexico, but I don’t know how people live ten blocks from me. We know so little about each other. I just want to see. I want to know these people. Never in my life have I been inside of a Negro house. Yet they must live like we live. They’re human . . . . There are twelve million of them . . . ” (1940: 69–70; italics and ellipsis in the original)
In so far as Mary genuinely cares about her black neighbors, this is a first step, born of good, caring intentions. However, Mary’s privilege, naivete, and arrogance (this list is not complete) are obstacles to her empathy. Her empathy misfires as projection. Mary speaks to BT in the third person about the group of which he himself is a part. The condescension is so thick that BT’s street knife would not cut through it had he even thought to try. Mary says, “Yet they [black people] must live like we live,” and that is definitely not the case. BT lives with his mother and two younger siblings in a single room. The opening scene of the novel involves a battle with a large rat in the small single room. Thus, the building is rat infested. Mary lives in a mansion with multiple servants, including BT. Mary tries to take a walk in BT’s shoes, shifting points of view, but it does not work. She is unable to take off her own shoes, so to speak – she can only imagine a glamorous life of travel – and her empathic imagination is insufficient to have a vicarious experience of the grinding, dehumanizing, poverty of her black neighbors, which poverty lives in her blind spot.
In contrast to fake empathy, a rigorous and critical empathy examines its own blind spots, projections, and conflicts of interests. It knows that it can be inaccurate or misfire. By cleaning up its conflicts of interests, projections, emotional contagions, and/or messages lost in translation, empathy becomes critical and rigorous. Unfortunately, Mary does not live to have the opportunity to work through her fake empathy to a rigorous and critical one, and BT experiences this dawning realization as he awaits execution for killing her.
The reader may say, I want instant empathy. Like instant coffee, just add water and stir. Wouldn’t it be nice? Nor is anyone saying such a thing as “instant empathy” is impossible. It may work well enough in a pinch; but like instant coffee, the quality may not be on a par with that required by a more demanding or discriminating appreciation and taste.
Jan’s case is similar to Mary’s though more nuanced. Jan wants something from BT as does Mary, but Jan’s agenda is less individual and, as befits a Communist, guided by an analysis of class. Yet he is equally naïve and utopian. Driving along Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, which offers a panoramic view of the tall buildings in the central city from the South Side, Jan remarks:
“We’ll own all that some day, Bigger,” Jan said with a wave of his hand. “After the revolution it’ll be ours. But we’ll have to fight for it. What a world to win, Bigger! And when that day comes, things’ll be different. There’ll be no white and no black; there’ll be no rich and no poor” (1940: 68).
Jan’s innocence can be measured in that he is not even a very good Communist – his economic analysis is badly flawed. Jan talks as if the Communist revolution will change ownership from the capitalist to the communists whereas any Communist will tell you that the revolution will bring about the abolition of private property. Yet even if he is not a good Communist, Jan is a good human being. His righteous indignation is functioning. Learning that BT’s father was killed in a riot (read “massacre”) targeting black people in the South, Jan says to BT:
“Listen, Bigger, that’s what we want to stop. That’s what we Communists are fighting. We want to stop people from treating others that way. I’m a member of the Party. Mary sympathizes. Don’t you think if we got together we could stop things like that?” [….] You’ve heard about the Scottsboro boys?” (1940: 75; quotations and italics in the original)
On back ground, in 1931 eight black young adults and one juvenile, The Scottsboro Boys, were falsely accused of raping two women. After examination by a medical doctor, no evidence of rape was found. None. The testimony of the women themselves was coerced in that they were involved in sketchy activities that might have opened them up to criminal charges. The young men were tried by an all-white male jury for rape and sentenced to death for it (except for the juvenile, who was sentenced to life in prison). The NAACP and the Communist Party provided legal assistance to the young men and stopped the State from executing them; but they had to endure long and unjust years in prison. The novel calls out the newspaper headline in bold type in referring to BT:
“AUTHORITIES HINT SEX CRIME. Those words excluded him [BT] utterly from the world. To hint that he had committed a sex crime was to pronounce the death sentence; it meant wiping out of his life even before he was capture; it meant death before death came, for the white men who read those words would at once kill him in their hearts” (1940: 243).
BT’s life unfolds in three phases. Phase 1 lasts until, BT puts a pillow over the face of an intoxicated Mary Dalston, in trying to keep Mary from crying out and giving away that he (a black man) is alone with a white woman, even more “incriminating,” in her bedroom. At best he will lose his job – before being lynched for “rape.” The latter is here defined as the white man’s projected fantasy of the black man’s sexual attraction to and on the part of the white woman, which fantasy must be eliminated by lynching the innocent black man. (See the appendix on the varieties of prejudice below.)
What actually happens when BT is left alone with Mary Dalton, who is completely drunk? Mary is sloppy drunk, and can barely stand. BT tries to help her to her bedroom – by supporting her up the stairs. Practically, he has to carry her. Mary’s blind mother, Mrs Dalton, an insomniac, is wandering about the mansion like a ghost. The reader can see trouble coming – suppose they are discovered together in the dark in or near the bedroom? BT tries to explain to his girlfriend Betsy what happened:
“I didn’t mean to kill her. I just pulled the pillow over her face and she died. Her ma came into the room and the girl was trying to say something and her ma had her hands stretched out, like this, see? [The mother, Mrs Dalton, is blind and could not see BT.] I was scared she was goin’ to touch me. I just sort of pushed the pillow hard over the girl’s face to keep her from yelling. He ma didn’t touch me; I got out of the way. But when she left I went to the bed and the girl … She … She was dead” (1940: 227; italics in the original).
This decisive event happens early on in the story. The reader can see it coming. Mary is drunk. BT is uncertain what to do. Mr Dalton did not clarify to the new chauffeur (who is an extension of the auto) that the “boss” is Mr Dalton, who seems to have a blind spot about his angelic daughter’s rebellious streak. The unconscious fantasy, the unconscious bias, is that a black man alone with a white woman, much less an intoxicated one, is the equivalent of statutory rape. Lies, damn lies, and total nonsense move the action forward. Every action that BT takes to avoid the false accusation advances the action in the direction of an even more tragic outcome. BT ends up smothering Mary in order to avoid being discovered with her and being falsely accused of rape (which, of course, will get one lynched). In BT’s conversation with his attorney, Mr Max, BT muses:
“They would say he had raped her and there would be no way to prove that he had not. That fact had not assumed important in his eyes until now. He stood up, his jaws tightening. Had he raped her? Yes, he had raped her [but, of course, not literally]. Every time he felt as he had felt that night, he raped. But rape was not what one did to women. Rape was what one felt when one’s back was against a well and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one. He committed rape very time he looked into a white face. He was a long, taut piece of rubber which a thousand white hands had stretched to the snapping point, and when he snapped it was rape. But it was rape when he cried out in hate deep in his heart as he felt the strain of living day by day. That, too was rape.” (1940: 227 – 228)
BT’s lawyer (Mr Max) tells the judge at BT’s trial:
“…[T]hat night a white girl was present in a bed and a Negro was standing over he, fascinated with fear, hating her; a blind woman walked into the room and that Negro [BT] killed that girl to keep from being discovered in a position which he knew we claimed warrants the death penalty” (1940: 400).
The being present together in the bedroom of the black chauffeur and the drunken white college age daughter is in 1940 already a capital crime for all intents and purposes. Here” rape” becomes a cipher for all the boundary violations perpetrated by survivors of perpetrations of survivors of perpetrations, and so on, in a seemingly endless cycle back to the Atlantic slave trade (which does not come up in the novel). Two wrongs do not make a right, and yet it is BT’s ownership of the crime that gives him agency, even if that agency is mutilated by the crime that calls it forth.
In Phase 2, BT lives into the devaluing expectations that white people have of him – he becomes a kind of Frankenstein – not just a monster but one created by white society, which monster seeks to strike back for the perceived injustice but goes about it in all the wrong ways that indirectly validate the stereotypes that live in white fantasy. James Baldwin has criticized Wright for writing a protest novel in which black people are depicted as dangerous – sexually and aggressively – in a way that maps to white racist stereotypes. And there is truth to it, yet at every step, Wright’s exaggerated “black badness” calls forth the unexaggerated social and legal injustices of discrimination in the North and Jim Crow in the South. Once again, two wrongs do not make a right. Two wrong make a bad situation worse – and at least twice the wrong. Let he who is without guilt cast the first stone; and, in this case, shame does not stop the stones from flying. Once the stones start flying, no one is spared. Wright makes it clear that BT is caught in the double bind of his own untutored judgment and the incoming pervasive slow violence (and fast aggression) of white society’s segregationist limitations.
In Phase 2, BT descends into hell in a particular sense. It is a kind of mutilated journey of the hero (think of Joseph Campbell’s mythologizing (1990)) on the way to a rebirth of agency, however, with one key difference. BT had not yet been born as a responsible agent, so, instead of “rebirth,” it would be better to say “birth,” born for the first time ever. The definition of hell includes an abundance of pain and suffering, to be sure, but the real hell is that no one hears it – not even God. This is BT’s description:
“[…[T]here were screams and curses and yells of suffering and nobody hears them, for the walls were thick and darkness was everywhere” (1940: 361).
This is BT’s experience of hell as he is locked up in Cook County Jail awaiting his fate. There is no evidence that Wright ever read Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus(or vice versa) or Mephistopheles’ description of hell contained in it. Wright was writing just as World War 2 was starting; Mann, perennially and a few years afterwards as Europe was a smoking ruin that still stank of the crematoriums of the Nazi concentration camps. Note well the above-cited quote is Wright not Mann, and it was written seven years before Mann penned his own description of hell. In a fine literary gesture, in {Mann’s) Mephistopheles’ description of Hell, words are used indirectly to describe the indescribable. In Hell –
“Every compassion, every grace, every sparing, every last trace of consideration for the incredulous, imploring objection ‘that you verily cannot do so unto a soul’: it is done, it happens, and indeed without being called to any reckoning in words; in soundless cellar, far down beneath God’s listening […]” (Mann 1947: 245).
The key aspect of hell – what makes a hell into Hell – is not the fire and ice – though, to be sure, that is not to be dismissed – but the hellish thing is that no one is listening, not even God, especially not God. BT’s fate indeed, though a spark of what might be called radical hope (Lear 2008) emerges when BT meets Mr Max. Mr Max is a “Clarence Darrow for the defense” type lawyer, who is retained for BT by the Communist Party. They are trying to find a common cause between exploited works and the black victims and survivors of racial prejudice, poverty, and social injustice.
In phase three, BT discovers his agency in taking ownership of the quasi-accidental killing of Mary. But this is a very qualified (re)birth in that agency is shot through-and-through with moral trauma. BT is asked to make a choice he should not have to make; that, strictly speaking, he cannot make; and that, in any case, he inevitably makes whether he takes action or not, since doing nothing is also an action. BT enters Mary’s room as a survivor of systematic racism and Jim Crow. He tries to survive the encounter with Mary’s blind mother. He takes an action to prevent being discovered alone with a drunken white woman, and in doing so he unwittingly smothers her with a pillow to prevent her from talking drunken nonsense. BT enters the room a survivor, and leaves it as a perpetrator. That is moral trauma (also called moral injury” (Shay 2014)).
In phase three, BT becomes a kind of Frankenstein and chooses the dark side (in the Star War’s sense – already the language is impossible). Recall that in the original Mary Shelley story, Victor Frankenstein rejects the creature that he assembled out of spare body parts and animated using electricity (electricity being a not-well-understood phenomenon at the time (1808) to which quasi-magical powers were attributed). Dr Frankenstein’s creature is lonely and wants a mate, in effect, a girl friend; but the “mad scientist” cannot countenance creating another such physically hideous creature, thereby, giving birth to an entire race of miscreants. At that point the creature has a kind of Richard III moment – “since I cannot prove a lover / To entertain these fair well-spoken days, / I am determined to prove a villain / and hate [. . . ]” Though it changes the meaning of the sentence to stop it mid-phrase, “hate” is the active ingredient here. He becomes a monster, exacting his revenges by murdering members of Victor Frankenstein’s family. Likewise with BT.
Though all the details are different, BT’s fate follows a parallel trajectory at this point with hatred simultaneously providing the dehumanizing and humanizing element. Hate is also the principle that animates BT’s emergence into agency, albeit a mutilated one, since it occurs on death row.
Until BT committed the first murder, he was little different than the biblical Cain before he slew Abel. Human history begins at the point at which that murder, born of envy, occurs. The murder creates agency. Likewise with BT:
But, after he murdered, he [BT] accepted the crime. And that’s the important thing. It was the first full act of his life; it was the most meaningful, exciting and stirring thing that had ever happened to him. He accepted it because it made him free, gave him the possibility of choice, of action, the opportunity to act and to feel that his actions carried weight [. . . .] It was an act of creation! (1940: 396, 400)
In the beginning was the word – murder. Murder results in one thing for sure – more murder. “The surest way to make certain that there will be more such murders is to kill this boy [BT]” (1940: 391).
Now one may well say, there’s gotta be a better way to get one’s agency, and that would be an accurate statement.
An argument can be made that Mr. Max’s rejection of sympathy in favor of empathy serves the reader well. But does it serve BT well? In terms of saving BT’s life, it would be better to question his agency, to make a play for sympathy, and to point to poverty, cognitive limitations, and a limited IQ. Insult BT, but save his life? Max asks:
“Is love possible to the life of a man I’ve described to this Court?” (1940: 401)
The ability to love, to experience empathy for an Other, has been negated, annulled, killed, by the systematic racism of the entire community – this is soul murder. The short definition of soul murder (a distinction arguably implicit in Wright) is that it is the systematic lack of empathy that destroys the possibility of love, that destroys the very possibility of possibility.
Max’s Jeremiad raises the text to the level of an early articulation of the key theses of the 1619 project (see Hannah-Jones 2019). Max argues to the court that BT is in so many double binds, that his agency is compromised, his empathy is mutilated, by soul murder. (For a sustained treatment of soul murder see Shengold 1989.)
“But in conquering they [the early American settlers] used others, used their lives. Like a miner using a pick or a carpenter using a saw, they bent the will of others to their own. Lives to them were tools and weapons to be wielded against a hostile land and climate.”
Given that BT was convicted by an all-white jury and the Governor, to whom an appeal for clemency was to be made, was a known racist, one might say Max was like Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry undertaking a full frontal assault on the Confederate Fort Wagner – it was a massacre:
“I do not say this in terms of moral condemnation. I do not say it to rouse pity in your for the black men who were slaves for two and one-half centuries [. . . .] It was the imperial dream of a feudal age that made men enslave others” (1940: 389)
Once again, Mr Max eloquently anticipates the 1619 project (Hannah-Jones 2019):
“If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we could call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country [….] Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life [….] What is happening here today is not injustice, but oppression, an attempt to throttle or stamp out a new form of life. And it is this new form of life that has grown up here in our midst” (1940: 391).
“Men once oppressed our forefathers to the extent that they viewed other men as material out of which to build a nation; we in turn have oppressed others to such a degree that they, fumblingly as yet, try to construct meaningful lives out of us!” (1940: 398).
“The hate and fear which we have inspired in him [BT], woven by our civilization into the very structure of his consciousness, into his blood and bones, into the hourly functioning of his personality, have become the justification of his existence” (1940: 400).
This is again an early version and invocation of the ideas that would become the 1619 project. One result of systematic oppression, not just the loss of possibility, but the loss of the possibility of possibility. If one cannot get a job, then that is the loss of possibility; but if one needs and cannot get a work permit, then that is the loss of the possibility of possibility.
Max does not ask for sympathy for BT. Sympathy results in guilt, and people hate those who make them feel guilty, enacting aggression against them. Max asks for empathy, without, however, using the word, which, if granted, would result in community, in belonging, in relatedness. As Dostoyevsky pointed out, people will kill that which evoked in them the condemning sense of guilt (1940: 390) and sympathy does precisely that. Max address the court:
“If I should say that he [BT] is a victim of injustice, then I would be asking by implication for sympathy; and if one insists upon looking at this boy as a victim of injustice, he will be swamped by a feeling of guilt so strong as to be indistinguishable from hate.”
[Max continues] “Of all things, men to not like to feel that they are guilty of wrong, and if you make them feel guilt, they will try desperately to justify it on any grounds; but failing that […] they will kill that which evoked in them the condemning sense of guilt (1940: 389–390)
BT’s act of murder becomes a cause célèbre in the narrative. The NAACP and the Communist Party get BT a powerful attorney, Mr Max, who resembles the historical Clarence Darrow, taking on unpopular causes.
