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Unreliable Parental Empathy in Henry James’ “What Maisie Knew”
Henry James provides a dramatic picture of unreliable and defective parental empathy. What Maisie Knew(1897) begins as a contentious divorce between Beale and Ida Farange is granted by the court. And, lacking the wisdom of Solomon (admittedly a rare quality), so is the custody of the child. The narrative is an inquiry into how the child is cut in half emotionally, and the consequences who she becomes as a person. Maisie is about six years old, and is to spend six months with each parent. As the story begins, each parent wants to take Solomon’s sword and use it on the other partner. Lacking a sword, they use Maisie. Or, expressed slightly differently, the parents are playing “hard ball” and Maisie is the ball.
James’ incomparable empathy with Maisie and his penetrating and astute comprehension of human relations writ large applies empathy in the extended sense as who people are as possibilities, walking in the other’s shoes (after, of course, first taking off one’s own to avoid projection), translating communications between adults and children (and adults and adults) as well as affect-matching and mis-matching (empathy in the narrow sense). James’ work aligns with the concise classic statement “On adult empathy with children” by Christine Olden (1953). When encountering a child, according to Olden, the adult is present to her or his own fate as a child of similar age. The encounter brings up the adult’s issues even if the child does not have such an issue and has other, unrelated issues. The adults expand their empathy by getting in touch with these issues and taking care that they not get in the way of their openness and responsiveness to the child. That, of course, is far from the case with the adults presented in James’ narrative. For example, in encountering Maisie, Mrs Wix (one of the governesses) is present not only to her own fate as a child, but to the fate of her (Mrs Wix’s) child, who was killed in a tragic traffic accident when she was about Maisie’s age. Mrs Wix reaction to her loses, including her own genteel poverty, is to embrace a scrupulous conventional morality that mainly constrains her (Mrs Wix), but which will also eventually impact Maisie. The parents, Beale and Ida, are nursing their grievances and elaborating their hostility to one another, as noted above, using Maisie. The prospective step-parents, Sir Claude and Miss Overmore (Mrs Beale), who eventually emerge, are a definite improvement in empathic responsiveness to Maisie. However, the bar is now set so low that is not saying a lot and the process of de-parenting and re-parenting does not succeed as the narrative ends due to Sir Claude’s unresolved marital status and Maisie’s own painfully acquired knowledge of how to play “hard ball” with the grown-ups.
As James’ novel begins, Maisie’s parents have already spent whatever financial resources they had as the divorce court enjoins Beale (the father) to return the 2500 pounds sterling to his former wife, which money, as noted, seems already to have been spent; Ida (the mother) is living off her looks, by the middle of the story, consorting with exceedingly unattractive rich men (Mr Perrin); Mr Faranago is doing the same with an American “Countess” of Color, who is described as having a mustache and it otherwise painted in terms of an appalling racist stereotype (definitely not James’ best moment). They are doing this for money. As Jems’ novels end, the one person of integrity – and it is narrowly scrupulous morality at that (people who are married should not move in with people to whom they are not married, even if the marriage is emotionally over (though not legally over)) – is Mrs Wix, whose inheritance (we learn towards the end) was stolen by a relative and, as the story of Maisie ends, has some slight hope of getting it back with the guidance of Sir Claude, who has heretofore not been particularly effective at anything except wooing an attractive, supposedly rich lady (Masie’s mother) who turned out not to be so rich and not so attractive if her personality is taken into the account. That noted, let us take a step back.
Children of tender age will repeat what is told them by way of a performance as if reciting a nursery rhyme, not appreciating the ramifications of the statements in the adult world. The reader is given a sample of misbehavior on the part of both parents. At this point, Maisie is six years old (p. 9). Her mother asks her:
‘And did your beastly, papa, my precious angel, send any message to your own loving mamma?’ Then it was that she found the words spoken by her beastly papa to be after all, in her little bewildered ears, from which, at her mother’s appeal, they passed, in her clear, shrill voice, straight to her little innocent lips, ‘He said I was to tell you, from him, she faithfully reported, ‘that your’re a nasty, horrid pig!’ (p. 11)
The way the parents use and, strictly speaking, misuse Maisie to send one another insulting, arguably abusive, messages marks both as loathsome individuals. These parents are easy to hate. The parents are verbally abusive towards one another, and abusive towards Masie in enrolling her in delivering invalidating messages on their behalf to one another. The text is packed with instances of inadequate, substandard parenting. The text is thick with examples of defective empathy, unreliable empathy, and even fiendish empathy. Breakdowns of empathy such as emotional contagion, projection, conformity, and communications lost in translation, are so pervasive as to make the text a veritable compendium of what parents ought not to do.
Maisie is reduced to a tool, and indeed even in Henry James’ skillful literary hands is something of a guinea pig in the jungle of parental incompetence and ethical conformity. The saving grace of James’ fictional study is that such scenarios, bordering on and perpetrating emotional abuse, are all too common – in his time and ours. The advantages of a fictional account is that it enables imaginative variations and thought experiments; and one is not going to get sued for slander, which is a risk even if the alleged “slander” is accurate and based on factual evidence.
The examples of Maisie’s parents are why 21st Century divorce judges begin proceedings by issuing a binding court order that the parents are not to speak ill of one another in front of the child nor have the child deliver messages to one another. I do not know the judicial practices in 1897. What I do know is that in 1897 divorce was less common and more scandalous in contrast with today when divorce is common and the scandals are single parent families, fatherless children, and domestic violence against women and children. We also know that the patriarchy was much more severe in times past (nor does that excuse today’s problems). Consider the cases of Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, 1878) and Effi Briest (Theodor Fontane, 1895), who were prevented from seeing their children by spouses who were aggrieved, wielding ethical cudgels to separate mother and child. Yet even in our own time such legal injunctions are hard to enforce in cases where the parent is bound and determined to create mischief. Anecdotal reports from the trenches indicate that divorce judges are swamped with cases of physical abuse and inevitably give lower priority to bad verbal behavior, which can still be quite destructive to young, still maturing personalities.
Taking care of this child of tender age requires time and effort (all of which cost money) and each parent is eager to send Maisie to the other to inflict this cost on the despised former spouse. The child becomes an extension of the parent, like the narcissistic extension his or her own hand, the very definition of defective empathy, which leaves the child vulnerable to emotional disequilibrium, a kind of empty depression, and breakdowns in the child’s own empathy. The violation of the moral imperative to treat other people as ends in themselves and not mere means aligns with the parents’ retributive attitude, manipulative behavior, and (it must be said) pathological narcissism. Maisie becomes a mere means of the parents to inflict abuse on one other. While lonely and neglected, Maisie makes use of “auxiliary parents” such as an interested and engaged governesses and step parents (all of whom have their own conflicts of interest to maintain a measure of hope and perky positivity in the face of recurring disappointments delivered by the supposed adults in her world. Now in the context of the narrative, the governess, Miss Overbeck, is romantically interested in (and eventually marries) Maisie’s father; but Miss Overbeck also takes a sincere interest in Maisie. If Miss Overbeck is faking her interest in Maisie, it is an academy award winning performance. As in most areas of life, conflicting and overlapping interests are what make James’ narratives so powerful and thought provoking.
The matter almost immediately goes beyond James’ penetrating and engaging narrative. And that is relevance of James for us today. In our own time of fragmented and blended families, who does not know of an example where former spouses are at risk of speaking ill about one another? (It happens to married couples too!) The question is what happens when the affection or hostility are not expressed but nevertheless powerfully present, so to speak, percolating up from beneath the surface. That the emotions are not expressed means that they remain “unthought” as far as thinking using words is concerned. When Maisie’s father tells her, “Your mother hates you,” what does Maisie know about her mother and/or her father? The former spouses routinely refer abusively to their ex-partner in the presence of the child (as James calls her) in devaluing terms (p. 141) – “pig,” “nasty” person, “ass,” and so on.