On background, the reader recognizes historical aspects of the Leopold/Loeb (1924) trial in which two wealthy, privileged University of Chicago students engage in a “thrill killing” of 14-year-old Bobby Franks for no good reason other than the killing itself. The perpetrators had near-delusional fantasies of über-man cognitive superiority and committing the perfect crime. Things do not go well. Leopold drops his reading glasses at the location where the victim’s body is dumped, connecting him to the crime scene. The dumbest mistake possible – and just possibly a “Freudian” slip. So much for cognitive superiority. Their defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, engages in a 12-hour presentation at the sentencing hearing, in which, with a penetrating critique of capital punishment, Darrow successfully saves the 18- and 19-year-old murderers from the death penalty (Stone 1971). Darrow’s arguments are still used to today to defend teenage offenders. On background, Loeb was murdered in prison in 1936. Leopold was paroled in 1958.
Less well known is the case of Robert Nixon, who in May 1938 was arrested for murdering a woman with a brick in the course of robbing her apartment (1940: 504; 455 line 17). Nixon was poor and black – was not defended by Clarence Darrow, and was executed in August 1939.
Mr Max talks to BT like a Mensch, like a fellow human being, asking about what he (BT) thought had happened. Max asks a lot of questions, trying to get a sense of what BT had to survive and what motivated him to do what he did.
“Bigger [BT] knew that Max was trying to make him feel that he accepted the way he looked at things and it made him as self-conscious as when Jan had taken his hand and shaken it that night in the car. It made him live again in that hard and sharp consciousness of his color and feel the shame and fear that went with it, and at the same time it made him hate himself for feeling it. He trusted Max” (1940: 346–347)
BT gets in touch with his feelings. Max asks him if he raped Mary. The answer:
“Naw. But everybody’ll say I did. What’s the use? I’m black. They say black men do that. So it don’t matter if I did or if I didn’t” [ . . . .] Mr Max, when folks says things like that about you, you whipped before you born. What’s the use? Yeah; I reckon I was feeling that way [hating Mary] when I was in the room with her. They say we do things like that and they say it to kill us. They draw a line and say for you to stay on your side of the line. They don’t care if there’s no bread over on your side. They don’t care if you die. And they say things like that about you and when you try to come from behind your line they kill you” (1940: 349, 351).
BT is coming from a life of no possibility – no personal space, no (limited) education, no career, no respect from the community, no self-respect – and living into an imminent future of capital punishment, the electric chair: “Over and over he [BT] had tried to create a world to live in, and over and over he had failed” (1940: 345).
“He [BT] breathed softly, wondering about the cool breath of peace that hovered in his body. It was as though he was trying to listen to the beat of his own heart. All around him was darkness and there were no sounds. He could not remember when he had felt as relaxed as this before. He has not thought of it or felt it while Max was speaking to him; it was not until after Max had gone that he discovered that he had spoken to Max as he had never spoken to anyone in his life; not even to himself. And this talking had eased from his shoulders a heavy burden. [….] Max had not compelled him to talk; he had talked of his own accord […] by a curiosity about his own feelings. Max had only sat and listened, had only asked questions” (1940: 359 – 360).
Max gives BT a good listening – gives him empathy – and BT feels “better” – the “heavy burden” is lifted from his shoulders.. His hatred gets dialed down, though not completely extinguished. His inner conflict and hatred are lessened, even as he knows he is not going to get out alive from his self-made predicament:
Max validates BT’s perspective of “no possibility” in a description that also validates how whites are also entangled in systematic racism that lives in unconscious bias, albeit with less harmful effects on whites than blacks:
“And I know that almost every white face you’ve met in your life had it in for you, even when that white face didn’t know it. Every white man considered it his duty to make a black man keep his distance. He doesn’t know why most of the time, but he acts that way” (1940: 346).
In acknowledging how hopeless is the situation, something shifts in BT.
So far BT gets empathic receptivity – another person, Max, is able to take his point of view and have a vicarious experience of how he (BT) feels. In conversation with Max, BT comes to appreciate a new possibility – an empathic possibility. The Other – in this case Max – brings forth the BT’s own humanness, mutilated though it is, by taking the Other’s perspective.
“He [BT] stood up in the middle of the cell floor and tried to see himself in relation to other men, and thing he had always feared to try to do, so deeply stained was his own mind with the hate of others for him. With this new sense of the value of himself gained from Max’s talk, a sense fleeting and obscure, he tried to feel that if Max had been able to see the man in him beneath those wild and cruel acts of his, acts of fear and hate and murder and flight and despair, then he too would have, if he were they, just as now he was hating them and they were hating him. For the first time in his life he felt ground beneath his feet [. . .]” (1940: 361).
BT experiences the emerging ability to “see himself in relation to other men [persons].” Being related to others requires the distinction “self-Other,” open up the possibility of the Other taking a point of view on oneself. This is what Max did for BT in seeing “the man in him [BT] beneath those wild and cruel acts of fear and hate.” If Max can be related to BT, it demonstrates to BT that he can do that for himself and for and with Others, too.
“If he [BT] reached out with his hands, and if his hands were electric wires, and if his heart were a battery giving life and fire to those hands, and if he reached out with his hands and touched other people, reached out through those stone walls and felt other hands connected with other heart – if he did that, would there be a reply, a shock? Not that he wanted those hearts to turn their warmth to him; he was not wanting that much. But just to know that they were there and warm! [. . . .] And in that touch, response of recognition, there would be union, identity’ there would be a supporting oneness, a wholeness which had been denied him all this life” (1940: 362).
What makes the hands come alive in this image of electrical connection and the shock of the human is precisely “the response of recognition,” which brings strength, energy, and vitality to the human heart. This is the empathic moment for BT, which, however, arrives late in the day as he awaits almost certain execution for his crimes.
Thus, the accusation of early critics (and James Baldwin) against Wright of didacticism and protest literature. Perhaps in our own time, but before the racist jury, judge, mayor, and governor, Max makes the best of a bad situation. The result?
BT gets his vitality and aliveness from the Other, in this case Max. Max is able to “see the man in him” and BT, in turn, is able to see that Max sees the man in him (BT), and that grounds him (BT). The Other brings forth empathy for the one, who, in this example, is trying to see himself in relation to other men. A new possibility opens up – the possibility of possibility – relatedness, connectedness – empathy.
Appendix: A Short “Ted Talk” on the Varieties of Prejudice
One may say, prejudice is prejudice and all prejudices are alike, and there would be truth to saying that. Yet when one looks at the dynamics of prejudice, one cannot simply substitute the underlying dynamics of racism against black people for antisemitism or sexism or for homophobia. A short “Ted Talk” on prejudice will again inform our historical empathy.
The fantasy of black hyper masculinity is repressed as a source of anxiety challenging the white male’s (imagined) inadequate sexual potency. It then gets reversed and projected onto the devalued other, who comes at the white man as white woman’s desire for the stereotyped hyper sexed black man. Elisabeth Young-Breuhl (1996: 367) writes in The Anatomy of Prejudices:
The white male’s mythological contractions of black male sexuality – the images of Negro phallic power, animal lust, and rapaciousness – signal the jealousy and resentment over the black’s defilement pleasure, and they also reflect the white male’s anxiety that white women really desire the black’s aggressive sexuality.
In contrast to the hysterical fantasy of the over-dramatized black male, the Jewish person is made the target of an obsessional paranoid over-intellectualization – the totally fictional worldwide conspiracy of the Protocol of the Elders of Zion. Lies, damn lies, and total nonsense. The nonsense continues: In the case of homophobia, one stays with the dynamic of difference for one has to project that, in a certain sense, the boy finds other boys attractive, in that special sexual way, and must defend against being a “fag” by perpetrating acts of aggression. Nor should the sexism and misogyny be overlooked, for BT kills two women – Mary and Bessie – in the one case quasi-accidently and in the other in a cowardly fear of betrayal. In the case of the prejudices of racism (in the narrow sense against blacks) and antisemitism the devalued, despised Other becomes the target of projections one of own inner black and jew in every imaginable positive and negative sense. The differences collapse – inwardly I am the despised Other and get rid of the negative value by externalizing it. In sexism, the dynamic changes, and the anatomical difference between the sexes is such that the difference is impossible to deny, so the Other must be denied, deleted, “killed,” in order to reestablish integrity of the self. In the prejudices stereotype, the Other – the woman in this case – is hated for being inferior cognitively, physically, and so, even as the male harbors an unconscious fantasy of superiority, the power to create life, womb envy.
References
Joseph Campbell. (1990). The Hero’s Journey. Novato, CA: The New World Library.
Nicole Hannah-Jones. (2019). The 1619 Project. New York: One World (NYT Magazine).
Jonathan Lear. (2008). Radical Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
Thomas Mann. (1947). Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Tr. H.T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
J. Shay, (2014). Moral injury. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31(2), 182-191. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036090
Leonard Shengold. (1989). Soul Murder Revisited: Thoughts About Therapy, Hate, Love, and Memory. Hartford: Yale University Press.
Irving Stone (1971). Clarence Darrow for the Defense. Signet.
Richard Wright. (1940). Native Son. New York: Harper Perenniel, 1998.
Elisabeth Young-Breuhl. (1996). The Anatomy of Prejudices. Harvard UP
Shoshona Zuboff. (2018). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile Books.
Photo image credit: Canada Lee as Bigger Thomas in the original Broadway production of Native Son (1941), photographed by Carl Van Vechten.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empathy is hard in the patriarchy
So far, the two-ton elephant in the room is “Maybe men and women really do have different brains – or a combination of brains and early experiences that produce different results from the same input.” Note this applies either in or outside a patriarchal context, though the action items diverge depending on which. Note also that if their neurological givens are not divergent, then the variable of the biooegicay given falls out of the equation, though that does not eliminate the variables of experiences of exploitation and privilege. In short, the evidence of gender research is compelling masterpiece of studied ambiguity.
One researcher who has proposed that men’s and women’s brains are different – nurturing versus systematicity – is Simon Baron-Cohen (2003). As relating to empathy, a fine debunking of Baron-Cohen is provided by Robyn Blum (2017) in her article “Gender and Empathy” (2017).[1]
Common sense suggests that woman is the more nurturing gender, given her role in giving birth and keeping the home fires burning in agricultural, hunting, and traditional indigenous cultures as the men are out hunting food and systematically doing battle with saber-toothed tigers and hostile neighbors. [2] As noted, Simone de Beauvoir asserted, biology is not destiny. Woman is not a mere womb; man is not mere testosterone. Robyn Bluhm’s article probes the research on the evidential basis of this nurturing role and inquires: does it extend to empathy and how far?
Early gender-empathy studies were vulnerable to self-report biases and gender stereotyping that pervasively depicted females in a biased way as the more empathic gender, according to Bluhm. These early studies simply do not stand up to critical scrutiny. Enter Simon Baron-Cohen (2003) and his innovative research, renewing the debate about empathy as a mindedness module subtending empathy and shifting the debate in the direction of neural science as opposed to social roles and their self-fulfilling stereotypes.
Bluhm points out in detail that, as Baron-Cohen’s work gained exposure and traction in the academic market place of ideas, the presentation of his ideas, and the results reported shifted in small but significant ways. At first, Baron-Cohen highlighted measures that were supposed to assess both cognitive and affective empathy, but later the affective dimension fell out of the equation (and the research) and only cognitive empathy was engaged as the target of the research (Bluhm 2017: 381).
Though Baron-Cohen’s initial research described the “male brain” as having “spatial skills,” his later publications, once he became a celebrity academic (once again, my term, not Bluhm’s), redescribe the male brain as “hardwired for systematizing”; likewise, the “female-type” brain, initially credited with being better at “linguistic skills,” was redescribed as “hardwired for empathy.” The language shifts from being about “social skills,” and Baron-Cohen speaks of “empathy” rather than “social skills,” so that the two distinctions are virtually synonymous (Bluhm 2017: 384).
As the honest broker, Bluhm notes that, as with the early research in gender differences, Baron-Cohen’s research has been influential but controversial. Men and women have different routes to accessing and activating their empathy; they respond to different pressures to conform to (or push back against) what the community defines as conforming to gender-appropriate behavior; and men and women even have different incentives for empathic performance.
For example, “…[M]en’s scores on an empathy task equaled women’s when a monetary reward for good performance was offered” (Bluhm 2017: 384). Monetary rewards up; empathy up? Though Bluhm does not say so, the author came away with the distinct impression of a much needed debunking of the neurohype—what we would now call “alternative facts”—a job well done.
Bluhm’s work is especially pertinent in constraining celebrity, executive consultants (once again, my term), running with the neuro-spin, and publishing in the Harvard Business Review, who assert that brain science shows one needs more women executives on corporate boards to expand empathy.
I hasten to add that we do indeed need more women executives, but that is not something demonstrated by brain science, at least as of this date (Q1 2023). We need more women executives because it is demonstrated by statistics (just one of many sources of reasons other than brain science) that to devalue the contributions to innovation, service, and productivity of slightly more than half the population is a highly problematic business practice—foolish, inefficient, and wasteful. The challenge is that the practices that make one good at business—beating the competition, engaging technology problems, solving legal disputes—do not necessarily expand one’s empathy, regardless of gender.
In an expression of insightful and thunderous understatement, Bluhm concludes: “With the exception of studies that rely on participants’ self-reports or on other’s reports of their behavior [which are invalid for other reasons], no consistent gender difference in empathy have been observed. This raises the possibility that gender differences in empathy are in the eye of the beholder, and that the beholder is influenced by gender stereotypes…” (Bluhm 2017: 386). Just so.
Still, Blum does not address the feminist case from the perspective of radical empathy. Though the evidence is anecdotal, not systematic, one can easily imagine women, especially care-takers, laying down the challenge: “We have empathy. We practice empathy everyday in distinguishing the wet cry of an unchanged diaper from the hungry cry of growing infant. Let men bring their empathy game up a couple of levels to match our commitment.” Ultimately, standard empathic receptivity and understanding may be good enough, but where the gendered empathy breaks down is at the point of taking that walk in the Other’s shoes. Men don’t get pregnant, endure morning sickness, months of gestation, significant physical transformations, and give birth to new human beings. That is perhaps the defining paradigm of radical empathy or its breakdown between the sexes, and, as with any experience that one is unable ever to have, one is thrown back on the fictional resources of the imagination.
This is an important point about the call for radical empathy in any context. Radical empathy renews the commitment of standard empathy to be empathic with extreme situations, in the face of empathic distress, in the face of making decisions that no one should have to make, that no one has the right to make but that one makes anyway. Physical trauma, moral trauma, and soul murder are on the list of challenges to the imagination of the witness and the victim, the violator and the one violated, the perpetrator and the survivor, especially when they are the same person. This is not for the faint of heart. When the privileged and powerful call for radical empathy, they must lead by their example, be the change they want to see, not call for the powerless to be even more empathically vulnerable. The powerful must expand their empathy for the less powerful and advantaged, not the other way around. There is precedent for it, for example, as President Obama powerfully articulated the value of empathy for the marginalized and under-privileged, calling on the powerful and privileged to be more inclusive. Wouldn’t it be nice? This is easier said than done, but it must be both said and done! (See Blankenship 2019.)
Meanwhile, with a certain grim, black humor, Isadora Duncan compared childbirth to the “interrogation” of the Spanish Inquisition, and asserted that the latter was not as bad (cited in de Beauvoir 1949: 477). Hence, the “joke,” since Duncan had not been interrogated by the Inquisition whereas she was a mother. Karen Horney argued that men suffer from “womb envy” (Horney 1967). To envy something, one has to have a sense of what it is and what it could be and do for one, even though one does not have direct and original experience of it firsthand. That does not mean that one’s empathy is a failure, yet one’s empathy is definitely challenged.
The ultimate test of the applicability of radical empathy is as follows: one takes off one’s own shoes and tries on the Other’s. Of course, the Other’s do not fit exactly and they almost never will; but, working within the metaphor, one at least “gets” that it is a human foot and one can learn something about where it pinches or chafes the Other. In radical empathy, the shoe pinches so badly that one has to take it off, or, alternatively, one gets the sense that it is not even a human shoe. One has fins or webbed feet. Perhaps not a very radical example, yet one goes to shake hands, and the other person is an amputee. The radical and empathic “hand shake” consists in acknowledging the Other’s courage in the face of adversity. This is perhaps where one’s tongue gets even more teeth marks in it, yet this is the power of being with the other person – really being with the individual without anything else added – comes into its own.
The lesson that radical empathy is trying to teach one here is that part of the definition of being human is that humans have experiences that other humans never have exactly as the other humans have them, but that privileged access is not exclusive access and a vicarious experience is quite good enough to satisfy the requirements of getting started with empathy. To continue the practice of empathy then requires creating a space of acceptance and tolerance within which the speaker and listener can exchange experiences and attempt to translate experiences into terms comprehensible by the Other, even if imperfectly so.
In the case of childbirth, when men try to “take a walk in the Other’s shoes,” using the imaginative tools of empathic interpretation and fiction, the result is botched, if not butchered, as in the so-called “savage tradition” illustrated by Emil Zola’s La Terre (1887), discussed in detail two paragraphs below. One reaches for incomparable and incommensurable experiences. It is impossible for most people to walk on the moon, trek to the South Pole, or summit Mount Everest. Still, it seems problematic to put childbirth in the same sentence as having endured or survived the Holocaust, a totalitarian state torture chamber, diverse crimes and boundary violations involving the human body, living in a war zone, or apartheid in South Africa or Israel, and so on. Yet once pain reaches a certain threshold, the body in pain unmakes the person, and the person is overwhelmed and isolated, dehumanized (Scarry 1985). One could argue back the comparison mixes a generally common experience, giving birth, which determines significant aspects of the life of half the population, with rare and exceptional ones, extreme exploration or extreme violence. There is a hierarchy of “otherizing” experiences, with presumably the most extreme being the least normal and with childbirth being the most extreme common experience. Might the same thing might be said of an Other’s tooth ache, whose pain is isolating and de-normalizing? Well, no, not quite. The vicarious experience of pain is a basic feature of empathic receptivity, though the generalization of pain to childbirth is a limited part of the process of giving birth, albeit a salient one. Arguably childbirth is a remote, hard-to-describe experience, for which qualitatively adequate words and in the right quantity are hard to find, even for women who directly experience it by giving birth, though, to be sure, mothers have more data to work with as embodied enactors of the process.
Empathy is challenged by radical translation out of remote, hard-to-grasp experience to become radical empathy. Radical empathy is called forth by extreme situations in which radical translation is the bridge between self and Other. Radical empathy deploys the same four minimal essential aspects of standard empathy – receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness. The differences from standard empathy map to these dimensions. The listener is aware that this trauma or tragedy is indeed a trauma or tragedy, but, for example, the listener is not on the Titanic, but watching the movie. (Key term: vicarious experience.) The empathic understanding of possibility is radicalized in the sense that possibilities of the experience of pain, suffering, or high spirits exist that the listener’s imagination cannot necessarily grasp in advance.
The debate continues. Notwithstanding the mixed evidence of biology, cultural studies, politics, consider the possibility: men of good will are open to and want to expand their empathy, standard or extreme, for women and their concerns and issues. Suppose men of good will come to their senses. They see the continuation of patriarchy as disgraceful, disadvantaging everyone, its various forms as a function of their own lack of leadership, and like F. W. de Klerk in South Africa in 1992, propose to do their best to “step down,” relinquishing power and privilege in its diverse forms, and in areas where they actually have such, starting, for example, with implementing the US Equal Rights Amendment and related initiatives?
How would one even know if empathy was expanded? The suggestion is that features such as dignity and respect would be expanded, boundaries would be acknowledged and respected. It is not that conflicts would not occur. Of course, conflicts, disagreements, and competition for limited resources would occur; but the disputes would be engaged and compromises reached using such empathic skills as committed active listening, critical thinking, putting oneself in the other’s shoes (after taking off one’s own), and acknowledging differences when they seem un-overcomeable.
Empathy research and reflections are constantly challenged by the protest: “You can’t possibly know what I am going through!” The repetition with which this protest is asserted leaves one suspicious that an intense skeptical demon and resistance to empathy lies behind such an assertion. Yet skepticism is an intellectually healthy skill that belongs in the tool chest of critical thinking. One method of both respecting a healthy skepticism and undercutting it (since infinitely iterated skepticism is a trap that is nearly impossible to refute) is to radicalize the skepticism. In effect, give the skeptic logical rope with which to hang himself. If one can, at the same time, put in its place, steps to expand the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy to dissolves honest misunderstandings, related fallacies, and idols of the academic marketplace, so much the better.
References
Lou Agosta. (2018). A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy. Chicago: Two Pears Press.
Simon Baron-Cohen. (1995). Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books (MIT Press), 1997.
______________________. (2003). The Essential Difference: Males, Females, and the Truth about Autism. New York: Basic Books.
______________________. (2014). Zero degrees of empathy. RSA [Renaissance Society of America] Video Presentation: https://youtu.be/Aq_nCTGSfWE [checked on 2023-02-26]
Simone de Beauvoir. (1949). The Second Sex, H. M. Parshley (tr.). New York: Bantam Books, 1961.
Lisa Blankenship. (2019). Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. Logan UT: Utah State University Press.
Robyn Blum. (2017). Gender and empathy. In (2017). The Routledge Handbook of the philosophy of Empathy. Heidi Maibom (ed.). London/New York: Routledge (Taylor and Francis).
[1] In addition to Blum’s article this Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Empathy (Blum (ed.) 2017) contains several excellent articles by Zahavi, Ickes, Robinson, Shoemaker, and Gallagher (some six out of twenty-seven). However, in other respects, the Handbook is so limited, constrained, and inadequate in its treatment of empathy that in order charitably to review it, I decided to write an entire book (Agosta, (2018), A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy).
[2] In a separate, informal email conversation (dated July 2, 2018), Bluhm calls out Cordelia Fine’s “takedown of The Myth of the Lehman Sisters” in the last chapter of Fine’s book (not otherwise a part of Bluhm’s review): Cordelia Fine, (2017), Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science and Society.New York: W. W. Norton.
IMAGE CREDIT: Picasso, Woman with green hat (1947), photo is cropped, Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria
(c) Lou gosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
My empathy lessons – in the beginning
My empathy lessons started when I was about four years old. My Mom would tell me bedtime stories. Right before bed, she would weave a narrative out of the significant events of a day in the life of an “on the go,” four-year-old boy. She would make a whole out of my experiences by telling me a story about this imaginary boy—his name was “Doodle Bug.”
For example, in a favorite story, Doodle Bug would ride his tricycle, and he would go through the park to visit the Indian Chief. He would make a treaty with the Chief. Then he would ride to the bakery. At the bakery he would sample a selection of cookies and cakes. Always the talented young man, Doodle Bug would “stand on his noodle for apple strudel.”
In the moment, as a four-year-old, this was hilariously funny. I had no idea what apple strudel was, and when I found out a little later, I did not particularly like it. To me, the suspense in the story was palpable. Would the Indian Chief (surely a father figure) be open to a treaty or would hostilities break out as in the cowboy movies that were popular at the time? The rhyme with which the story ended released the suspense in the narrative. It was funny, provoking a laugh, and it brought the story to a satisfying, dramatic close, clearing the way for a soothing transition to sleep.
This was my Mom’s empathic response to a busy, on the go, growing boy. I acknowledge her for it; and my emotional life and future were richer thanks to her. She took my experiences on a given day, wove them into a nuanced narrative, and gave them back to me as a bedtime story. I recognized the experiences as my own. I recognized that she got who I was for her. Brilliant. I was mesmerized. I was spell bound. I was soothed. I was comforted. I was stimulated (but not too much). This was the empathic moment.
Mom was tuning down the day as she was tuning up the empathy for me. She was calming down the day as she was also tuning up my empathy for myself. I was empathically transitioned from a busy day to a state of restfulness and readiness for sleep without the anxieties that can sometimes accompany a child at bedtime.
This was not to say that my childhood was all rainbows and balloons. There were plenty of upsets, too. It is not that I never had anxieties, but, in this case, they were over shadowed by the good stuff. This is a fine example of things going just right for a change; and how empathic responsiveness made a positive difference in one young boy’s life.
Story time—narrative—gives back to the other person his own experience in a way that he can recognize and integrate it. In this case, Mom wove a narrative out of the events of the day, helping her child integrate his experiences. When the other person recognizes his own experience in the story, as I did, then the empathic loop is complete. I got empathy at the end of the day.
Note that, in this and similar situations, a lot of work has to occur prior to the story. The narrator (Mom, in this case) must have access to the events being woven into the story. Her empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, and empathic interpretation were activated and engaged. I hasten to add that the distinction “empathy” was not made explicit. This was just Mom being Mom—a parent doing here job and getting it just right.
Therefore, advice to parents: if you want to expand your empathy with your child, and your child’s empathy for her- or himself, have a bed time story. Bring the day to a close in an orderly way. If you can make up a story, so much the better. But not everyone is a natural born storyteller, as my Mom seems to have been. If you want to read a story, that is good, too. Pick something that you think will resonate with the child, or let the child decide what she or he wants. In the case of my daughter, after awhile, I read her whatever she requested. The genius of the “out there” and wholesome sense of humor of Richard Scarry for children of tender age also deserves honorable mention. The point is to have that time together—that, too, is the empathic moment.
Then when tough times occurred—I do not go into the details since my now grown-up daughter will read this—emerging adults learning how to handle things (and sometimes mishandling things), I went down to dorm and said, “Okay, get your stuff—you are coming home for awhile.” And, low and behold, she listened! She knew I was concerned about her and had her well-being in mind and she listened; and then she got a job for awhile and went back to school a year later. Now flourishing and working on flourishing in ways that were not visible at the time, this is not a fairy tale ending, but is perhaps good enough in this world of helicopter parents, absent parents, and failures to launch.
For those who would like a further inquiry into how empathy is defined – storytelling shows up in many contexts, but when it builds an empathic relationship, storytelling falls under “empathic responsiveness” –
Empathy consists of four parts or dimensions, which, in turn, form the integral whole of authentic relatedness between individuals in community. These four dimensions are receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness:
- Empathic receptivity is the dimension of empathy that consists in being open to the other person’s feelings and experiences. It often presents as a vicarious experience.
- Empathic understanding is the dimension of empathy that engages the other person as possibility in his or her humanity. It often presents as possibilities of accomplishment, fulfillment, flourishing.
- Empathic interpretation is the dimension of empathy that takes a walk “in the other’s shoes,” the part corresponding to the folk definition of empathy. It often presents as shifts in perspective or points of view.
- Empathic responsiveness is that dimension of empathy that provides a gracious and generous listening as the source of a response that offers the other person her or his own experience back in a gesture, statement, story, or narrative. It often presents as a short narrative (“micro narrative”) or story, also called “rhetorical empathy.”
These four dimensions of a rigorous and critical empathy go around, but not exactly in a circle. One does not end up exactly where one started; one makes progress—progress up the winding and twisting hairpin curves of the mountain of human understanding. One goes “round the mountain,” ending up at the same coordinates at which one started, but higher up the mountain. Different perspectives open up as one goes up.
Those in the empathic relationship have advanced upward, coming back to where they started, but at a higher level, forming an upward spiral, round the mountain of empathic understanding of other human beings. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1: How empathy works: The four dimensions of empathy
One can start at any point with any one of these dimensions and, as noted, go “round the mountain,” engaging the other three dimensions, forming the integrated whole that we call “empathy.” One has a different perspective on the relationship, one’s own contribution to it, and the other person’s role. One key empathy lesson that drives this work forward and gets repeated at important points is: the four dimensions of empathy are a coherent whole. All four dimensions of empathy (empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, empathic interpretation, and empathic responsiveness) link to one another in a round trip extending from receptivity to understanding, from understanding to interpretation, from interpretation to response, and back. One can start anywhere in the cycle, and go around covering all the bases and end up back with the distinction with which one started, albeit at a “higher” level. You start with empathy and end up with empathy, expanded and (to shift the directional metaphor) “deepened” empathy in relating to the other person and to the community made up of other persons.
References
This post is an except from –
Lou Agosta. (2018). Empathy Lessons. Chicago: Two Pears Press: pp. 38 – 42.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Beloved on Juneteenth in the context of empathy
I am catching up on my summer reading. I finished Toni Morrison’s transfiguring classic Beloved on Juneteenth. Since another week was required to write the review, a belated joyous Juneteenth to one and all! I hasten to publish before the 4th of July. For those who may require background on this new federal holiday, June 19th – Juneteenth – it was the date in 1865 that US Major General Gordon Granger proclaimed freedom for enslaved people in Texas some two and a half years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Later, the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution definitively established this enshrining of freedom as the law of the land and, in addition, the 14th Amendment extended human rights to all people, especially formerly enslaved ones. This blog post is not so much a book review of Beloved as a further inquiry into the themes of survival, transformation, liberty, trauma – and empathy.
“Beloved” is the name of a person. Toni Morrison builds on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved person, who escaped with her two children even while pregnant with a third, succeeding in reaching freedom across the Ohio River in 1854. However, shortly thereafter, slave catchers (“bounty hunters”) arrived with the local sheriff under the so-called fugitive slave act to return Margaret and her children to slavery. Rather than submit to re-enslavement, Margaret tried to kill the children, also planning then to kill herself. She succeeded in killing one, before being overpowered. The historical Margaret received support from the abolitionist movement, even becoming a cause celebre. The historical Margaret is named Sethe in the novel. The story grabs the reader by the throat – at first relatively gently but with steadily increasing compression – and then rips the reader’s guts out. The story is complex, powerful, and not for the faint of heart.
The risks to the reader’s emotional equilibrium of engaging with such a text should not be underestimated. G. H. Hartman is not intentionally describing the challenge encountered by the reader of Beloved in his widely-noted “Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” but he might have been:
The more we try to animate books, the more they reveal their resemblance to the dead who are made to address us in epitaphs or whom we address in thought or dream. Every time we read we are in danger of waking the dead, whose return can be ghoulish as well as comforting. It is, in any case, always the reader who is alive and the book that is dead, and must be resurrected by the reader (Hartman 1995: 548).
Though technically Morrison’s work has a gothic aspect – it is a ghost story – yet it is neither ghoulish nor sensational, and treats supernatural events rather the way Gabriel Garcia Marquez does – as a magical or miraculous realism. Credible deniability or redescription of the returned ghost as a slave who escaped from years-long sexual incarceration is maintained for a hundred pages (though ultimately just allowed to fade away). Morrison takes Margaret/Sethe’s narrative in a different direction than the historical facts, though the infanticide remains a central issue along how to recover the self after searing trauma and event even beyond trauma. The murdered infant had the single word “Beloved” chiseled on her tombstone, and even then the mother had to compensate the stone mason with non-consensual sex. An explanation is required. Let us take a step back.
Morrison is a master of conversational implicature. “Implicature” is an indirect speech act that suggests an idea, even though the thought is not literally expressed. Conversational implicature lets the empathy in – and out – to be expressed. Such implicature expands the power and provocation of communication precisely by not saying something explicitly but hinting at what happened. The information is incomplete and the reader is challenged to feel her/his way forward using the available micro-expressions, clues, and hints. Instead of saying “she was raped and the house was haunted by a ghost,” one must gather the implications. One reads: “Not only did she have to live out her years in a house palsied by the baby’s fury at having its throat cut, but those ten minutes she spent pressed up against dawn-colored stone studded with star chips, her knees wide open as the grave, were longer than life, more alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil” (Morrison 1987: 5 – 6). Then a causal conversation resumes about getting a different house as the reader tries to figure out what just happened. “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief” (1987: 6). One of the effects is to get the reader to think about the network of implications in which are expressed the puzzles and provocations of what really matters at fundamental level. (For more on conversational implicature see Levinson 1983: 97 – 165.)
In a bold statement of the obvious, this reviewer agrees with the Nobel Committee, who awarded Morrison the Novel Prize in 1988 for this work. This review accepts the high literary qualities of the work and proposes to look at three things. These include: (1) how the traumatic violence, pain, suffering, and inhumanity as well as drama, heroics, and compassion of the of the events depicted, interact with trauma and transform into moral trauma; (2) how the text itself exemplifies empathy between the characters, bringing empathy forth and making it present for the reader’s apprehension; (3) the encounter of the reader with the trauma of the text transform and/or limit the practice of empathizing itself from standard empathy to radical empathy.