When another person tells one something, then one has to decide whether to believe it or not. A whole course in critical thinking may be unfolded and inserted here. In particular, the child is motivated to believe the parents, because most decent parents tell the child the truth in age appropriate language, establishing a track record. Still, life events such as divorce, the birth of a sibling, major illness, or death of a family member, introduce incentives and emotional conflicts that distort communications and create parental integrity outages. Even in such examples, and this is the really interesting case, the child is incented to “go along with the program” – that is, what is represented as the truth about the life and family circumstances – because the parent provides meals, clothing, transportation, education, and entertainment, all of which are essential to the child’s well-being and immediate happiness. Still, while the child is constrained to “go along with the program” that does not mean the child always believes the outlandish assertions of the dominating parental authorities. Just because the child goes along with the parent’s fibs does not mean that the child always believes what she is told. You can’t fool all the people all of the time.
For example, at about the same time as James was writing his work, there was a precocious five-year-old – articulate, funny, witty, cute – living in Vienna to whom was born a baby sister. When he asked his parents from where the sister came (he was not quite sure a sister was such a good idea), the parents told him the stork brought it. At that point the boy’s behavior deteriorated, hough the connection and timing was overlooked by the parents, because of their own blind spots. The well-behaved boy threw temper tantrums, developed a phobia which made it difficult to take him out of the house, and regressed to baby-like behavior and talk. His father had a conversation with someone who was innovating in human development (Freud 1909). The coaching was – stop lying to the kid and tell him about from where babies come – tell him about the birds and bees. Recovery was prompt – though there were other challenges in the relationship between his parents.
The point? Children often know that they do not have all the facts and being dependent on their parents for their well-being the children decide it is best to conform. (Key term: conform.) They accept what they are told, subject to their own observations. The boy in question, anonymously known as “Little Hans,” had access to the lake where the storks were living and he saw the storks, but there was a noticeable absence of human babies (Freud 1909). Young scientist! Astutely observant, Hans concluded that his parents account was a fabrication. In short, they were lying to him about from where babies came. Unable to express himself in adult (scientific) language with the counter-example produced by his own observations down by the lake, Hans acted out. His behavior deteriorated. His behavior expressed his disagreement and his suffering, In short, he “knew” his folks were lying to him, rather in the sense that Maisie “knew” matters were not well with the representations offered by the adults in her environment.
Thus, the one parent says, “Your father is loathsome.” The other parent says, “Your mother is loathsome.” Unlike the story about the stork, both of Maisie’s parents are speaking the truth! Yet even in uttering what is a factually accurate statement, there is a larger integrity outage confounding circumstances for the child. It is the job of the parents to take care of the whole child, and they seem not even to have the idea what is the “whole child” and how to do their job. Yes, of course, the child’s material needs, but also the child’s emotional development, education, and sense of being an effective agent, even if only in age appropriate, childish matters. That is profoundly missing here. In such a context, the factually accurate words are a lie.
In the case of Maisie, what might be called intrusive interruptions – and the pediatrician psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott calls “impingements” – in her childhood tasks of precisely being allowed to be a child of tender age, learning her school lessons, playing with children of a similar age, and holding tea parties with her dolls and stuffed animals – occur as the grown ups treat Maisie like a grown up. Her nursery attendant tells her: “Your papa wishes you never to forget, you know, that he has been dreadfully put about” (p. 10). This is the paradigm of defective empathy, for it attempts to induce in the child what papa was experiencing, yet does so in way that blames the child – points an accusing finger at her – for the “dreadful” inconvenience papa is suffering because of shared child custody. The child’s job is to learn her school lessons, play with her dolls, have bed time story time and lunch time and bath time, and visit with her peers (of which Maisie seems to have none), not to understand legal custody proceedings.
In general, when confronted with incompetent parenting, the child will (1) try to “fix the parent” so the parent can do her/his job (of taking care of the child), (2) conform, or (3)act out (see Little Hans, above). For example, the child will try to cheer up the depressed mother by putting on a happy smiley face, being perky, winsome, in the face of the mother’s self-invovled funk and indifference. The middle school or pubertal child will quote positive things said by friends about the parent. The child will try to placate the neglectful, abandoning, or angry father by being apologetic, giving agreement, being submissive, promising “I’ll be good!” The child may have no idea what is bothering the grown up – financial challenges, health issues, sexual frustration, or relationship breakdowns that a child of tender age cannot possibly comprehend. The child may act out – if an adolescent, defy social conventions – if a child of tender age, regress and lose toilet skills and wet the bed. The child will experience difficulties – experience sleep and eating disorders or throw temper tantrums. The child has limited skill in expressing her or his feelings verbally and/or understanding parental issues, so the child will invent meaning. “If only I were better at academics, sports, socializing, doing chores, then my mother and/or father would be happy (and be able to take care of me in such a way that I can be happy too).” “If only I had done my chores, my folks would not be getting divorced” – and this after both parents have repeatedly assured the child that she or had nothing to do with the family breakup.
In the narrative, mamma enacts a similar impingement and calls forth a “try to fix her” response in Maisie. Papa has already used the same words:
You’ll never know what I’ve been through about you – never, never, never. I spare you everything, as I always have [….] If you don’t do justice to my forbearing, out of delicacy, to mention, just as a last word, about your stepfather, a little fact or two of a kind that really I should only have to mention to shine myself in comparison and after every calumny like pure gold: if you don’t do me that justice you’ll never do me justice at all.
Maisie’s desire to show what justice she did her had by this time become so intense as to have brought with it an inspiration (p, 161)
In response, Maisie tries to cheer up her mother – tries to “fix” things by acknowledging her mother with the complimentary description of Ida (mamma) provided by The Captain, a prospective romantic interest of mamma with whom Maisie had a conversation. The Captain had paid her (mamma) many credible compliments, saying beautiful, kind things about her, which helped Maisie feel genuine affection for this difficult individual, Maisie’s mamma. Maisie tries to acknowledge her mamma using the Captain’s kind words. It does not work. “Her [Maisie’s] mother gave her one of the looks that slammed the door in her face; never in a career of unsuccessful experiments had Maisie had to take such a stare” (p. 164). James compares the impact on Maisie to a science experiment that goes horribly wrong, producing something disgusting instead of the expected elegant result. The mother then has a temper tantrum. Maisie (who is now estimated to be the age of a middle school student) survives this scene of “madness and desolation,” “ruin and darkness,” and, after mamma’s departure, goes off and smokes cigarettes with Sir Claude.
As noted, Winnicott describes this scene of fear and defective empathy, “…[T]he faulty adaptation to the child, resulting in impingement of the environment so that the individual [the child] must become a reactor to this impingement. The sense of self is lost in this situation and is only regained by a return to isolation” (Winnicott, 1952: 222; italics added). Maisie is definitely isolated, and she suffers greatly because of it. The parent takes the child as his or her confidant as if the child were an adult, “Let me tell you what your father said.” “Let me tell you what your mother did.” Even when the content of the statement is relatively benign, the tone with which it is uttered – and that is the moment of defective empathy – causes the listener to imagine a kind of outrage, boundary violation, or integrity outage. This other must be the very devil!
In the case of What Maisie Knew, both parents are explicitly hostile towards one another and, if not hostile towards Maisie (though that too emerges), at least neglectful and manipulative. Arguably, in making Masie the means of their abuse of one another, the parents are also abusing her. However, what about the case, perhaps more common in our own supposedly psychologically advanced time, where the parent is hostile, but following the court order, the parent does not express it. What happens then? That of course goes beyond James’ narrative, but points to its relevance for our own challenges and struggles.
On a positive note, if the abusive language is not performed, then it is not in the space. In so far as children are designed to conform to the guidance of their parents – even when they do not fully believe or trust them – so much negativity is removed from the space. Well and good – at least there is nothing to present in court when going before the judge. You will never hear me say that it is better to use the abusive language for then one knows where one stands with the other person. There are many other, better, ways of figuring out where one stands with the other such as comparing words and deeds, confronting one’s own introspective empathy, or simply asking the other person or other significant actors in the environment. It is just that the child’s ability to do these things is still developing and may be inadequate to the task (a problem that less skilled adults (and there are many) may also face). The hostility does not appear on the surface, which gives the appearance of a calm and placid body of water; yet a rip tide may lurk beneath the surface, capable of pulling one down.