So far as I know, no one has brought Morrison’s work into connection with the action of the Jewish Zealots at Masada (73 CE). The latter, it may be recalled, committed what was in effect mass suicide rather than be sold into slavery by the Roman army. The 960 Zealots drew lots to kill one another and their wives and children, since suicide technically was against the Jewish religion. On brief background, after the fall of Jerusalem as the Emperor Titus put down the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 73 CE, a group of Jewish Zealots escaped to a nearly impregnable fortress at Masada on the top of a steep mountain. (Note Masade was a television miniseries starring Peter O’Toole (Sagal 1981).) Nevertheless, Roman engineers built a ramp and siege tower and eventually succeeding in breaching the walls. The next day the Roman soldiers entered the citadel and found the defenders and their wives and children all dead at their own hands. Josephus, the Jewish historian, reported that he received a detailed account of the siege from two Jewish women who survived by hiding in the vast drain/cistern that served as the fortress’ source of water.
The example of the Jewish resistance at Masada provides a template for those facing enslavement, but it does not solve the dilemma that killing one’s family and then committing suicide is a leap into the abyss at the bottom of which may lie oblivion or the molten center of the earth’s core. So all the necessary disclaimers apply. This reviewer does not claim to second guess the tough, indeed impossible, decisions that those in extreme situations have to make. One is up against all the debates and the arguments about suicide. Here is the casuistical consideration – when life is reduced from being a human being to being a slave who is treated as a beast of burden and whose orifices are routinely penetrated for the homo- and heteroerotic pleasure of the master, then one is faced with tough choices. No one is saying what the Zealots did was right – and two wrongs do not make a right – but it is also not obvious that what they did was wrong in the way killing an innocent person is wrong, who might otherwise have a life going about their business gardening, baking hallah bread, or fishing. This is the rock and the hard place, the devil and deep blue sea, the frying pan or the fire, the Trolley Car dilemma (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem). This is Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, who after the unsuccessful attempt in June 1944 to assassinate Hitler (of which Rommel apparently had knowledge but took no action), was allowed by the Nazi authorities to take the cyanide pill. This is Colonel Custer with one bullet left surrounded by angry Dakota warriors who would like to slow cook him over hot coals. Nor as far as I know is the case of Margaret Garner ever in the vast body of criticism brought into connection with the suicides of Cicero and Seneca (and other Roman Stoics) in the face of mad perpetrations of the mad Emperor Nero. This is a decision that no one should have to make; a decision that no one can make; and yet a decision that the individual in the dilemma has to make, for doing nothing is also a decision. In short, this is moral trauma.
A short Ted Talk on trauma theory is appropriate. Beloved is so dense with trauma that a sharp critical knife is needed to cut through it. In addition to standard trauma and complex trauma, Beloved points to a special kind of trauma, namely,moral trauma or as it sometimes also called moral injury, that has not been much recognized (though it is receiving increasing attention in the context of war veterans (e.g. Shay 2014)). Without pretending to do justice to the vast details and research, “trauma” is variously conceived as an event that threatens the person’s life and limb, making the individual feel he or she was going to die or be gravely injured (which would include rape). The blue roadside signs here in the USA that guide the ambulance to the “Trauma Center” (emergency department that has staff on call at all times), suggest an urgent emergency, in this case usually but not always, a physical injury. Cathy Caruth (1996) concisely defines trauma in terms of an experience that is registered but not experienced, a truth or reality that is not available to the survivor as a standard experience. The person (for example) was factually, objectively present when the head on collision occurred, but, even if the person has memories, and would acknowledge the event, paradoxically, the person does not experience it as something the person experienced. The survivor experiences dissociated, repetitive nightmares, flashbacks, and depersonalization. At the risk of oversimplification, Caruth’s work aligns with that of Bessel van der Kolk (2014). Van der Kolk emphasizes an account that redescribes in neuro-cognitive terms a traumatic event that gets registered in the body – burned into the neurons, so to speak, but remains sequestered from the person’s everyday sense of self. For both Caruth and van der Kolk, the survivor is suffering from an unintegrated experience of self-annihilating magnitude for which the treatment – whether working through, witnessing, or (note well) artistic expression – consists in reintegrating that which was split off because it was simply too much to bear.
For Dominick LaCapra (1999), the historian, “trauma” means the Holocaust or Apartheid (add: enslavement to the list). LaCapra engages with how to express in writing such confronting events that the words of historical writing and literature become inadequate, breakdown, fail, seem fake not matter how authentic. And yet the necessity of engaging with the events, inadequately described as “traumatic,” is compelling and unavoidable. Thus, LaCapra (1999: 700) notes: “Something of the past always remains, if only as a haunting presence or revenant.” Without intending to do so, this describes Beloved, where the infant of the infanticide is literally reincarnated, reborn, in the person named “Beloved.” For LaCapra, working through such traumatic events is necessary for the survivors (and the entire community) in order to get their power back over their lives and open up the possibility of a future of flourishing. This “working through” is key for it excludes denial, repression, suppression, and advocates for positive inquiry into the possibility of transformation in the service of life. Yet the working through of the experiences, memories, nightmares, and consequences of such traumatic events result in repetition, acting out, and “empathic unsettlement.” Key term: empathic unsettlement. The empathic unsettlement points to the possibility that the vicarious experience of the trauma on the part of the witness leaves the witness unwilling to complete the working through, lest it “betray” the survivor, invalidate the survivor’s suffering or accomplishment in surviving. “Those traumatized by extreme events as well as those empathizing with them, may resist working through because of what might almost be termed a fidelity to trauma, a feeling that one must somehow keep faith with it” (DeCapra 2001: 22). This “unsettlement” is a way that empathy may breakdown, misfire, go off the rails. It points to the need for standard empathy to become radical empathy in the face of extreme situations of trauma, granted what that all means requires further clarification.
For Ruth Leys (2000) the distinction “trauma” itself is inherently unstable oscillating between historical trauma – what really happened, which, however, is hard if not impossible to access accurately – and, paradoxically, historical and literary language bearing witness by a failure of witnessing. The trauma events are “performed” in being written up as history or made the subject of an literary artwork. But the words, however authentic, true, or artistic, often seem inadequate, even fake. The “trauma” as brought forth as a distinction in language is ultimately inadequate to the pain and suffering that the survivor has endured, (“the real”). Yet the literary or historical work is a performance that may give the survivor access to their experience. The traumatic experience is transformed – even “transfigured” – without necessarily being made intelligible or sensible by reenacting the experience in words that are historical writing or drawing a picture (visual art) or dancing or writing a poem or a literary masterpiece such as Beloved. The representational gesture – whether a history or a true story or fiction – starts the process of working through the trauma, enabling the survivor to reintegrate the trauma into life, getting power back over it, at least to the extent that s/he can go on being and becoming. In successful instances of working through, the reintegrated trauma becomes a resource to the survivor rather than a burden or (one might dare say) a cross to bear. To stay with the metaphor, the cross becomes an ornament hanging from a light chain on one’s neck rather than the site of one’s ongoing torture and execution. Much work and working through is required to arrive at the former.
Though Beloved has generated a vast amount of critical discussion, it has been little noted that the events in Belovedrapidly put the reader in the presence of moral trauma (also called “moral injury”). Two levels of trauma (and the resulting post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)) are concisely distinguished (for example by the Diagnositic and Statistical Manual(5th edition) of the American Psychiatric Association (2013). There is standard trauma – one survives a life changing railroad or auto accident and has nightmares and flashbacks (and a checklist of other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)). There is repeated trauma, trauma embedded in trauma, double-bind embedded in double bind. One is abused – and it happens multiple times over a course of months or years and, especially, it may happen before one has an abiding structure for cognition such as a stable acquisition of language (say to a two-year-old) or happens in such a way or such a degree that words are not available as the victim is blamed while being abused – resulting in complex trauma and the corresponding complex PTSD.
But this distinction, standard versus complex trauma (and the correlated PTSD), is inadequate in the case of moral trauma, where the person is both a survivor and a perpetrator. For example, in a Middle East War zone, the sergeant sees an auto racing towards the check point manned by US soldiers. The sergeant thinks the auto is loaded with explosives – a car bomb. The sergeant gives the order to fire at the auto. After the auto is stopped by the fusillade, it turns out to contain family rushing to the hospital because the wife is giving birth. The now orphaned children are treated for their grave injuries in a military hospital. The result may indeed be like standard PTSD – nightmares, flashback. The resulting loss of their parents may result in complex trauma and complex PTSD. Meanwhile, the private who pulled the trigger believed he was following a valid military order, which if he did not obey would result in he and his platoon being blown up by a car bomb (and a court marshal for disobeying a valid order), but in obeying the order has catastrophic consequences. The private is not physically injured. Yet he shuts down emotionally, and is dishonorably discharged. He ends up wordlessly abandoning his family, living on the street, and no one knows what is bothering him. The military authorities ask him, but he has no words. “Moral trauma.” With no time to gather additional data, the soldier was put in an impossible situation – a double-bind. So he decided to follow orders (why shouldn’t he? he was under attack) and deeply enshrouded in the fog of war on a clear day, technicaly speaking, he committed a war crime, killing innocent civilians. Little did he know in the moment of the classic, tragic double-bind, “damned if you do and damned if you don’t”; the rock and the hard place; the devil and the deep blue. The soldier is now damned – he is a perpetrator. He was forced to make a decision that no one should have to make; that no one can (really) make; and yet that he did make. This perpetrator is also a now a survivor. Moral trauma.
Another example of moral trauma? An escaped slave makes it to freedom. One Margaret Garner is pursued and about to be apprehended under the Fugitive Slave Act. She tries to kill herself and her children rather than be returned to slavey. She succeeds in killing one of the girls. Now this soldier’s choice is completely different than the choice faced by Margaret/Sethe, and rather like the inverse of it, dependent on not enough information rather than an all-too-knowledgeable acquaintance with the evils of enslaement. Yet the structural similarities are striking. One significant difference between the soldier and Sethe (and the Jewsih Zealots) is their answer to the question when human life ceases to be human. A clarification is in order. If human life is an unconditional good, then, when confronted with an irreversible loss of the humanness, life itself may not be an unconditional good. Life versus human life. The distinction dear to Stoic philosophy, that worse things exist than death, gets traction – slavery, cowardice in the face of death, betraying one’s core integrity. The solder is no stoic; Sethe is. Yet both are suffering humanity.
However, one may object, even if one’s own human life may be put into play, it is a flat out contradiction to improve the humanity of one’s children by ending their humanity. The events are so beyond making sense, yet one cannot stop oneself from trying to make sense. So far, we are engaged with the initial triggering event, the infanticide. No doubt a traumatic event; and arguably calling forth moral trauma. But what about trauma that is so traumatic, so pervasive, that it is the very form defining the person’s experiences. Trauma that it is not merely “unclaimed, split off” experience (as Caruth says). For example, the person who grows up in slavery – as did Sethe – has never known any other form of experience – this is just the way things are – things have always been that way – and one cannot imagine anything else (though some inevitably will and do). This is soul murder. So we have moral trauma in a context of soul murder. Soul murder is defined by Shengold (1989) as loss of the ability to love, though the individuals in Beloved retain that ability, however fragmented and imperfect it may be. Rather soul murder is defined as the loss of the power spontaneously to begin something new – the loss of the possibility of possibility of the self, leaving the self without boundaries and without aliveness, vitality, an emotional and practical Zombie. By the way, Shengold (1989) notes, “Soul murder is a crime, not a diagnosis.” Though Morrison does not say so, and though she might or might not agree, enslavement is soul murder.
Beloved contains actual murders. For example, the friend and slave Sixo is about to be burned alive by the local vigilantes, and he gets the perpetrators to shoot him (and kill him) by singing in a loud, happy, annoying voice. He fakes “not givin’ a damn,” taking away the perpetrators’ enjoyment of his misery. It works well enough in the moment. His last. Nor is it like one murder is better (or worse) than another. However, in a pervasive context of soul murder, Sethe’s infanticide is an action taken by a person whose ability to choose is compromised by extreme powerlessness. Yet in that moment of decision her power is uncompromised. Note one continues to try and justify or make sense out of what cannot have any sense. Sethe is presented with a choice (read it again – and again) that no one should have to make – that no one can make (even though the person makes the choice because doing nothing is also a choice). This is the same situation that the characters in classic Greek tragedy face, though a combination of information asymmetries, personal failings, and double-binds. Above all – double-binds. This is why tragedy was invented (which deserves further exploration, not engaged here).
Now bring empathy to moral trauma in the context of soul murder. Anyone out there in the reading audience experiencing “empathic unsettlement” (as LaCapra put it)? Anyone experiencing empathic distress? If the reader is not, then that itself is concerning. “Empathic unsettlement” is made present in the reader’s experience by the powerful artistry deployed by Beloved. Yet this may be an instance in which empathy is best described, not as an on-off switch, but as a dial that one can dial up or down in the face of one’s own limitations and humanness. This is tough stuff, which deserves to be read and discussed. If one is starting to break out in a sweat and thinking about putting the book down, rather than become hard-hearted, the coaching is temporarily to dial down one’s practice of empathy. While one is going to experience suffering and pain in reading about the suffering and pain of another, it should be a vicarious experience – a sample – a representation – a trace affect – not the overwhelming annihilation that would make one a survivor. Dial the empathy down in so far as a person can do that; don’t turn it off. Admittedly, this is easier said than done, but with practice, the practitioner gets expanded power over the practice of empathizing.
As noted, Morrison is a master of conversational implicature. Conversational implicature allows the empathy to get in – become present in the text and become present for the reader engaging with the text. The conversational implicature expresses and brings to presence the infanticide without describing the act itself by which the baby is killed. Less is more, though the matter is handled graphically enough. The results of the bloody deed are described – “a “woman holding a blood soaked child to her chest with one hand” (Morrison 1987: 124) – but not the bloody action of inflicting the fatal wound itself. “Writing the wound” sometimes dances artistically around expressing the wound, sometimes, not.
Returning to the story itself, the moment at which the authorities arrive to attempt to enforce the fugitive slave act is described: “When the four horsemen came – schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sheriff – the house on Bluestone Road was so quiet they thought they were too late” (Morrison 1987: 124). Conversational implicature meets intertextuality in the Book of Revelation of the New Testament. The four horsemen of the apocalypse herald the end of the world as we know it and that is what comes down on Sethe at this point. Perhaps not unlike the Zealots at Masade, she makes a fatal decision. Literally. As Hannah Arendt (1970) pointed out in a different political context, power and force (violence) stand in an inverse relation: when power is reduced to zero, then force – violence – comes forth. The slaves power is zero, if not a negative number. Though Sethe tries to kill all the children, she succeeds only in one instance. The boys recover from their injuries and, in the case of Denver (Sethe’s daughter named after Amy Denver, the white girl who helped Sethe), Sethe’s hand is stayed at the last moment.
Beloved is a text rich in empathy. This includes exemplifications of empathy in the text, which in turn call forth empathy in the reader. The following discussion now joins the standard four aspects of empathy – empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, empathic interpretation, and empathic responsiveness. The challenge to the practice of empathy is that with a text and topic such as this one, does the practice of standard empathy need to be expanded, modified, or transformed from standard to radical empathy? What would that even mean? Empathy is empathy. A short definition of radical empathy is proposed: Empathy is committed to empathizing in the face of empathic distress, even if the latter is incurred, and empathy, even in breakdown, acknowledges the commitment to expanding empathy in the individual and the community.
We start with a straightforward example of empathic receptivity – affect matching. Now radical empathy is required here. An example of standard empathic receptivity is provided in the text, and the dance between Denver and Beloved is performed (1987: 87 – 88):
“Beloved took Denver’s hand and place another on Denver’s shoulder. They danced then. Round and round the tiny room and it may have been dizziness, or feeling light and icy at once, that made Denver laugh so hard. A catching laugh that Beloved caught. The two of them, merry as kittens, swung to and fro, to and fro, until exhausted they sat on the floor. “
The contagious laughter is entry level empathic receptivity. Empathy degree zero, so to speak. This opening between the two leads to further intimate engagement with empathic possibility. But the possibility is blocked of further empathizing in the moment is blocked by a surprising discovery. At this point, Denver “gets it” – that Beloved is from the other side – she has died and come back – and Denver asks her, “What’s it like over there, where you were before?” But since she was killed as a baby, the answer is not very informative: “I’m small in that place. I’m like this here.” (1987: 88) Beloved is the age she would have been had she lived.
The narrative skips in no particular order from empathic receptivity to empathic understanding. “Understanding” is used in the extended sense of understanding of possibilities for being in the world (e.g., Heidegger 1927: 188 (H148); 192 (H151)): “In the projecting of the understanding, beings [such as human beings] are disclosed in their possibility.”Empathic understanding is the understanding of possibility. What does the reader’s empathy make present as possible for the person in her or his life and circumstance? What is possible in slavery is being a beast of burden, pain, suffering, and early death – the possibility of no possibility of human flourishing. In contrast, when Paul D makes his way to the house of Sethe and Denver (and, unknown to him, the ghost of the baby), the possibility of family comes forth. In the story, there’s a carnival in town and Paul D, who knew Sethe before both managed to escape from the plantation (Sweet Home), takes her and Denver to the carnival. “Having a life” means many things. One of them is family. The possibility of family is made present in the text and the reader
“They were not holding hands, but their shadows were. Sethe looked to her left and all three of them were gliding over the dust hold hands. May be he [Paul D] was right. A life. Watching their hand-holding shadows [. . . ] because she could do and survive things they believed she should neither do nor survive [. . . .] [A]ll the time the three shadows that shot out of their feet to the left held hands. Nobody noticed but Sethe and she stopped looking after she decided that it was a good sign. A life. Could be.” (Morrison 1987: 67)
Within the story, Sethe has her own has a justification for her deed. She is rendering her children safe and sending them on ahead to “the other side” where she will soon join them. “I took and put my babies where they’d be safe” (Morrison 1987: 193). The only problem with this argument, if there is a problem with it, is that it makes sense out of what she did. Most readers are likely to align with Pau D, who at first does not know about the infanticide. Paul D learns the details of Sethe’s act from Stamp Paid, the former underground rail road coordinator, who knows just about everything that goes on, because he was a hub for the exchange of all-manner of information. Stamp feels that Paul D ought to know, though he later regrets his decision. Stamp tells Paul D about the infanticide – showing him the newspaper clipping as evidence and explaining the words that Paul D (who is liberate) cannot read. Paul D is overwhelmed. He cannot handle it. He denies that the sketch (or photo) is Sethe, saying it does not look like her mouth. Stamp tries to convince Paul D: “She ain’t crazy. She love those children. She was trying to out hurt the hurter” (1987: 276). Paul D asks Sethe about the infanticide reported in the news clipping, and she provides her justification. Paul D is finally convinced that she did what she did, yet unconvinced it was the thing to do and a thunderhead of judgment issues the verdict: “You got two feet, Sethe, not four […] and right then a forest sprung up between them trackless and quiet” (1987: 194).[1] Paul D experiences something he cannot handle, whether it is empathic distress or choking on moral judgment or all of the above, and he moves out of the house where he was living with Sethe, Denver, and Beloved. In a breakdown of empathic receptivity, Paul D takes on Sethe’s shame, and instead of a decision to exit the relationship for cause, he runs away, makes an escape. Stamp blames himself for driving Paul D away by disclosing the infanticide to him (of which he had been unaware), and tries to go to explain it to Sethe. But the door is closed and locked against him.
At this point the isolation of the woman inspires a kind of mad scene – or at least a carnival of emotion. Empathic interpretation occurs as dynamic and shifting points of view. The rapid-fire changing of perspectives occurs in the three sections beginning, “Beloved, she my daughter”; “Beloved is my sister”; “I am Beloved and she is mine” (Morrison 1987: 236; 242; 248). These express the hunger for relatedness, healing, and family that each of the women experience. For the reader, encountering the voices has the rhythmic effect of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. The voices are disembodied, though they address one another rather than the reader (as is often the case in Woolf). The first-person reflections slip and slide into a free verse poem of call and response. The rapid-fire, dynamic changing of perspectives results in the merger of the selves, which, strictly speaking, is a breakdown of empathic boundaries. There is no punctuation in the text of Beloved’s contribution to the back-and-forth, because Beloved is a phantom, albeit an embodied one, without the standard limits of boundaries in space/time.
In a flashback of empathic responsiveness: Sethe is on the run, having escaped enslavement at Sweet Home Plantation. She is far along in her pregnancy, alone, on foot, barefoot, and is nearly incapacitated by labor pains. A white girl comes along and they challenge one another. The white girl is named Amy Denver, though the reader does not learn that at first, and she is going to Boston (which becomes a running joke). These are two lost souls on the road of life if there ever were any. Amy is barely more safe or secure than Amy, though she has the distinct advantage that men with guns and dogs are not in hot pursuit of her. Sethe dissembles about her own name, telling Amy it is “Lu.” It is as if the Good Samaritan had also been waylaid by robbers, only not beaten as badly as the man going up to Jerusalem, who is rescured by the Samaritan. Amy is good with sick people, as she notes, and practices her arts on Sethe/Lu. Sethe/Lu is flat on her back and in attempt to help her stand up, Amy massages her feet. But Sethe/Lu’s back hurts. In a moment of empathic responsiveness, Amy describes to Sethe/Lu the state of her back, which has endured a whipping with a raw hide whip shortly before the plan to escape was executed. Amy tells her:
“It’s a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here’s the tunk – it’s red and spit wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. You go a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain’t blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom. What god have in mind I wonder, I had me some whippings, but I don’t remember nothing like this” (1987: 93).
This satisfies the definition of empathic responsiveness – in Amy’s description to Lu of what Amy sees on Lu’s back, Amy gives to Lu her (Amy’s) experience of the state of Lu’s back. Amy’s response to her (Lu) allows / causes Lu to “get” that Amy has experienced what her (Lu’s) experience is. Lu (Sethe) of course cannot see her own back and the result of the rawhide whipping which is being described to her. On background, early in the story, Sethe tells Paul D: “Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher [actually a teacher, but mostly a Simon Legre type slave owner, and the brother of Mrs Garner’s late husband] made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still” (1987:20). The reader wonders, What is she talking about? “Made a tree”? The conversational implicature – clear to the participants in the story, but less so to the reader – lets the suspense – and the empathy – come out. The “tree” finally becomes clear in the above-cited passage. Nothing is lacking from Morrison’s artistry, yet the description gave this reader a vicarious experience of nausea, empathic receptivity, especially with the white puss. Once again, not for the faint of heart. This a “transfiguring” of the traumatic.
A further reflection on “transfiguring” is required. If one takes the term literally – transforming the figure into another form without making it more or less meaningful, sensible, or significant, than one has a chance of escaping the aporias and paradoxes into a state of masterful and resonant ambiguity. For example, in another context, when the painter Caravaggio (1571 – 1610) makes two rondos of Medusa, the Gorgon with snakes for hair, whose sight turns the view to stone, was he not transfiguring something horrid and ugly into a work or art? The debate is joined. The inaccessible trauma – what happened cannot be accurately remembered, though it keeps appearing in nightmares and flashback – is the inaccessible real, like Kant’s thing in itself. The performing of the trauma, the work of art – Caravaggio’s self-portrait as the Medusa[2] or the encounter of Amy and Sethe/Lu or Morrison’s Beloved in its entirety – renders the trauma accessible, expressible, and so able to be worked through.
However, the myth of the Medusa itself suggests a solution, albeit a figurative one. In the face of soul murder embedded within moral trauma (and vice versa), the challenge to standard empathy is to expand, unfold, develop, into radical empathy. That does not add another feature to empathy in addition to receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness, but it raises the bar (so to speak) on the practice of all of these. Radical empathy is committed to the practice of empathizing in the face of empathic distress. What does empathic distress look like? It looks like the reaction to the traumatic vision of the snake-haired Gorgon that turns to stone the people who encounter it. A clarification will be useful
The reader may recall that the hero Perseus succeeded in defeating this Medusa without looking at her. (Remember, had he seen the Medusa straight on, it would have turned him to stone too.) Perseus would have been traumatized by the traumatic image and rendered an emotional zombie – lacking in aliveness and vitality. Beyond empathic unsettlement and empathic distress, moral trauma (moral injury) and soul murder stop one dead – not necessarily literally but emotionally, cognitively and practically. Is there a method of continuing to practice empathizing in the face of such unsettlement? Recall that Perseus used a shield, which was also a magic reflective mirror, indirectly to see the Medusa as a reflection without being turned to stone and, thus, defeat her. The shield acted as a defense against the trauma represented by the Medusa, enabling him to get up close and personal without succumbing to the toxic affects and effects. There is no other way to put it – the artistic treatment of trauma is the shield of Perseus. It both provides access to the trauma and defends against the most negative consequences of engaging with it. The shield does not necessarily render the trauma sensible or meaningful in a way of words, yet the shield takes away the power of the Gorgon/trauma, rending it unable to turn one to stone. In the real-world practice of trauma therapy, this means rendering the trauma less powerful. The trauma no longer controls the survivor’s life. One gradually – by repeated working through – gets one’s power back as the trauma shrinks, gets smaller, without, however, completely disappearing.
The question for this inquiry into Beloved is what happens when one brings literary language, refined language, artistic language, beautiful language, to painful events, appalling events, ugly events, dehumanizing events, traumatic events? The literary language has to dance around the traumatic event, which is made precisely present with expanded power by avoiding being named, leaving an absence. The traumatic events that happened were such that the language of witnessing includes the breakdown of the language of witnessing. As Hartman notes in his widely quoted study:
It is interesting that in neoclassical aesthetic theory what Aristotle called the scene of pathos (a potentially traumatizing scene showing extreme suffering) was not allowed to be represented on stage. It could be introduced only through narration (as in the famous recits [narrative] of Racinian tragedy) (Hartman 1995: 560 ftnt 30).
Once again, less is more. The absence of the most violent defining moment increases its impact. Note this does not mean – avoid talking about it (the trauma). It means the engagement is not going to be a head on attack, but a flanking movement. In the context of narrative, this does not prevent the reader from engaging with the infanticide. On the contrary, it creates a suspense that hooks the reader like a fish with the rest of the narrative reeling in the reader. The absence makes the engagement a challenge, mobilizing the reader’s imagination to fill in the blank in such a way that it recreates the event as a palpable vicarious event. It is necessary to raise the ghost prior to exorcising it, and this does just that.
If this artistic engagement with trauma is not “writing trauma” in LaCapra’s sense, then I would not know it:
“Trauma indicates a shattering break or caesura in experience which has belated effects. Writing trauma would be one of those telling after-effects in what I termed traumatic and post-traumatic writing (or signifying practice in general). It involves processes of acting out, working over, and to some extent working through in analyzing and ‘giving voice’ to [it] [. . . ] – processes of coming to terms with traumatic ‘experiences,’ limit events, and their symptomatic effects that achieve articulation in different combinations and hybridized forms. Writing trauma is often seen in terms of enacting it, which may at times be equated with acting (or playing) it out in performative discourse or artistic practice” (LaCapra 2001: 186–187).
If the writing (and reading) of the traumatic events is a part of working through the pain and suffering of the survivors (and acknowledging the memory of the victims), then the result for the individual and the community is expanded well-being, expanded possibilities for aliveness, vitality, relatedness, and living a life of satisfaction and fulfillment. Instead of being ruled by intrusive flashbacks and nightmares, the survivor expands her/his power over the events that were survived. This especially includes the readers engaging with the text who are survivors of other related traumatic events, dealing with their own personal issues, which may be indistinguishable from those of fellow-travelers in trauma. That is the situation at the end of Beloved when Paul D returns to Sethe and Denver (Sethe’s daughter) after the community has exorcised the ghost of Beloved. It takes a village – a community – to bring up a child; it also takes a village to exorcise the ghost of one.
References
Anonymous. (2012). Trolley problem (The trolley dilemma). Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem [checked on 2023-06-25]
Hannah Arendt. (1970). On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Caty Caruth. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Geoffrey H Hartman. (1995). On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies New Literary History , Summer, 1995, Vol. 26, No. 3, Higher Education (Summer, 1995): 537 – 563 .
Martin Heidegger. (1927). Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trs.). New York: Harper and Row, 1963.
Toni Morrison. (1987). Beloved. New York: Vintage Int.
Dominick LaCapra. (1999). Trauma, absence, loss. Critical Inquiry, Summer, 1999, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Summer, 1999): 696–727
Dominick LaCapra. (2001). Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, John Hopkins Unviersity Press.
Stephen Levinso. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ruth Leys. (2000). Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Boris Sagal, Director. (1981). Masade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masada_(miniseries) [checked on 2023-06-25).
J. Shay, (2014). Moral injury. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31(2), 182-191. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036090
Leonard Shengold. (1989). Soul Murder Revisited: Thoughts About Therapy, Hate, Love, and Memory. Hartford: Yale University Press.
Bessel van der Kolk. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Penguin.
[1] For those readers wondering how Sethe regained her freedom after being arrested for murder (infanticide), Beloved provides no information as to the sequence. During the historical trial an argument was made that as a free woman, Margaret Garner should be tried and convicted of murder, so that the Abolitionist governor of Ohio could then pardon her, returning here to freedom. Something like that needs to be understood in the story, though it is a fiction. It is a fiction, since in real life, Garner and her children were indeed returned to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act. Moral trauma within soul murder indeed.
[2] Caravaggio was a good looking fellow, and he uses himself as a model for the face of the Medusa. This does not decide anything. Arguably, Caravaggio was arguably memorializing – transfiguring – his own life traumas, which were many and often self-inflicted as befits a notorious manic-depressive.
© Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Rhetorical empathy – a primer
The relationship between empathy and rhetoric has not been much theorized. At first, empathy and rhetoric seem to be at cross purposes. The speaker who lacks empathy cannot expect to be effective or persuasive; and empathic responsiveness needs to find its voice to be effective in making a difference. With empathy one’s commitment is to listen to the other individual in a space of acceptance and tolerance to create a clearing for possibilities of overcoming and flourishing. With rhetoric, the approach is to bring forth a persuasive discourse in the interest of enabling the other to see a possibility for the her- or himself or the community. In the case of empathy, the initial direction of the communication is inbound, in the case of rhetoric, outbound. Yet the practices of empathy and rhetoric are not as far apart as may at first seem to be the case, and it would not be surprising if the apparent contrary directionality turned out to be a loop, and arts of empathy and rhetoric reciprocally enable different aspects of authentic relatedness, community building, and empowering communications. Both empathy and rhetoric are as much arts as theories, in which the theories emerge from the practice(s). In both cases, practice is a basic part of the theory and vice versa.
Let us take a step back and use as a springboard to catalyze further analysis Lisa Blankenship’s Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy (Utah State University Press, 2019). The present commentary is not a proper book review, but if it were, the short version would be “two thumbs up!” I learned much from this short text and so will any reader.
Blankenship’s book has a throat-grabbingly powerful beginning. It quotes Eudora Welty’s imaginary account in The New Yorker (see July 6, 1963) of the assassination in 1963 of civil right leader Medgar Evers, in Jackson, Mississippi – from the shooter’s point of view. Welty’s fictional narrative was so compelling and lifelike that many readers took it to be the first-person account of the shooter. This is rhetorical empathy. It takes the other’s point of view. In this case, Welty creates a receptivity to an experience of the hatred (prejudice, racism, etc.) that motivated the shooter, but does so in such a way that the reader has a vicarious experience of the hatred. The reader does not actually become a hater, but gets a taste – a sample – a vicarious experience – of what it is like. It creates an understanding of the possibility – and in this case, actuality – that someone could be so motivated. This may be mind expanding to some – and disconverting to others – or both. And the story itself is an empathic response to the appalling crime that expands the reader’s power to cope with and engage the horror with a view to transforming it.
Blankenship contributes here to one of my own interests in the intersection of empathy and fiction, the rhetorical embedding of a fictional account in a factual one. This is not without its challenges to the integrity of the narrator, for no way exists to know “for sure” what went on in the conscious mind of the shooter – and, arguably, not even the shooter knew what went on in his unconscious mind. Welty’s story is narrated within the frame of a fictional account “as if” she were the shooter. Yet skepticism is not an option – or even required. Courts of law, historical monographs, and therapeutic processes, all ask and engage with the motives of human beings both as specific historical individuals and the ideal type, “human actor.”
A rigorous and critical empathy knows that it can be wrong about the feelings and thoughts of others, and such empathy seeks to check the validity of its empathy in a conversation with the other. Granted in a case such as this, the conversation might include a police interrogation. In addition to be a short story, Welty’s account is a proposal as to what motivated the perpetrator. To validate the account, one would have to talk to the perpetrator – as noted, even interrogate him – or peruse his diary or other (un)published communications. Indeed Welty’s bait of falsehood catches a carp of truth (as Shakespeare’s Polonius famously noted in another context). Given a firm anchoring in the factual details of the case, the way is opened to such alethic – “disclosive” – truths as learning to live with uncertainty, the conflictual dynamics of the human psyche, and acknowledging not knowing what one does not know.