At this point, it is useful to take a step back and consider how our consciousness is populated with many voices and many actors. An example of an “internal object” (actually more of an agent) would be a conscience that “tells” the person about the rightness of a prospective or accomplished behavior or speech act. The first internal object, the conscience (“superego”) is formed, thanks to the mechanism of identification with the aggression (about which more shortly). The conscience can become a hostile introject along other internal objects such as images of the parents, mentors, and positive complexes such as generosity, compassion, and empathy. The proposal is that the difference between parents who are explicitly assaultive in their speech acts and those who bottle up the hostility, which then leaks out in indirect forms, shows up in the quality of the internal introject. In the first case, the introject is more hostile, harsher but easier to distinguish from the authentic self; in the second case, the introject is more benign, but not necessarily harmless, and yet harder to distinguish from the authentic self.
If one could truly cancel all the hostility – not just try to keep it down – but truly extirpate it, then it would become an idle wheel and not move any part of the behavior or thinking of the agents in question. But would the hostility then exist anymore? It would be unexpressed, because it really and truly were sublimated into a poem or work of art. That is the issue – is there ever such a thing as unexpressed hostility? This is not a problem that Maisie’s parents have – their problem is that they are embracing the hostility, elaborating it, making it their project. The damage (including to the parents) is substantial. In contract, when the hostility is unexpressed, but still lurking beneath the surface, it may not be unexpressed forever. Betrayal oozes at every pore. empathy is active here too, in a kind of regressive mode, and gives off hostile vibes, aggressive vibes, even if one’s words as sweet as honey. “Would you like another piece of cake?” Is spoken with such a tone of venom that one suspects the cake might contain arsenic. The tone is the moment of empathy (or, more precisely, the unempathic moment) in which one gives off a kind of negative affect, a hostile vibe, in spite of one’s sweet or benigh words. In addition, it is just as common for hostility which is not verbally expressed to be displaced or expressed indirectly in behavior and deed. With advance apologies to pet lovers, the boss bullies the employee and the employee goes home and kicks the dog. The hostility is present but displaced.
As Maisie’s papa gets ready to leave for American to attend to the business affairs of his new, rich consort, the princess, further unreliable empathy. He makes an invitation to Maisie to accompany him to America. This is “out of the blue,” without context or assurances as to how Maisie will be taken care of, and the offer is fake. Why fake? Because he really does not want her along, nor does she really want to go, even though she says with enthusiasm and e=repeatedly “I will follow you anywhere.” It is clear the adventure is not going to happen:
She [Maisie] began to be nervous again; it rolled over her that this was their parting, their parting forever, and that he [papa] had brough her there for so many caresses only because it was important such an occasion should look better for him than any other [….]It was exactly as if he had broken out to her: ‘I say, you little donkey, help me to be irreproachable, to be noble, and yet to have none of the beastly bore of it. There’s only impropriety enough for one of us; so you must take it all (p 138).
Naturally, the child has to go along with what the parent tells her or him. The parent has the power to provide meals, transportation, shelter and entertainment, though, in this case, none are offered.
The cost and the impact of the lack of integrity and empathy (and adaptation in general) of the parents to the child is the creation of a false self. Maisie pretends to be dumb. The trouble is that faking being dumb risks actually being dumb in a “fake it till you make it” moment. Her formal education is already neglected and in tatters. Now in the context of James’ narrative, Maisie never loses her cognitive acumen, though she gets called invalidating names such as “idiot” and “donkey” by her elders, which must have a damaging impact on her self-esteem.
Here James is the master psychologist ahead of his time, giving the reader an inside case history on the production of what, as noted, D. W. Winnicott came to describe as “the false self.” On background, Winnicott is the pediatrician who became a celebrated psychoanalyst, surviving an analysis with James Strachey, Melanie Klein, who was himself fortified intellectually by one his most famous (indeed infamous) students and colleagues, Masud Kahn. Without going into psychoanalytic politics, let’s just say that Winnicott’s ideas of the transitional object, virtual play space of creativity, and the false self are among the most enduring and time-tested contributions of child analysis.
At risk of over-simplification, the false self is constructed in order to protect the true self, the source of spontaneity, satisfaction, fulfillment, beginning something new (as Hannah Arendt would say), and creativity. The false self is designed to help the individual survive the impingements of caretakers whose empathy is faulty. Here “empathy” is understood in the extensive sense of the parent’s willingness and ability to adapt to the requirements of the maturing child. The child is an end in her- or himself and not an extension of the parent’s narcissism, which narcissism reduces the child to the role of fulfilling the parents’ unmet needs in their own lives. Unhappy the child who must compensate for what is missing in the parents’ own lives. Most children will try to do so, making reparation for another’s incompletenesses, conforming to the felt requirements of the parent. How do you think that is going to work for the child?
Maisie’s authentic self takes shelter, hides, behind the false one and preserves the hope of someday being able to be expressed and have a satisfying life of her own, but in the meantime Maisie is able to get the secondary gain of frustrating her parents is using her to hurt one another. Maisie acquires the “know how” required to survive by manipulating the manipulators. The cost is enormous, but it protects one from the impingements of the powerful, malevolent forces in the unempathic environment:
The theory of her stupidity, eventually embraced by her parents, corresponded with a great date in her small, still life [….] She [Maisie] had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self, or, in other word, of concealment. She puzzled out with imperfect signs, but with a prodigious spirit, that she had been a centre of hatred and a messenger of insult, and that everything was because she had been employed to make it so. Her parted lips locked themselves with the determination to be employed no longer. She would forget everything, she would repeat nothing, and when, as a tribute to the successful application of her system, she began to be called a little idiot, she tasted a pleasure altogether new. When therefore, as she grew older, her parents in turn, in her presence, announced that she had grown shockingly dull, it was not from any real contraction of her little stream of life. She spoiled their fun, but she practically added to her own (p. 13; see also p. 54 on “the effect of harmless vacancy”; see also p. 117 on deep “imbecility”).
The child lives into – and unwittingly lives up to – the devaluing description and expectations made of her. Maisie makes the best of a bad situation and has fun spoiling the fun of other (which “fun” seems to be the mutual insults of and gossip about the parents). But the cost is substantial. James’ calls out a masochistic moment here in which, as the proverb goes, one cuts off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Caught in the cross fire, in an attempt to find a way between the rock and the hard place, Maisie consults a potential ally. Miss Overmore (the governess initially employed by her mother, but who eventually marries her father) has conflicts of interest of her own but in this moment functions as an honest broker. Maisie’s mother tells her to tell her father that he is a liar and Maisie, who is maturing, asks her governess if she should do so:
‘Am I to tell him?’ the child [Maisie] went on. It was then that her companion [Miss Overmore] addressed her in the unmistakable language of a pair of eyes deep dark-grey. ‘I can’t say No,’ they replied as distinctly as possible; ‘I can’t say No, because I’m afraid of your mamma, don’t you see? Yet how can I say Yes after your papa has been so kind to me, talking to me so long the other day, smiling and flashing his beautiful teeth at me the tie we met him in the Park, the time when, rejoicing at the sight of us [….]The wonder now lived again, lived in the recollection of what papa had said to Miss Overmore: ‘I’ve only to look at you see that your’re a person to whom I can appeal to help me save my daughter.’ Maisie’s ignorance of what she was to be saved from didn’t diminish the pleasure of the thought that Miss Overmore was saving her. It seemed to make them cling together (p. 15).
What Maisie does is she keeps quiet. She isolates – plays dumb. All the worse, the mother initially prevents Miss Overmore from accompanying Maisie when the rotation to the father’s turn to take care of her occurs. The child is afraid of being abandoned – not taken care of – not provided for. Miss Overmore is taking caring of Maisie educationally and emotionally. Miss Overmore is banished (at least at this point). The child is “invisible”: “Maisie had a greater sense than ever in her life before of not being personally noticed (p. 107).
As the novel progresses, mamma is stricken with a dreaded but unspecified disease and her life is limited by illness even as she consorts with men who have money. As noted, Papa is bound for America. Sir Claude (who has not been properly introduced here but is a kind person who marries Maisie’s mother and genuinely likes Maisie) ping pongs between England and Paris as Sir Clause learns of a letter in which Papa (Mr Beale) deserts Mrs Beale (Miss Overmore, now Sir Claude’s lover). “You do what you want – and so will I” type of arrangement. Sir Claude is still married to mama (Ida Farange), and in the gilded age that is the scandal. Sir Claude cannot live with a woman married to someone else (according to the standard conventions of the time). There is something indecent about Sir Claude taking up with Miss Overmore while still technically married to Ida. Key term: indecent.
The novel itself has an unthought, regarding the conventions circa 1897 about adult sex outside of marriage and within marriage with other partners. Sir Claude’s is a person who does not speak unkindly of anyone. He is kind, albeit a chain smoker, which is perhaps a way of binding his underlying anxiety. He is happy to have been given permission to do what he wants by his wife (Ida, Masie’s mother) provided she gets similar permission to consort with whoever she wishes. Without a formal divorce, this leaves Sir Claude compromised in terms of conventional moral standards (which were much stronger in such matters in 1897 than in 2024).
We fast forward though Maisie’s lessons in cynicism, playing “hard ball,” the integrity outages of her parents and step parents, and instruction from another of her governesses, Miss Wix, in a rigorous sense of conventional morals. As the story ends (spoiler alert!), Maisie practices a kind of hardball. “I will give up Mrs Wix if you will give up Miss Overmore – and we will go off together to Paris,” Maisie proposes to Sir Claude. Both governesses are to be thrown “under the bus,” which does have a certain narrative symmetry and symbolizes Maisie’s gorwing up.
Thus, Maisie tries to seduce Sir Claude, who, as noted, is the handsome if ineffective 2nd husband of her mamma. “Everyone loves Sir Claude,” everyone except his wife (Maisie’s mama). After marrying mamma, Sir Claude falls in love with Miss Overmore (who has since married Papa). Maisie proposes that she will give up Miss Wix if Sir Claude gives up Miss Overmore. That is the “seduction.” There is a certain amount of back-and-forth negotiation, but it is clear this is never seriously considered by Sir Claude. He would be willing to be in Maisie’s life, but is committed to living near Miss Overmore (Mrs Beale) in France (who are notoriously loose regarding marriage boundaries) so Sir Claude and Miss Overmore can continue their romance. Maisie (as directed by the author, James) takes the moral high road, and returns to England with her strict governess Miss Wix to a life of genteel poverty and “moral sense,” which means conformity to conventional moral behavior.
The empathic moment for Maisie is, who is she as a possibility? This is an aspect of empathy that is sometimes overlooked in the conversations about affect matching, projection, and communications lost in translations – who is the person as a possibility. For example, I meet someone is who struggling with alcohol abuse or, in this case, with quasi-abusive, neglectful parents. That is not who the person is authentically as a possibility. The abuser of alcohol is the possibility of overcoming that she is drinking because of unresolved trauma, low self-esteem, or other specific issue, which when surfaced and worked through allow the person to write the great American novel, join Doctors without Borders, or start a family.
So, once again, who is Maisie as a possibility? First of all, she is a survivor of being “caught in the cross fire” of a nasty divorce and being raised in its shadow. Anyone proposing to give Maisie a good listening might find themselves responding to her empathically saying, “You may usefully know yourself as a survivor.” By the end of the narrative, as Maisie goes off with her governess, Miss Wix, it far from clear that is the case. So while Maise learns a lot about cynicism, hardball, interpersonal invalidation, perpetrations, and emotional intrigue, she does not yet know herself as a survivor.
Using James’ other female figures as a foil for who is Maisie as a possibility, maybe she becomes a kind of Kate Croy (as in James’ Wings of a Dove) scheming to get married to get someone else’s fortune upon their passing away. Maybe Maisie becomes Maggie (as in The Golden Bowl), sacrificing herself to the happiness of others and simultaneously validating the appearances of conventional morality. Or perhaps she becomes a Miss Overmore, a governess educating other people’s children in French grammar and romantic intrigues with the master of the house. Alternatively, Maisie becomes a governess such as Mrs Wix, not mourning the loss of a daughter, but the loss of her own possibility of satisfaction by means of a scrupulous morality, a reaction formation to the loose standards of her own parents and step parents. As the narrative concludes, the latter is the probable almost certain future. A sad ending indeed.
There are many moments of affect matching (and mismatching) in James. There are many moments of communications lost in translation. These are empathy lessons in the sense that if one “cleans up” the miscommunication (restore understanding, then empathy emerges between the communicants. There are many examples of projection in – the parents especially are projecting their hostility onto one another and indeed everyone in the environment. Withdraw the project and authentically be with the other person and empathy comes forth. This does not happen to the parents, but the step parents (with whom Maisie is prospectively “re-parented”) move in that direction. Does Maisie become Kate Croy, Maggie (albeit without all the money), or even a version of her own mamma, seeking her fortune (literally) in association with a series of men of varying degrees of unattractiveness The opportunities for women are appallingly limited. Maisie’s education has been neglected as she has been shunted back and forth between parents. Even when she is de-parented from her biological ones, and Sir Claude and Miss Overmore (Mrs Beale) come together and propose to take care of her, the promise of educational lectures is short-circuited by lack of a revenue model. They can afford some lectures targeting working class folks at the equivalent of the public library, but university level preparation (which, at that time, requires Greek and Latin) seems a high bar. The disappointing, even demoralizing (in the sense of inspiring a righteous indignation), results are a reduction to absurdity of the constraints of standard morality. There is no need for James explicitly to have intended such a message, but it is not hard to find it in him, consistent with an agenda that treats women as full human beings, social actors, and agents with full political and financial rights (which was definitely not the case in James’ Gilded Age).
James’ novels often end on a conventional note, even if his embrace of convention is a reduction to absurdity of convention. When Maisie sees her parents nasty divorce, relatively rare in 1896 as compared with our own time, and the musical chairs of changing partners with Sir Claude and Miss Overbeck (Mrs Beale), is it any wonder that Maisie embraces conventional morality and partners with Mrs Wix, a standard governess who has lost a daughter that would be about Maisie’s age? As noted above, when Mrs Wix is in the presence of Maisie, she (Mres Wix) is in the presence of her lost daughter, which presents an obstacle to her being with – that is, empathizing with – Maisie. Instead Mrs Wix goes to morality (not inconsistent with empathy, just different than it) and her advocacy with “moral sense.” At this point, James’ incomparable empathy gives way to crafting a writerly conclusion, which engages and reduces conventional morality to absurdity.
Much ink has been spilt on whether James’ endings are endorsed by him. Happy endings are rare in the real world, and if one considers death to be unhappy, then they never occur. Never. However, endings where the protagonists act conventionally are realistic in the sense that people often conform to conventional moral standards – which is why it is called “convention.”
A deeper level of integrity coincides with doing what is conventional in James’ Wings of a Dove. Maggie returns to her unfaithful husband, Prince Amerigo, doing what is superficially conventionally requires. The arguably “deeper” integrity of Maggie’s self-sacrifice for the happiness of the poor couple (the husband and his original love interest) is hard to understand under the draconian laws of the patriarchy, by which the unfaithful husband has control of Maggie’s financial fortune. Maggie decides to “fund” his unfaithfulness to her in a magnanimous gesture of self-sacrifice (but does she really have a choice?) based on the romantic notion that his love for his prospective bride from their days of mutual impoverishment was the “real thing.” There is no way that life has to look, and it will turn out the way that it turns out.
In a different context and narrative, Lambert Strether (The Ambassadors) honors his word in the most superficial sense, returning to America presumably to acknowledge that, though Chad returns to Woollett, he (Strether) tried to convince him not to do so, requiring the engagement of other ambassadors, and forgoing his (Strether’s) own possibility of happiness with Marie, which would have required him explicitly to break his word and not return. Thus, doing the conventionally “right thing” is the wrong thing from the perspective of a personally satisfying outcome.
In the background is the pervasive issue of what is the revenue model? Who has the money? Kate Croy and Merton Denscher are engaging in a confidence scheme to get Milly Theale’s fortune (she has a fatal disease). Denscher is belatedly overcome with integrity (and Kate’s refusal to have sex with him to confirm the shady deal), not conventional conformity, but actual remorse. It cancels his affection for Kate, who poverty previously prevented him from marrying. Unless one thinks Milly’s bequest is a “guilt trip” designed to punish Denscher (which it might be, but probably not), and not a genuine gift to someone Milly loved, a case can be made that the non-conforming thing to do would be to “take the money and run (to the bank).” Here the layers of ambiguity and uncertainty really do send the participants (and readers) spinning (Pippin 2000: 66), and no reason exists to believe an unambiguous “right answer” is available. In the Golden Bowl, Maggie has the money, until she doesn’t, and that makes all the difference.