In another context, Blankenship provides a moving narrative of “coming out” queer in a family of evangelical Christians. This is not for the faint of heart. One can’t top it, and I am inspired by it. This cannot have been easy, and shows that she has “matriculated in the college of hard knocks.” She is a survivor, and, as is often the case, survivors are able to make good use of the difficult, even traumatic, experiences they had to endure to inform an expanded empathic sensibility to the radical differences in experiences that empathy is committed to bridging. Blankenship’s other cases are hard-hitting, politically and factually relevant political advocacy for exploited workers, marginalized groups (e.g., LGBTQ), and teaching composition to undergraduates, the career challenging possibilities of which should not be underestimated. By the way, Blankenship capitalizes Other and uses “otherizing” [making into an Other] in a way that resonates with my own thinking.
Blankenship’s work contains and insists on an important caution, which hereafter my own work is committed to acknowledging. When the privileged and powerful call for empathic vulnerability, they must lead by personal example, not call for the powerless to be even more empathically vulnerable. This is obvious to common sense, but our own fractured political and cultural battlefields have long left common sense behind. Therefore, it is necessary explicitly to call out such things. Rhetorical empathy as such is not mere talk, yet it reverses the direction of our traditional understanding of empathy as listening, empathic receptivity, from inbound to the outbound direction of communication (speaking). There is precedent for it, for example, as President Obama’s speaking (and rhetoric) powerfully articulated the value of empathy for the marginalized and under-privileged, calling on the powerful and privileged to be more inclusive. That such a shift is not easy to bring about and is still a work in progress, makes it all the more urgent to further the shift.
Blankenship properly calls out the fundamental acknowledgement that Heidegger gives to Aristotle’s treatment of pathos (emotion, affect, passion) in Book II of his (Aristotle’s) Rhetoric. Her analysis is on target and penetrating. Yet I have one point of disagreement. She attempts to line up “empathy” with some particular pathos in Aristotle such as elos (pity) or clemency. This will not do, and it goes beyond what Blankenship proposes.
Empathy – the phenomenon, not the word – is not a particular emotion, but the form of the receptivity to and understanding of all the emotions – any arbitrary emotion – everything from sadness, anger, fear, and high spirits to subtler emotions such as guilt, jealousy or righteous indignation; and there is no word for that in Aristotle. Aristotle’s use of the term “empatheateros” (εμπαθέστερος) occurs in his treatise On Dreams(460b).[1] In this text, the term and its use do not mean what the tradition understands by “empathy” or what we mean by it today. Rather it means being in a condition of being influenced by one’s emotions. When in a state of emotional excitement, sense-perception is more easily deceived by the imagination than is normally the case. When excited by the emotion of fear, the coward is more likely to think that his enemy is approaching (though it is only a distant figure); or when excited by love, the amorous individual believes it is the beloved one approaching from a distance. This suggests that empathy without adequate interpretation is blind. However, projection is also operating here. The individual perceives the situation in line with his or her pre-given emotional set, and attributes to the object what is merely a function of the individual’s own affective condition. The distortion of empathy emerges along with the possibility of empathy.
At this point, my discussion goes beyond what Blankenship writes, though I believe it is consistent with her position. This discussion is less concerned with the struggle for social justice causes, worthy though it be, than delivering on a neo-Aristotelian account of rhetorical empathy in a way that makes sense out of both empathy and rhetoric.
As one might expect, an Aristotelian account of what is entailed in capturing and responding to the emotions relies on an analysis in terms of what are designated as Aristotle’s “four causes” – formal, final, efficient, and material. With the possible exception of the material cause, what one calls the formal, efficient, and final causes are redescriptions of the same underlying phenomenon in nature according to different aspects of causality. Yet Aristotle lived in a profoundly different world than we inhabit today. Vision consisted of rays reaching out from the eyes to grasp the visible object. As the gypsy and savant Melquiades said, “Things have a life of their own; it is just a matter of waking up their souls.” This can be particularly puzzling if one thinks of causal relations between events in terms used by David Hume, for whom the causality by which one billiard ball impacts another and causes it to move is invisible.[2] One sees the first ball hit the other and the other immediately jumps forward. Nowhere is a separate causal relation to be perceived. In contrast with the modern conception of causality, for Aristotle the principles of change (“causes”) are visible. For Aristotle, only one event is transpiring—a change in a total field of potentiality in which motion is actualized. The carpenter is the efficient cause of the cabinet as is the sculpture of the statue. Objects such as billiard balls are sublunary objects empowered to move at their own level, and are not significant problems requiring attention.
Now shift this analysis in the direction of the emotions. It may be a function of our primitive understanding of the emotions or the subtlety and power of Aristotle’s analysis, but the Aristotelian account of the emotions is a strong contender. In the context of the emotions, for example, the anger aroused by an insult is not separate from that insult, but is part of the processing of the anger in context. In addition to the physiological concomitants (material cause), one elaborates the occasions that arouse the anger (efficient cause), what one is trying to accomplish in expressing anger (final cause), and the process of being angry and expressing the anger (formal cause). One is dealing with the totality of a human interaction and situation.
According to Aristotle, “Anger must be defined as a movement of a body, or of a part or faculty of a body, in a particular state roused by such a cause, with such an end in view” (On the Soul, 403a: 25).[3] The emotion of anger involves “a surging of blood and heat round the heart” (403b: 1) as the material cause. Being in a particular state of emotional upset involving “a craving for retaliation” (403a: 30) is the formal statement of the essence, though the retaliation itself might be redescribed as the final cause, the end in view. It is almost impossible to describe the primary principle of change (“efficient cause”) without falling into a modern, sense of disconnected events such as those described by David Hume when two billiard balls impact, the first being the cause of the second’s motion. Granted, there are certain things which arouse our anger—various insults, slights, disdain, frustration with things and people, spitefulness—Aristotle understands these as being part of the activity of being angry. Nevertheless, if one encounters an person angry, there is no better way than to appreciate the efficient cause – or trigger – of her anger than to ask, “Who perpetrated a dignity violation against the person?” From the perspective of the final cause – the purpose – one’s anger has a certain end in view, a target, which is usually an action directed against a person, that for the sake of which the activity is undertaken, retaliation (“pay back”). So at least one thing is plain: Aristotle makes it clear that the understanding of emotion involves more than knowing what the other person feels like “inside.” Emotion is a complex human activity involving the possibility of redescriptions of the phenomenon of emotionality from the four perspectives of Aristotelian causality.
Having laid out an account of the emotions, we turn to Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The power of the Rhetoric lies in recreating the listening of the audience in the oratorical performance of the speaker. “Recreating the listening of the audience” in the speaker means precisely that what the speaker utters expresses what the listener is experiencing, has experienced, or may usefully consider experiencing going forward. These are not necessarily consistent with one another, and some listeners are only willing to hear what they already believe or of which they are “certain”. That is whether rhetorical techniques and strategies – such as empathy – may be appropriate to persuade or get around defensive certainty to allow the communication to land in way that makes a difference.
Aristotle does not need to call out an explicit term for empathy because his method is informed by empathy from the start. The speaker’s character and how that character is shown in his speaking is responsible for how the speaker’s discourse is received – how the speaking “lands” – in the listening of the individual in the audience. Aristotle’s guidance to the empathic rhetorician is in effect to recreate the way in which the listener is listening to the speaking of the speaker.
© Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Being an empathic (“good”) orator depends on being a certain kind of person rather than possessing a body of knowledge (see also Eugene Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (1994)). Persuading the listener means being a certain kind of person – having the depth of character to demonstrate one’s integrity, wholeness, leadership by example – rather than rhetorically providing the best syllogism (though sound and valid reasoning is also important). Providing a gracious and generous response to the listener (audience), the orator forms a vicarious experience that is subject to further empathic processing. In order for the other to be in enrolled in the orator’s speaking, does the orator then have to demonstrate to the listener (audience) that the speaker has listened? The speaker (orator) has to become an empathic rhetorician in the sense that she demonstrates in her speaking to the other that the orator has gotten or captured or understood what is of utmost concern to the listener (audience). This is inevitably complicated by the possibility that the individuals in the audience themselves do not fully appreciate what is that possibility.
This account of the emotions comes into its own in the place where Aristotle gives his most complete account of the emotions, Book II of his Rhetoric.[4] Aristotle’s account of the emotions in other context (e.g., On the Soul) calls out bodily effects such as “blood surging” and accelerated physiological effects. If Aristotle had known of mirror neurons (or a biological mirroring system), then he might well have marshaled these as part of his account of the material cause. As things stand, Aristotle gives his analysis in terms of just three aspects of the emotions in his Rhetoric. He distinguishes the disposition or frame of mind of the emotion, the person with whom or towards whom one feels the emotion, and the occasions which give rise to the emotion (Rhetoric, 1378a: 9-10).
This rational reconstruction of the role of empathy in Aristotle, who did not use the word “empathy” here, is guided by the hypothesis that a speaker without empathy is not going to be effective, persuasive, or successful. Empathy is the reenactment or recreation of the audience’s listening in the orator’s speaking. The choice of arguments and facts to be persuasive must be guided by the speaker’s empathy with the audience. Who are they and what possibilities, potential and actual emotions, and reactions are present in their listening? The speaker who can answer these questions will be most powerful and persuasive.
The really Big Idea here is that the speaker gets his humanness from the audience. Rhetorical empathy invites the audience’s empathic receptivity to the speaker only to give it back to them (the audience) in an empathic responsiveness that validates the audience’s own experience. It is not just that the audience confers on the speaker his (or her) social role as orator but, in the sense that by his character and who he is as a speaker demonstrates empathically that the speaker is part of the community, persuasively carrying the day by an example of leadership.
Consider now an exercise. One may well want to take this Aristotelian analysis a step further and raise a question that did not occur to Aristotle, namely, “What are the four [Aristotelian] causes of empathy?” This did not even occur to Aristotle because, arguably, he lived in an understanding of empathy that was a fundamental part of the dynamics of emotions in practical deliberation and speaking. A brief outline of the answer is worth considering, as a rational reconstruction of what Aristotle might have argued, though it goes beyond Aristotle’s text.
As the material cause of empathy, one may usefully focus on the way in which the betrayal of feeling in another individual arouses corresponding feelings in oneself. So someone yawns. Pretty soon one feels like yawning too. Laughter and tears can frequently be induced in this way as one’s “laugh lines” and “grief muscles” are activated by a kind of contagion at the level of one’s physical organism. The evidence of mirror neuron as a “common coding” scheme at the level of the organism also warrants recognition.[5]
If by formal cause or essence one understands Aristotle’s interpretation in the Rhetoric as disposition or frame of mind, then the subject of empathy would be in a particular state of receptivity or openness. But open to what? Open to different possible ways of being in the relationship to the speaker and the matter being addressed in the speaking. In everyday terms where communications are enacted and delivered through language, the audience would be listening receptively. But this also extends to the speaker. The speaker would be recreating the listening of the audience in his/her own speaking by being responsible for how the message “landed.” Thus, if the speaker was giving a funeral oration, he would be responsible for speaking in such a way as to call forth the loss and sadness of the listener. When ML King iteratively calls out “I have a dream,” describing black and white children holding hands in a community free of racial prejudice (which children of all races generally do anyway unless adults “teach” them prejudice), King’s speaking calls forth in the listener the possibility of overcoming prejudice (and related injustice). Yes, there is art and perhaps even artifice involved, technically called “anaphora,” repeating the same phrase to heighten engagement towards an emotional peak. One may say this form of empathic receptivity is not empathy at all but emotional contagion or infectious feelings, and there is truth to that statement. However, what is missed is that the same underlying function is employed in empathy as in emotional contagion and that a rigorous and critical empathy sets a limit to the contagion, further processing the emotion in empathic understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness. In its rhetorical enactment, the empathic responsiveness, in addition to including acknowledgement and recognition of the listener’s struggle and humanity, usually includes a call to action. If one stops with emotional contagion, the result is unpredictable – one gets a riot. If one further processes the empathic receptivity, one creates a possibility – such as a peaceful demonstration, speaking truth to power, working on oneself and one’s own spiritual development, and so on.
Returning now to the traversal of the four causes, the final cause of empathy is the purpose or end in view of the speaker’s expression of emotion. For example, when Malcolm X, addressing a largely African American audience, says “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, the rock was landed on us!” – the applause, laughter, and exclamations of “Amen!” “Right, brother,” indicate the accuracy of the empathic gesture. (Malcolm used this line many time – one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Aq2Z0i8D6A .) The final cause of rhetorical empathy is to build a community between the speaker and the listener(s). Another way of saying this in Aristotelian terms is the speaker’s empathic response recognizes the listener’s humanness and recognizes the listener’s struggle or accomplishment. Acknowledgement and recognition are the final causes of empathy in general and empathic rhetoric in particular.
Finally, the efficient cause of empathy would be what immediately releases one’s empathy. This forms a whole that is indistinguishable from the context of emotionality, though, as indicated above, we moderns represent separate, disconnected events. Aristotle’s practical wisdom (phronesis) of the virtuous individual enables the speaker to recognize details of the situation that are suited to the situation (Nichomachean Ethics VI.5). This requires taking the other’s perspective and assessing what is relevant; and doing so with the appropriate emotions. The empathic speaker deploys language to present a case that arouses a vicarious experience of the situation such that the listener is touched by it and is enrolled in – “buys into” – the request for action made by the speaker. The request may be “consider the possiblity,” “let go of prejudice,” “commit to acceptance and tolerance in human relations,” “find the defendant ‘not guilty’,” “buy the product,” “marry me,” “hire me as an employee,” “elect me your representative in the assembly,” and so on. In rhetorical empathy, one tries to imagine what would make one behave, feel, speak or otherwise respond the way the other is behaving or one wishes him to behave. If one’s empathy is not spontaneously released by the here and now, the speaker (or listener) will try to reconstruct the other’s situation imaginatively in order to further his empathy (and vice versa).
Rhetorical empathy is not empathy as traditionally understood. Indeed rhetorical empathy invites the possibility that effective but unethical speakers may misuse empathic methods to control or dominate. This too is a possibility of empathy, available already at the start. The devil may (and does!) quote scripture. The fact that rhetoric can be misused for purposes of manipulation should not blind us to the consequences which Aristotle’s account of the emotions has for empathetic receptivity. This opens up a whole conversation, which cannot be completed here. However, the position of this speaker is that “empathy tells one what the other individual experiencing; one’s morals and good upbringing tell one what to do about it.” One cannot expect one’s empathic receptivity to encompass the depths of another’s emotions unless one lets one’s empathy be informed by the occasion, the object, and the disposition of the person. In a way, the introduction of empathy into the context of rhetoric requires a transformation of the function of the rhetorical speaker into that of the listener. One not only strives to arouse and guide emotions, but rather permits one’s own emotions to be aroused by what the other (the audience) is experiencing, what one would like the audience to experience, what imaginatively one believes the audience is likely to be experiencing, and a rigorous and critical combination of all of these. It is a further challenge to manage or control a rigorous and critical empathy once it is explicitly called forth and that is – the art of rhetorical empathy.
[1] Aristotle, “On dreams” in Loeb Classical Library: Aristotle VIII: On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, tr. W.S. Hett, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936: 348f.
[2] Jonathan Lear. (1988). Aristotle: The Desire to Understand, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988: 31.
[3] Aristotle, “On dreams” in Loeb Classical Library: Aristotle VIII: On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, tr. W.S. Hett, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936: 2f.
[4] Aristotle, “Art of Rhetoric” in Loeb Classical Library: Aristotle ‘Art’ of Rhetoric, tr. J. H. Freese. London & Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann &Harvard University Press, 1926: 169f.
[5] Philip L. Jackson, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Jean Decety. (2005). “How do we perceive the pain of others? A window into the neural processes involved in empathy.” Neuroimage 24 (2005). See also J. Decety & P.L. Jackson. (2004). “The functional architecture of human empathy” in Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews, Vol 3, No. 2, June 2004, 71-100; V. Gallese. (2007). “The shared manifold hypothesis: Embodied simulation and its role in empathy and social cognition” in Empathy and Mental Illness, eds. T. Farrow and P. Woodruff, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007: 452f. [Editorial note: this material duplicates that cited below in the context of Hume – one of the occurrences should be deleted, assuming the material on Aristotle goes forward.]