That Maisie turns out with standard level neuroses, acting out an Oedipus complex, even if cynical and seductive in a way conventionally appropriate for women of the Gilded Age, and not psychotic, is a tribute to the secure attachment she experienced from her early nurse, Moddle, all of which must have occurred prior to the beginning of the narrative.
Bibliography
S. Freud. Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 10:1-150
Henry James. (1897). What Maisie Knew. New York, Penguin Classics, 2007.
Christine Olden. (1952). On adult empathy with children. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 8: 111–126.
Robert Pippin. (2000). Henry James and Modern Moral Live. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Winnicott, D. W. (1952). Psychoses and child care. In D. W. Winnicott (1958).
Collected Papers. London: Tavistock Publications.
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: A Lazy Person’s Guide is now an ebook – and the universe is winking at us in approval!
The release of the ebook version of Empathy: A Lazy Person’s Guide coincides with a major astronomical event – a total solar eclipse that traverses North America today, Monday April 8, 2024. The gods are watching and wink at us humans to encourage expanding our empathic humanism!
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: A Lazy Person’s Guide, Empathy Lessons, and A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy – drum roll please – are now available.
A lazy person’s guide to empathy guides you in –
- Performing a readiness assessment for empathy. Cleaning up your messes one relationship at a time.
- Defining empathy as a multi-dimensional process.
- Overcoming the Big Four empathy breakdowns.
- Applying introspection as the royal road to empathy.
- Identifying natural empaths who don’t get enough empathy – and getting the empathy you need.
- The one-minute empathy training.
- Compassion fatigue: A radical proposal to overcome it.
- Listening: Hearing what the other person is saying versus your opinion of what she is saying.
- Distinguishing what happened versus what you made it mean. Applying empathy to sooth anger and rage.
- Setting boundaries: Good fences (not walls!) make good neighbors: About boundaries. How and why empathy is good for one’s well-being. Empathy and humor.
- Empathy, capitalist tool.
- Empathy: A method of data gathering.
- Empathy: A dial, not an “on-off” switch.
- Assessing your empathy therapist. Experiencing a lack of empathic responsiveness? Get some empathy consulting from Dr Lou. Make the other person your empathy trainer.
- Applying empathy in every encounter with the other person – and just being with other people without anything else added. Empathy as the new love – so what was the old love?
Okay, I’ve read enough – I want to order the ebook from the author’s page: https://tinyurl.com/29rd53nt
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Practicing empathy includes finding your sense of balance, especially in relating to people. In a telling analogy, you cannot get a sense of balance in learning to ride a bike simply by reading the owner’s manual. Yes, strength is required, but if you get too tense, then you apply too much force in the wrong direction and you lose your balance. You have to keep a “light touch.” You cannot force an outcome. If you are one of those individuals who seem always to be trying harder when it comes to empathy, throttle back. Hit the pause button. Take a break. However, if you are not just lazy, but downright inert and numb in one’s emotions – and in that sense, e-motionless – then be advised: it is going to take something extra to expand your empathy. Zero effort is not the right amount. One has actually to practice and take some risks. Empathy is about balance: emotional balance, interpersonal balance and community balance.
Empathy training is all about practicing balance: You have to strive in a process of trial and error and try again to find the right balance. So “lazy person’s guide” is really trying to say “laid back person’s guide.” The “laziness” is not lack of energy, but well-regulated, focused energy, applied in balanced doses. The risk is that some people – and you know who you are – will actually get stressed out trying to be lazy. Cut that out! Just let it be.
The lazy person’s guide to empathy offers a bold idea: empathy is not an “off-off” switch, but a dial or tuner. The person going through the day on “automatic pilot” needs to “tune up” or “dial up” her or his empathy to expand relatedness and communication with other people and in the community. The natural empath – or persons experiencing compassion fatigue – may usefully “tune down” their empathy. But how does one do that?
The short answer is, “set firm boundaries.” Good fences (fences, not walls!) make good neighbors; but there is gate in the fence over which is inscribed the welcoming word “Empathy.”
The longer answer is: The training and guidance provided by this book – as well as the tips and techniques along the way – are precisely methods for adjusting empathy without turning it off and becoming hard-hearted or going overboard and melting down into an ineffective, emotional puddle. Empathy can break down, misfire, go off the rails in so many ways. Only after empathy breakdowns and misfirings of empathy have been worked out and ruled out – emotional contagion, conformity, projection, superficial agreement in words getting lost in translation – only then does the empathy “have legs”. Find out how to overcome the most common empathy breakdowns and break through to expanded empathy – and enriched humanity – in satisfying, fulfilling relationships in empathy.
Order from author’s page: Empathy: A Lazy Person’s Guide: https://tinyurl.com/29rd53nt
Order from author’s page: Empathy Lessons, 2nd Edition: 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
Order from author’s page: A Critical Review of Philosophy of Empathy: https://tinyurl.com/29rd53nt
Order from author’s page: Empathy Lessons, 2nd Edition: https://tinyurl.com/mfb4xf4f
Above: Cover art: Empathy Lessons, 2nd Edition, illustration by Alex Zonis
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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
Finally, let me 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
Alternative facts, harmful half truths, damn lies, and total nonsense – about empathy
At the time of the initial publication of Empathy Lessons in 2018, a number of books appeared then and shortly thereafter that questioned the value of empathy. These extend from works which assert a bold statement of the obvious, that the practice of empathy has its strong and weak points, its breakdowns and break throughs, its misfirings and its successes, all the way to a growing number of works that insist the disadvantages of empathy far outweigh its benefits and sensible practitioners would do well to disregard and even abstain from it. The latter are the ones of concern here.
Full disclosure: I mistakenly subscribed to the view that no such thing as bad publicity existed, and I declined in 2018 (and up until 2023) to mention the anti-empathy authors by name, instead referring to a “celebrity psycholinguist,” a prominent “Germanic studies” teacher, or a mandarin professor of comparative literature. Why give “free publicity” to views that were seemingly committed to inhibiting, contracting, devaluing, rather than expressing, expanding, and implementing the practice of empathy? The gambit did not work. The devaluing of empathy got traction, perhaps driven by publishers whose market research, whether accurate or not, suggested that the sales of empathy books had peaked, and who proposed to keep the pot boiling with works that throw empathy “under the bus.” The challenge is that it is getting crowded under the bus, and the following cases provide a few suggestions about current authors who belong there, too. In the following, the alleged biases and limitations of empathy are so easy to refute that the reader is going to suspect me of having set up the representation of these limitations of empathy as a strawman in order to knock it down. I am not making this stuff up, and I provide references in support.
A second reason that the practice of empathy is hypothetically “on the ropes” is that skepticism about empathy’s value is a consequence of its own success. Empathy works. Empathy makes a profound and lasting difference. But in the age of TikTok does it work fast enough? Empathy and its many successes are themselves the occasions for the skepticism, resistance, and seeming embrace of the obstacles to empathy. A rigorous and critical empathy can be hard work; better to take the easy way out. The reader may say, I want instant empathy, like instant coffee, just add hot 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 – or a more challenging situation. The pervasive cynicism and resignation of the world are naturally attracted to attacking the sources of inspiration and strength, not those of enervation and stagnation. A treatise on “The Dark Sides of Violence” will sadly remain timely and relevant, but no one disputes the accuracy of the description. One does not need a treatise “Against Eating Dirt,” because few are inclined to eat dirt (and if one is so inclined, it seems be a sign of a vitamin deficiency).
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This brings us to the poster child for devaluing empathy, Fritz Breithaupt’s The Dark Sides of Empathy (2017) (hereafter referred to as “Dark Empathy”). Breithaupt asserts on page 8 that to “uncritically embrace empathy without caveats” is the goal debunked by the end of this [Breithaupt’s] book. Those who “uncritically embrace empathy” are debunked. Just so. Please stop right there. Who proposed uncritically embracing empathy—or anything? Uncritically embracing empathy is not proposed here. Attributing uncritical thinking to the masters of empathy such as Batson (2009), Baron-Cohen (2014), Frans de Waal (2009), Jean Decety and William Ickes (2009), Lanzoni (2012), Zenko (2015) (this list is not complete), is itself a concerning sign of lack of critical thinking. Dark Empathy is at best naïve and at worse disingenuous in imaging practitioners of empathy are uncritical or lack rigor. “Uncritically embracing empathy” sets up a strawman, and gives a green light to uncritical thinking. The program of Dark Empathy is systematically and sensationally to attribute examples of empathic distress to the practice of empathy itself, charge empathy with these misfirings, and, going forward, invalidate and dismiss the practice of empathy. Instead of engaging with the hard work of self-inquiry into one’s own blind spots to overcome the obstacles and resistances to empathy, Dark Empathy takes the easy way out, discards empathy, gives up on it. It is like giving up on nutrition because the cook may put too much salt in the soup or burned the roast.
Dark Empathy properly lists many of empathy’s breakdowns, misfirings, and obstacles (as do practitioners of a rigorous and critical empathy). Phenomena such as emotional contagion, projection, conformity, messages getting lost in translations in attempting to be empathic. A rigorous and critical empathy is committed to doing the hard work of overcoming these break downs and misfirings in order to relate authentically and in integrity to the other individual. Dark Empathy’s commitment is to sensationalizing the failings of empathy, not demonstrating how empathy works (and does not work) in literature, politics, psychology, etc. Or rather the commitment is that empathy does not work (full stop).
If Dark Empathy would have stopped at page 8—empathy is what makes us human (or words to that effect) and elaborated on that position—then it would have made a useful contribution. The author really says it: empathy is essential to our humanity. However, empathy then breaks down into empathic distress. The issue is that human beings are frequently inhumane—not just a few bad apples, but as the Holocaust and Hannah Arendt taught us about the banality of evil, and the famous quote from Himmler (Arendt 1971: 105–6; Agosta 2010: 73), everyone has the potential for real badness, evil, even if few act on it. Therefore, dial back empathy, abstain from empathy?
Dark Empathy asserts a few sensible things about empathy up front, and then sensationalizes the negative and the resulting empathic distress by saying that empathic human beings perpetrate horrid actions. Accurate enough. Human beings are a difficult species. They are an empathic, caring, and kind species as well as an aggressive, territorial, and rapacious one. Wouldn’t we want to work on expanding the former and inhibiting the latter? That Roman soldiers drove nails through the limbs of the people they were crucifying does not invalidate the art of carpentry. Dark Empathy makes it sound like it does as it seemingly intentionally applies the same argument to empathy. Dark Empathy perpetrates a similar series of fallacies of numbing grossness by saying the forms of empathy are the motives for the horrid actions. Aren’t the hidden variables aggression, uninhibited desire, territoriality (this list is not complete)?
Dark Empathy cites Nietzsche to support the case against empathy. The reading of Nietzsche is highly problematic. The text sounds like Nietzsche is discussing empathy, has an argument about empathy, and indeed may be considered a major contributor to the conversation on empathy. Breithaupt writes things like: “Nietzsche’s argument is not that empathy leads to a narrowed range of vision” (p.43). “Empathy, Nietzsche suggests…” (p. 44). “Nietzsche situates the empathic or objective person…” (p. 45). “…Nietzsche’s argument on empathy…” (p. 46). “…A second thesis of Nietzsche’s conception of empathy” (p. 48). “…[A]bout Nietzsche’s argument concerning empathy” (p. 55). The problem is that Nietzsche does not mention empathy. Ever. Nietzsche does not have an argument about empathy. Nietzsche does not situate empathy. Nietzsche does not have a conception of empathy as (for example) Johann Herder or Theodor Lipps or Novalis or any modern thinker engaged with it. Empathy is not implicit in Nietzsche, unless one projects it there.
Yet Breithaupt does not propose a rational reconstruction of empathy (or of anything in this book). He is writing as if Nietzsche had a position on empathy (or an account of empathy) at the level of Nietzsche’s text or very close to it. Not accurate. Regarding explicit or implicit references to empathy in Nietzsche, there is nothing to site. Granted that Nietzsche is notoriously difficult, the editor and reviewers must think the readers are really inattentive. This is a scholarly breakdown of numbing grossness. I am at a loss to comprehend how the editor let this occur.
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Now if Dark Empathy were to have written (condition contrary to fact) that Nietzsche has a position on the moral sentiments such as guilt, shame, ressentiment, love, compassion, that the moral sentiments have a “dark side,” and then added empathy to the list, it might have a case. According to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Judeo-Christian morality (such as one finds in the Ten Commandments or Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount) is a reaction formation transforming aggression and hostility into slave morality (Nietzsche’s key term: “slave morality”). The Roman slaves, with whom Christianity became popular (in spite of their initially being fed to the lions) turn the tables on the Roman masters by means of the conventional Christian practices that privilege turning the other cheek, being kind to the poor, predicting the meek shall inherit the earth. The “meek” are precisely the slaves. But then the reduction to absurdity of Dark Empathyoccurs: it is all of conventional morality that has a dark side—the dark side of the Ten Commandments and the Good Samartian (he really was acting selfishly!?)—not merely the practice of empathy. Though Nietzsche does not do so, a reconstruction of Nietzsche’s position might add “empathy” to the list of characteristics of slave morality such as altruism, compassion, charity, helping those in need, being kind to animals, turning the other cheek, and so on (even though empathy is not a sentiment as such but a form of emotional communication). But Dark Empathy says no such thing. I cannot site a reference because there is none. Not even close. Once again, if Dark Empathy were to have said that the pessimist (read: “Schopenhauer”) is at odds with the “objective man,” who gives up his self rather than face pessimistic annihilation, then one might say Dark Empathy opens the way to an empathic communication. But even then the other horn of the dilemma gores Dark Empathy. According to Dark Empathy, to be empathic one must have a self, be a listening self, be a receptive self. Dark Empathy attributes to Nietzsche an imaginary assertion that one needs to have an empty self to be empathic. Nietzsche may indeed attribute a hollow self to the objective man, but empathy remains uninvolved.
In a deep sense, this book lacks integrity—not in the sense that contains any moral improprieties or ethical lapses, but that it lacks wholeness. Empathy is fragmented. The interpretation is fragmented. The understanding of Stockholm Syndrome is fragmented (e.g., p. 39, 69). The short version of Stockholm syndrome is that the hostage/prisoner identifies with the hostage taker, the jailer, or the concentration camp guard in order to survive, save his or her life. This is called “identification with the aggressor” (not empathy), in which the aggressor is the authority figure who has the monopoly of the means of force and violence. Thus, for example, Patty Hearst, the media heiress, after being held in the closet for two seeks (it is not clear if she was allowed to use the bathroom), finally says, “Okay, I’ll join up”; and the next thing she is caught on camera with the other terrorists of the Symbionese Liberation Front, trying to rob a bank. Unfortunately, the jury did not understand Stockholm Syndrome either. The hostage does not just pretend to join the “bad guys” who are her captors: the hostage really does join up. Now notice also that this same mechanism is the means by which the conscience is formed—which is relevant to Nietzsche. If five-year-old Louie gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar, violating the rule “No cookies before dinner,” and gets punishment (say, a time out), Louie feels shame at getting caught “red handed” (red because he is blushing) and given a time out. However, if tomorrow, Louie puts his hand in the cookie jar and Mom does not catch him in the act and he bites into the cookie, what happens? The cookie does not taste right. Guilt! He has interiorized the authority (Mom) and the rule (no cookies before dinner—you will ruin your appetite) and Louie ruins his own appetite. The cookie does not taste right due to identification with the aggressor. It is a standard means by which the conscience is formed, but it does not function as designed—it goes out of kilter—when people are taken hostage, abused, and made to obey nefarious actors. Returning to Stockholm Syndrome, which of course is a pathological phenomenon, whereas the formation of a conscience is a positive one, work with trauma survivors and empathic distress comes into view. Now Dark Empathy assets that is not the meaning of Stockholm Syndrome in which it is interested (p. 69), but it is going to be hard to avoid, given all the hostages. Work with trauma survivors is usually not in the competence of literary critics, and this example shows the hazards of so engaging. One example which dishonors the survivors and gives meaning to “integrity outage” is when Dark Empathy writes “Stockholm syndrome might describe one extreme of the range of possible forms a marriage can take” (p. 60). Hmmm. This is concerning. This is not marriage, it is domestic violence or intimate partner abuse, and may require intervention by the authorities. It is unfortunate that neither Dark Empathy nor the editor, Mahindre Kingra, noticed this fragmenting statement, which may usefully be cleaned up. It shows the author to be tin-eared when it comes to the suffering of the survivors of domestic violence, marginalized women and marginalized groups.