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empathy and the Novel by Suzanne Keen (Reviewed)
Suzanne Keen’s Empathy and the Novel (2007, Oxford University Press, 242 pp.) can be read as an introduction to empathy studies, fiction (novel studies), and reading in the enlarged sense of engaging with the Humanities. Keen’s approach to these intersecting discourses is nuanced, subtle, and not easily summarized. She provides a great springboard for further conversations, elaborations, and social psychology experiments.
The usual definitions of empathy are reviewed, especially: a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect (2007: 4). I would add: talking a walk in the other person’s shoes; transiently, temporarily, and selectively identifying with the other person; appreciating who the other person is being as a possibility; feeling and experiencing vicariously what the other person feels and experiences; being fully present with the other person in such a way as to acknowledge and respond to the other’s humanity. Keen’s book is fully buzzword compliant, including accounts of theory of mind, mirror neurons, and storytelling.
A significant aspect of the interest in relating empathy and the reading of fiction, especially novels as in Keen’s book, is to make the world a better place. Read some quality fiction; expand one’s empathy; and take action to improve the world. Wouldn’t it be nice?
Keen notes: an ideal type case is that of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which, in its time, was a run-away best seller, opening the eyes of contemporaries to the injustices and inhumanity of slavery, furthering the cause of abolition. Even if such a book as Stowe’s did not directly create a social movement, with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, it is notable as representing a parallel and behind the scenes shift in the prevailing values of the community. (Sinclair’s The Jungle or Dickens’ Oliver Twist might be added to the list of influential works (2007: 118)). And yet the libraries are overflowing with novels that did not make a difference and are read by few.
Due to the importance of the empathy-altruism hypothesis developed by C. Daniel Batson, Suzanne Keen begins her book on Empathy and the Novel with Batson’s hypothesis and its relation to the practice of reading fiction.
At the risk of oversimplification, I gloss the subtleties and what the empathy-altruism hypothesis gets right: empathy creates a clearing for the prosocial, helping behaviors of altruistic behavior such as one finds in Good Samaritan scenarios. When read judiciously, this hypothesis neither reduces altruism to empathy, nor vice versa. Experimental subjects who are empathically “primed” find that their “empathy” understood as prosocial engagement spontaneously manifests itself in the direction of altruism when challenged to do so. Nevertheless, Batson’s work is a masterpiece of studied ambiguity when it comes to deciding where the boundary lies between empathy and altruism.
Keen’s approach privileges the novel, in which the fictional world brings forth a “safe space,” in which empathy can be applied without requiring that anyone take action: “…[F]ictional worlds provide a safe zone for readers’ feeling empathy without a resultant demand on real world action” (2007: 4). That is quite appropriate from the perspective of a professor of English literature. However, one might just as well reverse the equation. Empathy creates a clearing for acceptance and toleration within which the imagination performs its work of capturing experience as a narrative in which the empathic exchange of emotional and imaginative psychic contents occurs.
My position in the matter is: Empathy opens us to (“tells us”) what the other person is experiencing; our good upbringing, morals, ethics, and professional practices tell us what to do about it. This makes it sound like empathy is a mode of observation or perception, and it is indeed that. However, insofar as empathy is something that requires two people in interaction, the empathizer is required to perform an empathic response in order to complete the loop and validate the empathic interaction.
One key point of debate is whether reading novels expands a person’s empathy. Though Keen is inclined to favor this hypothesis, she marshals significant evidence on both sides of the debate and concludes that the jury is still out.
The literary career of empathy (Keen’s incisive phrase) extends from 18th century warnings by the clergy and other learned men that novel reading ranks among the incentives to the seduction of female readers (Keen, 2007: 37) all the way to the enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume and, finally, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s guidance to extend the sympathetic imagination to feel with others. “Sympathetic” because the word “empathy” had not yet been coined in the English language (which would happen in 1909 as E. B. Titchener’s translation of the German “Einfühlung”). Fast forward to James Joyce, Sam Beckett, and Berthold Brecht, who become anti-empaths, privileging defamiliarization and estrangement in narrative.
The moral peril of vicarious emotions to the innocence of girls becomes the emotional contagion that Brecht sees as subverting the consciousness raising of the workers and potential for revolutionary action of the working class by means of his Epic Theatre. None of this is full blown adult empathy, but it is on a spectrum of empathic relatedness that is wide and complex.
Arguably, the listening and receptivity of the community were ready to respond to the message of these books due to seismic shifts in social and productive relations; and the book provided concise language and a set of powerful images to make the point at hand. Though correlation is rarely causation, sometimes correlation is good enough.
No substitute is available for the “magic bullet” of identifying a specific replicateable cause, and such discoveries are rare. Though many people confuse cause and effect (nor am I saying that happens to Keen!), from the point of view of an alliance between empathy, fiction, and social action, it is almost as enlightening and effective to have the literary fiction represent the “signs and portends” of social dynamics that can then become the target of appropriate political action, fund raising, consciousness raising, and social influence. As Keen puts it, “…[reading literary fiction becomes] a sign of one’s empathy and commitment to human principles” (2007: 167). Reading literary fiction – presumably along with political editorials – would be a source and a method of consciousness raising. Still most readers do not look to reading literature as sources for social action in the real world – or at least the evidence-based studies that Keen sites do not show such a result. (2007: 118).
All the casual, easy generalization such as “altruism results in expanded empathy,” “empathy results in expanded altruism,” “reading quality fiction (novels) enhances empathy,” “empathy enhances appreciation of the novel” have significant qualifications, conditions, and counter-examples. Never was it truer, the devil is in the details; and Keen’s work contains a wealth of engaging examples and background on empathy studies. Incidentally, Keen ends her book with some twenty-seven proposals about narrative empathy (2007: 169 – 171).
In discussing the enhanced empathy of authors, who report that their characters come to life in their imaginations, Keen acknowledges the moral ambiguities of the possibilities of empathy for both good and evil. For example, Keen reports that William Pierce (pseudonym: Andrew MacDonald), founder of a white supremacist organization, published The Turner Diaries (1978), containing hateful depictions of blacks, Jews, and gay people. The novel was apparently written with some literary skill. Timothy McVeigh, the bomber of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City (1995), studied this book, and, based on the account in the novel, “emulated its protagonist by building a fertilizer bomb to explode a government building […] made and deployed in a small truck” (Keen 2007: 127).
True, it is highly improbable that the novel by Pierce (MacDonald) caused an upstanding citizen to become a mad bomber. McVeigh was already entangled with murderous levels of prejudice and deviance, and was therefore attracted to the novel. Do not confuse cause and effect; yet the evidence is that this white supremacist novel – and the bomb making parts of it – inspired McVeigh and made him a more dangerous deviant.
Another celebrated example of a novel having alleged causative effects, not mentioned by Keen, in the real world is Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther, in which the broken-hearted hero commits suicide. There really was an epidemic of copycat suicides across Europe in which romantically devastated individuals would jump off of bridges with a copy on the novel in their respective pockets as a kind of suicide note. More good empathy gone bad? Can’t get no satisfaction – or empathy? More likely, individuals who were already suicidal found an expression of their suffering in literary form thanks to the dramatic finesse of Goethe.
I offer a bold statement of that which is hidden in plain view. The hidden variable is the practice of empathy itself. If I read a novel that enrolls me in the practicing prosocial empathic responsiveness to my neighbors, then empathy is expanded. If I read a novel that enrolls me in the practice of white supremacy, then the latter is expanded.
One could argue, though I will dispute the formidable ambiguities, that even white supremacists can be empathic towards other white supremacists. That is the critique of empathy that asserts empathy is too parochial, limited only to the in group, and, as such, a problematic “virtue,” if one at all. The answer is direct. In so far as the white supremacists [and so on] require one conform to a certain prejudiced, humanly devaluing ideology to qualify as the recipient of the practice of empathy, the empathy misfires and fails.
Thus, the debate is joined. The celebrated Self Psychologist and empathy innovator Heinz Kohut, MD, gives the example of the Nazis who equipped their dive bombers with sirens, the better to impart empathic distress in their victims, thus demonstrating their (the Nazis’) subtle “empathic” appreciation of their victims’ feelings. I am tempted to say, “The devil may quote scripture,” and Nazis may try to apply some subset of a description of “empathy.”
Note that Kohut speaks of “fiendish empathy” and the use of empathy for a “hostile purpose” while emphasizing his value neutral definition of empathy as “vicarious introspection” (1981: 529, 580). Nevertheless, the point is well taken that empathy is a powerful phenomenon in all its dimensions and requires careful handling. [For further details see: “On Empathy,” The Search for the Self: Volume 4: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut 1978-1981, London: Karnac Books, 2011: 525 – 535].
The Nazi applies a kind of entry level emotional contagion or affective transmission of feelings, but the process breaks down at the point of empathic responsiveness. Empathic responsiveness requires a core of acknowledgement and recognition of the other person’s humanity.
But it is plainly evident that the would-be “empathy” of the Nazis (or the white supremacists) misfires and fails in a contradiction. It is a flat-out contradiction to relate authentically to another human being while dehumanizing him or her. Empathy doesn’t work that way. Empathic responsiveness simply does not admit of bombing people or disqualifying them as “less than” or other than human when they plainly are human.
One of the strongest points of Keen’s book is the final chapter on “Contesting Empathy,” in which she cites a long series of objections, qualifications, and doubts about empathy. Failed empathy, false empathy, fake empathy, breakdowns of empathy, and the social construction of the emotions are engaged and deconstructed. Empathy has to run a gauntlet of things that can go wrong with it, though I suggest it emerges out of the backend bruised but still in one piece.
This point is not well-understood in the empathy research literature where break downs of empathy are mischaracterized as features of empathy itself. To blame empathy for its misuse, breakdowns, and misapplications is rather like using the smoke alarm to decide when Thanksgiving turkey is done.
Keen is concerned that the empathy-altruism hypothesis with which she launches her project is left hanging by a thread. If the work of Kohut is to be credited (who, by the way, is not mentioned by Keen), the hypothesis is not likely ever to be validated. Yet if empathy is a practice, not a mere psychological mechanism, then by practicing it, we get better at it in using it to reinforce and expand our shared humanity. Empathy becomes a powerful force in creating a clearing to call forth “the better angels of our nature.” The empathy-altruism hypothesis as an aspirational project, not a social psychology given.
Thus, the really tough question is how does “empathy” as a psychological mechanism relate to “empathy” as a interpersonal process and “empathy” as a practice in relating to people. One starts out talking about empathy as a psychological mechanism, subsumed by a biological mirroring system (even if mirror neurons remain debatable) and invoking identification, projection, and introjection.
Almost immediately one has to give an example of two people having a conversation in which one is feeling and experiencing something that the person may or may not “get” or “understand.” Then one finds oneself immediately discussing the practical considerations of why, in the course of the personal interaction, the empathy succeeded or broke down in a misunderstanding, and how to improve one’s practice of empathy based on experience.
It makes a profound difference from which definition of empathy one begins, though ultimately one has a sense of traversing all the distinctions and simply coming back to enhanced relatedness and understanding of the other person.
One goes in a circle. Readers are attracted to the literary fiction that speaks to their hopes, possibilities, and fears, which, in turn, expands and reinforces their hopes, possibilities, and fears. Then, either by accident or diligent search, readers encounter new forms of writing that change their experiences and perceptions. The writing causes the readers to see existing social structures and ways of relating to other people in new ways. The hermeneutic circle of interpretation? The engaging thing about bringing the hermeneutic circle to empathy is that it provides a series of steps, phases, within which logically to organize the process. Even if ultimately such a hermeneutic circle of empathy falls short of a formal algorithm, one gets a coherent guide against which to succeed or fail and engage in a process of continuous improvement based on experience.
What if a rigorous and critical empathy gave us the data needed to grasp the way to the humanity enhancing actions that need to be taken? The application of empathy would become an imperative guiding our reading and relatedness along with the moral imperatives so important to Keen and Batson. Empathy has not usually functioned as a criteria of literary significance or greatness – until now.
REFERENCES and NOTES
Since Keen published her book in 2007, several peer-reviewed have appeared that support the hypothesis that reading literary fiction expands empathy. These are useful, but do not decisively determine the outcome of the debate; and, obviously, these researchers did not include Pierce (MacAndrews) on their list. A lot of work gets done here by the adjective “literary.” For example:
Bal, P. M , Veltkamp, M. (2013). How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation. PLoS ONE 8(1): e55341, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0055341;
David Comer Kidd, Emanuele Castano. (2013). Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind, Science 18 October 2013, Vol. 342, Issue 6156, pp. 377–380, DOI: 10.1126/science.1239918;
Kelly Servick. (2013). Want to Read Minds? Read Good Bookshttps://www.science.org/content/article/want-read-minds-read-good-books [The page # is not available on the web version; but they are short articles.]
The reader may usefully review my blog post on these publications and “reading literary fiction expands empathy”: https://bit.ly/311A2G8
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empathy: Capitalist Tool (Part 1): The Empathy Deficit in Business is Getting Attention
The empathy deficit in business is getting attention
Listen to podcast on Spotify or via Anchor: https://anchor.fm/lou-agosta-phd/episodes/Empathy-Capitalist-Tool-Part-1-The-Empathy-Deficit-in-Business-is-Getting-Attention-e18tlcn
Children and parents get it. Nurses and doctors get it. Teachers and students get it. Couples get it. Consultants and clients get it. Neighbors get it. What about business people? Do they “get it”—that empathy produces results? Practicing empathy is a neglected opportunity in business. The qualities, practices, and behaviors that help a person build a business sometimes work against expanding the person’s empathy.
An executive’s ego, opinion, expertise, and attachment to being right raise the bar on empathizing with others, who may have diverging mind sets. Hard charging entrepreneurs find it hard to let go of their status or set aside the lessons learned as they came up through the ranks. Executives and managers lose touch with the experiences, perceptions, and perspectives of customers, employees, and stake-holders.
The urgent drives out the important. Management effort and time are monopolized responding to competitive pressures, compliance issues, legal challenges, and solving technology problems.[i] For example, according to a report from Businessolver, a human resources and talent consultancy, some 60% of executives believe that their organizations are empathic, whereas 24% of their employees agree.[ii] An empathy deficit?
The stress of operating the business—deadlines, financial issues, staffing crises, software breakdowns, competition, litigation—drive out empathy and a deep appreciation that a commitment to empathy is good for business. The disconnect is substantial between perceptions in the executive suite and in the cubicles of workers and the front line, customer-facing staff.
Ironically, the empathic practices such as the receptive, interpretive, and responsive processes described in detail in this work (as opposed to compassion) are what are most urgently needed in dealing with customer demands, employee crises, negotiations with competitors, vendors, clients, and one’s own budgeting authorities and board, optimally resolving conflicts with reduced cost and impact.
When I ask business leaders what is their budget for empathy training, the response is often a blank stare. Zero. However, when I ask the person what is the budget for expanded teamwork, reduced conflict, enhanced productivity, commitment to organizational goals, taking ownership of outcomes, product and service innovations, then it turns out that budget exists after all. Empathy makes a difference in connecting the dots between business skills and performance. Empathy contributes to results in a powerful way by engaging the staff’s energies and commitments at a fundamental level.
While every business has its own distinct commitments, in many ways, the basic empathy training in business is the same as empathy training in every other context.
The training consists in surfacing and driving out the cynicism, denial, shame, implicit threats, and pressure that many business people experience in their communications. Empathy then spontaneously comes forth and expands the space of possibilities to do business. This does not mean that businesses do not have their own blind spots when it comes to empathy. They do. Therefore, let us take a step back and look at what it is going to take.
An appreciation of the value of empathy to promote breakthrough results often starts in sales. In business, the sales people get it. Developing empathy with customers is good for business.
Even the cynical sales person recognizes that putting oneself in another person’s shoes is a good method of selling them another pair.[iii] The sales person gives the prospect some empathy. Shazam! The customer calls you to close the deal. Wouldn’t it be nice?
Yet the basic idea is straightforward. When the customer appreciates that the sales person is interested in the customer’s requirements, that the sales person is listening, then the customer is likely to open up and candidly share what is stressing him—budget, deadlines, internal politics, market dynamics, or the competition.