The Dark Sides of Empathy succeeds in being provocative, even sensationalistic, identifing ways in which empathy can (and does) breakdown, misfire, and go astray. Yet The Dark Sides of Empathy is argumentatively uncharitable (in Donald Davidson’s sense): it uses the weakest versions of the opponent’s (or empathy advocate’s) arguments, not the strongest. On background, the analytic philosopher of language Donald Davidson (1973: 136–137) innovated in defining a “a principle of charity.” The principle of [argumentative] charity goes beyond honest translation or statement of an argument, as noted, asking the thinker to engage with the strongest version of an argument rather than intentionally weaking it through setting up a strawman or a distorted, ambiguous representation (Haber 2010: 74) of the logic. At the risk of mixing the metaphor, one can always make a splash by throwing a rotten tomato, and that is what The Dark Sides of Empathy does. The only concern is that my criticisms will sound like there is no such thing as bad publicity or sound like buying the book is worth it. It is not. I have read it very carefully, cover-to-cover, dear reader, so you do not have to. What a chore! Dark Empathy name drops Hölderlin, Goethe, Flaubert, Fontane, Hawthorne ((p. 172) one page only!), before turning to an in-depth engagement with the execution of the domestic terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, which says as much about the dark side of the author as about any aspect of empathy.
The fundamental fallacy is to confuse empathic distress with empathy itself. That empathy can misfire and fail does not mean one should abstain from empathy. It means to expand one’s empathy one may usefully practice and develop one’s empathic capability. With practice and effort, one’s empathic abilities are broadened and deepened. The celebrated Self Psychologist and empathy innovator Heinz Kohut, MD, (who is not mentioned in Breithaupt) 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. One is tempted to say, “The devil may quote scripture.” The devil frequently does, 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 (Kohut’s) value neutral definition of empathy as “vicarious introspection” and a method of data gathering about the other person (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.
Thus, it is arguably plainly evident that the would-be “empathy” of the Nazis or the white supremacists such as Timothy McVeigh, and so on, misfires. It is contradictory. 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.
However, the really tough question is how does “empathy” as a psychological mechanism relate to “empathy” as an interpersonal process and both these, in turn, to “empathy” as a way of being with other people in practice. One starts out talking about empathy as a psychological mechanism, subsumed by a biological mirroring system and invoking identification, projection, and introjection. Immediately one has to give an example of two people having a conversation, in which the speaker is feeling, experiencing, and trying to express something that the listener is trying to “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.
The risk of Dark Empathy to the reader is that the reader may think its author is an expert in empathy and start quoting the distortions, lack of rigor, critical faux pas, and simple inaccuracies as if they shed light on empathy. For example, in a case of shocking inaccuracy, the book sites Stockholm Syndrome as an example of the dark side of empathy (p. 37). The mechanism of Stockholm Syndrome is not empathy, but “identification with the aggressor.” Because the hostages identified with the aggressor (the bank robber and hostage taker) in order to survive a five-day traumatic kidnapping means that people do what they have to do to survive. It is not an example of empathy, but of Dark Empathy’s lack of psychological acumen – and of empathy. On background, identification with the authority figure is crucial in forming the human conscience during childhood; and identification is consistent with the process going off the rails in the case of a kidnapping, in which, in order to survive, the victim actually builds a relationship with the perpetrator – does not pretend to do so, actually builds the relationship. Breithaupt’s interpretation depends on overlooking the basic definition of empathy that empathy requires a firm boundary between the self and the other. Schopenhauerian compassion and selflessness and/or merger, against which Nietzsche’s occasionally raged, are break downs of empathy. Never was it truer that “Good fences make good neighbors” (a fence, not a wall!), and there is a gate in the fence over which is the welcoming word “Empathy!”
In comparison with the long, hard slog through Dark Empathy, Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy is relatively easy to comprehend and situate. The case against empathy is that it is parochial, biased and limited based on preferences for “in group” individuals and associations such as family, neighborhood, and superficial similarities such as ethnic background, race, or local custom. Bloom’s recommendation is to pursue rational compassion. Bloom actually makes it sound like one has to choose between rational compassion and empathy. Given the state of the world, doesn’t it need both more compassion and expanded empathy? The forced choice between the two must be declined.
Furthermore, the answer on the part of empathy advocates to the criticism of the “bias and limitation” of parochialism is direct: if empathy is sometimes parochial, the solution is not to abstain from empathy but to expand it. The empathic imperative is precisely: Be inclusive! Expanded empathy is what is required to broaden the scope and limits of the community to build harmonious and cooperative relationships that work for everyone. That building such a community is a high bar, takes nothing away from empathy. Given the complexity of the challenge, one would think that deploying various methods to make progress is proper. As noted, Bloom’s choice between rational compassion and, as the title says, against empathy seems forced. Given the challenges at hand, don’t we need both empathy and compassion (of all kinds) to deal with this difficult species, human beings? Though I might be mistaken, I am not aware of any advocate of a rigorous an critical empathy who recommends abstaining from compassion. Why should advocates of rational compassion abstain from empathy?
Given that Bloom operates with the distinctions rationality and critical thinking (the latter implicitly), he has much to offer – just not against empathy. His discussions of compassion fatigue, self-control, delayed gratification, caring and mirroring, the basis of morality, violence and cruelty, thinking about the consequences of one’s speech and actions, are all relevant to the dynamic between empathy and rational compassion.
Many of these distinctions such as self-control, delayed gratification, thinking about the consequences of one speech and actions, are features of adult behavior and action. Now that many adults are going about behaving in immature ways like children says a lot about the breakdown of civility, education, and politics in our world, and, once again, the antidote is expanded rationality, compassion, and empathy. This is a good place to note that empathy has a developmental sequence. The empathy of a two year old, who offers his own teddy bear to grieving grownup whose adult suffering the child cannot possibly understand, is on a continuum with, but different than, full adult empathy. The latter deploys all the aspects of a vicarious affect matching with the Other, appreciating who the Other person is as a possibility, taking a walk cognitively in the Other person’s shows (while remembering to take off one’s own to avoid project), and responding to the Other in a form of words and gestures that indicates to the Other that the listener “got” that with which the Other was struggling.
What is characteristic of those against empathy is that they engage with the weakest version of the empathically-relevant phenomena at issue, not the strongest. They engage with the breakdowns and misfirings of empathy such as emotional contagion, projection, conformity, and communications getting lost in translation. The tactic is to roll these u into the efinition of empathy, and then invalidate empathy. In contrast with this argumentative lack of charity, the sound practice of empathy “gets it” that empathy can fail; and it is precisely in overcoming these failures, obstacles and resistances that a rigorous and critical empathy comes forth and gets implemented.
As noted above, on background, the analytic philosopher of language Donald Davidson (1973: 136–137) innovated in defining a “a principle of [argumentative] charity.” The principle of [argumentative] charity goes beyond honest translation or statement of an argument requiring that the thinker engage with the strongest version of an argument or position rather than intentionally weaking it through setting up a strawman or a distorted, ambiguous representation (Haber 2010: 74) of the logic. One seeks for that in vain in Against Empathy, where the title itself seems to be a provocation. Nor is there anything wrong with that as such – just do not pretend that provocation and rhetoric (in the negative sense) are going to expand one’s empathy. Never was it truer, resistance to empathy makes obstacles to empathy a part of the defining features of empathy in order to dismiss it.