When the prospective customer feels that the sales person has understood him, the chance is significantly expanded that he will prefer to purchase the product or service from the empathic representative. Once the customer feels the sales person is listening, the customer will share details about his needs, vulnerabilities, and shortcomings, including those about which he might otherwise be defensive, enabling the sales person to position the product or service as a solution to the perceived problem.
This is not “new news.” In 1964, in the Harvard Business Review—not exactly an obscure, backwater publication—David Mayer and Herbert M. Greenberg called out the two basic qualities that any good sales person must have: empathy and ego drive. These authors define “empathy” as the central ability to feel as other people feel in the context of selling them a product or service.
In Mayer and Greenberg’s article, the sales staff were trained to interrupt themselves when they found that they were reacting defensively to customer complaints, whether legitimate or not, whether solvable or not. Stop—hit the pause button before responding. Instead of reacting to the complaint, the sales person was trained to “get” the complaint and to communicate back to the customer that he “got it,” namely, that the customer was upset (or whatever the customer was self-expressed about).
The sales person was trained to acknowledge that a breakdown had occurred. Key term: breakdown. The sales person was trained to acknowledge the complaint by calling it out: “This is a break down!” Even if the customer is inaccurate or wrong in his complaint about some detail, the customer is always—the customer.
By definition, the breakdown in the product or service occurs against the expectation of customer satisfaction. The relationship between the buyer and seller is itself in breakdown against the expectation of satisfaction. This does not rule out the possibility that additional training is needed on the part of the customer about product features or the service level agreement; but such training is substantially different from a defensive reaction.
The next step is repairing, fixing, or at least managing the cause of the complaint: the respondent then solicits additional feedback and details as to the complaint, i.e., what went wrong. The empathic response includes what one is going to do about the breakdown and by when.
The committed listening, that is, empathy, creates a clearing for communication, improving the sales process, and restoring authenticity to the relationship when integrity has gone missing. While there are no guarantees, customers treated in such a way tend to stick. Repeat business, maximizing revenue over the lifetime of the relationship, is one of the outcomes. [iv]
The empathic leader meets “economic man”
Development Dimensions, Intl., (DDI) identifies empathy as one of the critical success factors in executive leadership. One of the leading talent development corporations in the market, DDI’s report on High Resolution Leadership identifies empathy as an emotional quotient (EQ) “anchor skill.”
Empathy provides the foundation for interpersonal leadership skills such as developing subordinates, building the consensus for action, encouraging engagement, supporting self-esteem, and taking responsibility.[v]
In the DDI study, listening and responding with empathy were demonstrated by 40% of executives profiled (as opposed to 71% whodemonstrated taking responsibility or 54% who demonstrated building agreement on actions to take).
The conclusion is that, as regards empathy, the majority of leaders have room for expanding their performance. The good news is that, using interventions designed to expand empathy, the empathy skills needed to drive business results are within reach. [vi]
Thus, the empathy deficit in business is getting attention. Empathy is moving to the foreground. The role and contribution of empathy to business results is penetrating the awareness of leaders, managers, staff, and stake-holders.
Closely related to the challenge of closing the empathy deficit in business is the challenge that “economic man” is significantly different than man as such. Let’s define our terms.
The person who conducts transactions in the market is defined in business school as economic man—homo economicus. The latter is significantly different than man, the human being as such. The person (man) in the economic theory is rational, selfish, and her or his tastes do not change.
Business practices assume the organization is engaging with customers, employees, stake-holders, and leaders who fit the model of economic man. Human beings, on the other hand, do not. Most people in business do not know anyone who fits the description of economic man. Why then are we so busy trying to do business with him when he does not even exist?
Unlike the person described in economics in business schools, humans are limited in their reasonableness. Humans are diverse and inconsistent in their preferences. Humans are even limited in their selfishness, being generous and compassionate in unpredictable ways.
The issue? Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker’s rational choice theory (preference theory) in economics has been extended to many other aspects of life. Becker’s rational choice theory has been extended to areas as diverse as marriage, crime, and discrimination.
Generalizations from rational choice theory to the social sciences at large have been a growth industry in the social sciences. From the rich mixture of inconsistencies and contradictions that most people really are in life, the human being was translated into a function of rational, self-interested, and allegedly consistent preferences. The human as such has been simplified and redescribed as a rational, calculating engine of human behavior.[vii]
People are supposed to be consistent in their preferences and tastes. People are supposed to be logical and consistently obey the rules. But finding counter-examples is easy.
For example, if a person prefers coffee to hot chocolate and the person prefers hot chocolate to tea, then, according to this logic, the person is supposed to prefer coffee to tea. [Think: coffee > hot chocolate > tea; therefore, coffee > tea, according to the transitive rule, in which “>” means “prefers.”] But, no, it doesn’t work that way. Given all these personal preferences as indicated, the person still chooses tea instead of coffee. The person just prefers tea to coffee. The individual is from London!
Nothing inherently illogical exists in preferring coffee to hot chocolate and tea to coffee while also preferring hot chocolate to tea. Nothing unless one insists on making a dynamic network into a transitive sequence. So much for rational choice theory.
The lesson? Empathy as well as logic are required to understand decision making. Without allowing for the possibility of empathy, economics produces some strange results. People are not natural born statisticians, logicians, or gamblers, though the discipline of economics sometimes seems to assume so.
Still, testing a person’s decisions and preferences using probabilities, bets, and lotteries is an engaging exercise, and nothing is wrong in doing so. However, unless one also adds empathy to the mixture of economics and logic one misses something essential—the person!
Now, I apologize in advance to the reader for the technical terms, but in economics the chance of winning a bet is expressed as an “expected utility.” “Expected utility” is technical talk for “satisfaction” or “happiness.” (But nothing more than arithmetic is needed to get this. )
For example, in economics the expected utility of a 10% chance of winning a million dollars is $100K [.10 x 1,000,000 = 100,000] [note: K = 1,000]. If Jack and Jill both end up with a million dollars, they should enjoy the same expected utility, no? Remember, Jack and Jill are supposed to be rational, selfish, and consistent in their preferences. Now consider a counter-example:
Today Jack and Jill each have a million dollars.
Yesterday Jack had zero and Jill had two million dollars.
Are they equally happy? (Do they have the same utility?)
You do not need an advanced degree to know that today Jack is very happy and Jill is in despair. Yesterday Jack had zero; now he has a million dollars. Hurrah! Yesterday Jill had two million dollars; now she has only one million. Ouch!
We must be able to put our ourselves in the shoes of Jack and Jill and get a sense of their expectations. Sounds familiar?
These expectations, in turn, constrain their experience of satisfaction (i.e., happiness). To grasp the outcome in terms of their individual experiences, we need an empathic anchor or reference point in their expectations from which they begin. Empathy gives us access to an anchor point in their respective experiences.
Our empathy shows that outcomes are linked to feelings about the changes of one’s wealth rather than to states of wealth. The experience of value depends on the history of one’s wealth, not only the current state of it.
Yet another bold empathy lesson: People are strongly influenced by hope and fear. Empathy indicates that people attach values to gains and losses, and these are weighted differently than logical probabilities in decision making. This is not just saying that people are irrational, though that may be true enough at times, too. This says that people (and their behavior) frequently do not conform to the pattern of rationality, selfishness, and consistency in preferences.
Still, the matter is not hopeless for those committed to pattern matching in economics. People are frequently surprising, but sometimes in predictable ways. People are sometimes inconsistent, but one can sometimes predict those inconsistencies if one learns one’s empathy lessons.[viii] For example:
(1) People are risk averse due to fear of disappointment and regret. The empathy lesson is that people try to avoid risks even in situations where taking a risk is a good bet. “A good bet” is determined according to the probability calculation.
Consider: if a person had a 90% probability of winning a million dollars, he ought to accept $900K as a “sure thing” settlement, which settlement is logically equivalent to a 90% probability of winning the million dollars [.9 x 1,000K = 900K]. The 10% probability of not winning is an unlikely outcome, but still possible. The “unlikely outcome” often determines the result.
For example, law suits in cases of accidents and contract disputes produce settlements in trial law indicating that people will “settle for” $800K or even $750K for the possibility of knowing the outcome with certainty. For most people that is still a lot of money, and the possibility of having to live with the regret of missing the pay-off due to an unlikely outcome gets most people out of their comfort zone. They decide to settle.
Empathic receptivity to the possibility of disappointment and regret may usefully “override” the rational, self-interested, and consistent preferences that the purely economic person brings to the negotiations.
(2) People are risk seeking in the hope of getting an even larger gain instead of accepting a modest settlement.
This is why people bet on the state lottery where the chance of winning is vanishingly small. Such a bet is illogical, but common. We need expanded empathy to get a clue what is going on here.
The empathy lesson indicates that people are not buying a chance to win a big pot of money. Rather people are buying a chance to dream of the possibility of winning the big jackpot. “We are such stuff as dreams are made of,” said Shakespeare. The value is in the dreaming, that is, precisely in the possibility of the big jackpot, not the jackpot itself. That such a dream would more likely be the dream of a poor person rather than an affluent one is a further problem that invites attention.
If one looked rationally at the odds, one would not buy the ticket. No way. Clearly lotteries are popular, especially with the poor and “have nots.” The possibility of escaping from poverty is being manipulated in a cynical way by the establishment, and we citizens have all become “addicted” to the revenue stream.
The lottery budget and effort would be better devoted to job training and instruction in basic financial management, except now lotteries have become a source of revenue for local government and education. This is a breakdown in empathic understanding, which gives us our possibilities. It is hard not to become a tad cynical in considering that the poor are paying for education through lottery revenue, though they are often unprepared to benefit from or hindered from accessing the educational opportunity.
(3) People are risk seeking in the hope of avoiding a loss in situations in which simply stopping a project altogether would enable cutting their losses (rather than incurring additional likely losses). Defeat is difficult to accept. The empathy lesson is that people are attached to an ideal, in this case a losing cause, for reasons extending from perseverance, egoism, greed, risk aversion, fear of the unknown, all the way to idealism, romance, blind hope, and just plain stubbornness.
People (and businesses) facing a bad outcome manage to turn a survivable (but painful) failure into a complete meltdown. Desperate gambles often make a bad situation worse in exchange for a small hope of avoiding the loss at all. Businesses, individuals, and even countries, continue to expend resources long after they should blow the bugle, lower the flag, and leave, implementing an orderly retreat. Instead people (and organizations) persist in a lost cause until a rout becomes inevitable.
Business accounting teaches the basic idea of a “sunk cost.” Suppose Octopus, Inc., (OI) is building a new software system for $100 million dollars. OI has already spent $150 million. The project is over-budget. It is estimated to take another $55 million to complete the job. Suppose further that evidence of a new, breakthrough technology really exists. It would enable OI to develop the system from scratch for $25 million. What should OI do? The money already spent is a “sunk cost.” It should not influence the decision. Given the evidence that the new technology really works, the OI project leader should throw away the over-budget system and build the new one from scratch, spending $25 million and saving $30 million against the projected completion cost of the project. However, that is not what most project leaders would do.
Due to a sense of ownership of the over-budget project and a fear of the unknown in engaging the new technology, many project leaders double down on the investment in a losing proposition. In a breakdown of empathic interpretation, they continue to project their hopes and fears onto the old technology and, as the saying goes, throw good money after bad.
(4) People are risk averse due to a fear of a large loss and may rationally and usefully bet on a small chance of (avoiding) a large loss. This is why people buy insurance. The empathy lesson is that people are not merely buying protection against an unlikely disaster; they are buying peace of mind, the ability to get a good night’s sleep. If the negative event would have catastrophic consequences, creating a risk pool, in which everyone participates, spreading the risk in a manageable way, makes compelling sense. Note that certain risks such as war and civil insurrection (or a giant asteroid hitting the earth) are uninsurable. Insurance is a calculation, not a gamble against undefined odds. In general, the insurable risk must relate to individuals or subgroups and the occurrence of the risk should not destroy the infrastructure of the entire community, which needs to be intact to cover the insured risk.
Insurance was a brilliant business innovation that emerged at about the time of the European Renaissance as traders in the Netherlands—those frugal Dutch—were sending valuable but fragile ships to fetch precious cargo in far away lands. The risks and rewards were great. How to even out the odds? Insurance was born.
In our own time, one can see the irrationality, the unempathic response, and gaming of the system by special interests in health insurance in the USA where attempts were made to exclude the sickest people from the insurance pool through penalties for preexisting illnesses, combined with charging monopoly rents to the healthiest participants.
Insurance is often a “good bet” when an outcome that is highly unlikely but catastrophic can be managed by everyone (or a large group) incurring a small cost to spread the risk. But how to get everyone at risk into the pool? When told that people have no health insurance, some politicians are supposed to have said: “Let them pay cash!” In another context, in one the most spectacular breakdowns in empathic responsiveness in modern European political history, the French Queen, Marie Antoinette, was told that the people had no bread, and she is supposed to have said: “Let them eat cake!” Same idea?
Saying that the purpose of business is to make money is like saying the purpose of life is to breathe. Keep breathing—and make money—by all means. But the purpose of life is to find satisfaction in one’s work, raise a family, write the great American novel (it’s good work if you can get it!), experience one’s efforts as contributing to the community and making a difference.
Likewise with business. Business is about delivering human value and satisfying human demands and goals, whether nutrition, housing, transportation, communication, waste disposal, health, risk management, education, entertainment, and so on. Even luxury and conspicuous consumption are human values, which show up as market demands.
In conclusion, business people “get it”—empathy is good for business. Profit is a result of business strategy, implementation, and operations, not “the why” that motivates commercial enterprise. And if profit shows up that way (as the “the why”), then you can be sure that, with the possible exception of index derivative hedging, it is a caricature of business and a limiting factor. Business prospers or fails based on its value chain and commitment to delivering value for clients and consumers. However, as noted, some of the things that make people good at business make people relatively poor empathizers.
Business leaders lose contact with what clients and consumers are experiencing as the leaders get entangled in solving legal issues, reacting to the competition, or implementing the technologies required to sustain operations. Yet empathy is never needed more than when it seems there is no time or place for it. This is a challenge to be engaged and overcome.
What to do about it? Practice expanded empathy. Empathy is on the critical path to serving customers, segmenting markets, positioning products (and substitutes), psyching out the competition—not exactly empathy but close enough?—building teams and being a leader who actually has followers. Empathy makes the difference for contributors to the enterprise at all levels between banging on a rock with a hammer and building a cathedral. The motions are the same. When the application of empathy exposes and strengthens the foundation of community, then expanding empathy becomes synonymous with expanding the business. Building customer communities, building stakeholder communities, building teams that work, are the basis for product innovation, brand loyalty, employee commitment, satisfied service level agreements, and sustained or growing market share. Can revenue be far behind? Sometimes leaders don’t need more data, leaders need expanded empathy, though ultimately both are on the path to satisfied buyers, employees, and stakeholders. If the product or service is wrappered in empathy, has an empathic component as part of the service level agreement, gets traction in the market, and beats the competition’s less empathic offering, then we have the ultimate validation of empathy. We do not just have empathy. We have empathy Capitalist Tool!
Notes
[i] Katja Battarbee, Jane Fulton Suri, and Suzanne Gibbs Howard. (2012). Empathy on the edge: Scaling and sustaining a human-centered approach in the evolving practice of design, IDEO:
http://liphtml5.com/gqbv/uknt/basic [checked on 03/31/2017].
[ii] William Gentry. (2016). Rewards multiply with workplace empathy, Businessolver: http:// http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/brand-connect/businessolver/rewards-multiply-with-workplace-empathy/ [checked on 03/31/2017].
[iii] Roman Krznaric. (2014). Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It. New York: Perigree Book (Penguin): 120.
[iv] C.W. Von Bergen, Jr. and Robert E. Shealy. (1982). How’s your empathy? Training and Development Journal, November 1982: 22–28: http://homepages.se.edu/cvonbergen/files/2012/11/Hows-Your-Empathy.pdf [checked on 03/31/2017].
[v] Research Staff. (2016). High Resolution Leadership, Data Dimensions, Intl.: http://insight. ddiworld.com/High-Resolution-Leadership [checked on 03/31/2017].
[vi] William Gentry, Todd J. Weber, Golnaz Sadri. (2007). Empathy in the workplace: A tool for effective leadership, http://www.ccl.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/EmpathyInTheWorkplace.pdf [checked on 03/31/2017].
[vii] Bernard E. Harcourt. (2015). Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[viii] Daniel Kahneman. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Lou Agosta, Ph.D., Listening With Empathy 