For example, if one is suffering from compassion fatigue or empathic distress, a professional risk of first responders and members of the helping professions such as doctors and therapists, then one recommendation is to “dial down” the compassion and/or empathy. If one uncharitably represents empathy or compassion as an “on off” switch, then one is faced with the false choice between these pro-social practices and hard-heartedness. However, if one represents compassion and empathy as being something that one can dial up and down, then one has the possibility of sampling the other person’s suffering and pain vicariously. One has a sample or trace affect of the Other’s experience, and one is able to put one’s toe in the river of the Other’s suffering (so to speak) without being flooded by it. Much remains to be said about this, but, for our present purposes, the point is to decline the false choice.
A particularly problematic example that Bloom cites is the case in which empathy allegedly incites to violence. The example Bloom gives is the cases of lynchings of black men in the US South who were accused of raping white woman, in which lynchings, Bloom maintains, empathy for the white woman became a motive to the violence. How shall I put it delicately? Simply stated, lynchings were a way of maintaining white supremacy and should never be represented in any other way. Racism is the systematic denial of empathy. These false accusations against innocent black men, literally grabbed off the street, str at the level of delusion that Jewish people drank the blood of Christian babies or that extra-terrestrials from Mars invaded New Jersey in 1931 – lies, damn lies, and total nonsense. I am sitting here holding my head in my hands and rocking back-and-forth quasi-catatonically. I am sick at heart. To site this racist accusation of rape as an example of empathy or motivating an empathic reaction is the reduction to absurdity of Bloom’s entire project. He just doesn’t get it. At the very least, Bloom is tin-eared and unempathic to site this common racist stereotype of rhetorical violence preceding physical violence, which is a tactic of domination, Jim Crow, white supremacy, and the imposition of injustice by violence.
On background for the reader’s historical empathy, 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. They 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.
In a stunning example of rhetorical empathy Malcolm-X said to his black audience, “You didn’t’ land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock landed on you.” Rhetorical empathy is not a well-known distinction, but refers to empathic responsiveness – speaking into the listening of the person with whom one is attempting to empathize with a form of words that indicates one understands what the Other has experienced (see Blakenship 2019). One aspect of rhetorical empathy is that, when it works, the audience has the experience of being heard, even though it is the audience that is doing the listening. The speaker takes the experience of the audience – which means the listens has to know her or his audience in the sense of what they are about and what is important to them – and gives back to the audience the experience of their struggle and suffering and success in such a way that the audience recognizes it as their own experience. That, of course, is what Malcom did in his famous short one-liner about Plymouth Rock.
Empathy should never be under-estimated, but empathy requires a safe space of acceptance and tolerance. Once someone throws the first stone, then self-defense, limit setting, drawing boundaries is appropriate. Empathy does not work with psychopaths, certain kinds of autism, most bullies, and lynch mobs. It is not joke, but especially in the latter case, call for backup. I am skeptical after Gandhi, King, and Malcolm, to add race relations to the list of things with which empathy does not work, but Alisah Gaines has tried to make a case for doing so in Black for a Day
Empathy and white fantasies of empathizing with black people are debunked in Alisha Gaines’ Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy by Alisha Gaines (University of North Carolina Press, 2017: 212 pp). As will be elaborated, one cannot find a single instance where empathy succeeded in establishing or even contributing to improving the relations between black and white folks. Not one. Now we know that race relations are a touch challenge – but not a single instance? Hmmm.
Back covers of books are famously misleading, but after reading Black for a Day line-by-line, cover-to-cover, I believe the cover accurately represents the author’s position. I am not aware that anyone, black or white, has ever said—as does the back cover of Black for a Day—that “empathy is all that white Americans need” (my italics) to racially navigate social relations. With the exception of the second to last paragraph of Black for a Day, the reader does not find a single statement in this book that is positive about the practice of empathy. None. One does not find a single example in the text of a rigorous and critical empathy that works to produce healthy empathic relatedness. If empathy is not “all” that is needed, what then is needed? Someone may usefully ask—because the author has not done so: what then is needed?
The list of what is need is long, but it starts with a small set of related skills such as critical thinking, showing respect, acknowledgement, dignity, rigorous examination of one’s own implicit biases, considering the point of view of one’s opponent (which includes both critical thinking and empathy), and, of course, the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy. A case can also be made for reparations for survivors of slavery, such as a college education, but to get there is a whole issue in itself, and that cannot be pursued here. Okay, be charitable and attribute the “all” to the marketing department. However, once again, whatever the source, this “all”—as in “all you need is empathy”—is a nice example of an uncharitable argument, setting up a strawman—not in the sense of the Good Samaritan—but in the sense of engaging with the weakest, distorted, watered-down version of an argument, not the strongest. As noted, positively expressed, the scholarly standard is to try to make the opponent’s argument work.
Gaines does not make such a connection with social psychology, nor does she necessarily need to do so. A number of responses from black people suggested to John Howard Graham that he could never know the black person’s struggle without literally getting inside the skin of a black person. But that was his commitment—so that is what he tried to do. Being too literal in taking the coaching? Gaines notes that Graham personally rescued Jewish children from the Nazis by pretending they were mentally ill and sending them abroad—a righteous use of deception if I have ever heard of one. Still, it turns out that changing one’s exterior color and working for a few weeks on changing the interior conversation makes great headlines, but does not work in establishing empathic relatedness. How could it?
Empathy is based on being authentic about who one is in relating to another person. Empathy is based on integrity and being straight with the other person to and with whom one is trying to relate. So the idea of starting off by pretending to be someone who one is not—impersonating a person one is not—is not going to produce empathy. One cannot start out by being a fake and expect to produce an authentic relationship. Hence, the idea of an empathic impersonation is a contradiction in terms.
Staring with the integrity outage of impersonation does not create integrity—or empathy. It does not make a difference if one adds “race” to the mix. Empathic racial impersonation still results in fake relatedness and fake empathy. Now one may still learn a lot by going “under cover” and seeing how other people behave when they think you belong to the “in group” (in this case the “in group” of Southern segregationists or Northern racists), but one is going to get a complex, morally ambiguous integrity outage rather than an authentic relationship.
In short, the muck-raking, memoires and experiments of Sprigle, Graham, Halsell are social psychology experiment that go “off the rails.” The same can be said of the consistently devaluing assessment of these works in Black for a Day. These experiments, including Gaines’, provide engaging adventures and misadventures the demonstrate that when one starts out by faking solidarity, integrity, relatedness, and empathy as input, then one gets fake solidarity, fake integrity, fake relatedness, and fake empathy. This is not surprising. Fake in; fake out. The author calls this “empathic racial impersonation.”
At every turn—I counted them—sixty-five times, we get “empathic racial impersonation,” and the steady drum beat of invalidation. Empathy goes off the rails as projection, conformity, bad faith, conscious and unconscious bias, communications lost in translation. Indeed, empathy is a most imperfect practice, nor are these struggling and misguided impersonators given the benefit of the doubt. Black for a Day does not engage with the strongest version of the argument that empathy is valuable. Empathy is the weakest, watered-down, or distorted one—“eating the other” (bell hooks) or being a fake medical actor (Leslie Jamison’s hilarious account of her misadventures). Hmmm. Positively expressed, the scholarly standard is to try to make the opponent’s argument work rather than engaging with a distorted, strawman version of it. The one possible exception is if an author wishes to write a polemical piece. For example, Nietzsche explicitly subtitles his Genealogy of Morals “A Polemic.” If that is the author’s intention here, it is nowhere expressed, for example, in the preface.
The main white fantasy that “racial impersonation” brings forth is the attempt by some white people to empathize with blacks. The narrative of Black for a Day consists in critically reviewing several non-fiction narratives of individuals, born Caucasian, who go “under cover,” changing the color of their skin cosmetically and chemically from white to black, in order to “pass” as African American while travelling in the American south (or, in one case, Harlem) in the late 1940s and 1950s. Ray Sprigle, John Howard Graham, Grace Halsell, the cast of a Fox Reality TV show called Black.White (the latter show being an exception in premiering in the year 2006) engage in what may be described as a bold, though misguided, experiment in social psychology (my terms, not Gaines’). These racial impersonations are supposed to produce empathy between the races and/or in white people for black people, but what they actually produce is fake empathy. Key term: fake empathy (once again, my term, not Gaines’).
Black for a Day by Gaines (2017: 8, 171) claims to get its definition of empathy from Leslie Jamison and bell hooks. First, following up on bell hooks’ Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), there is much about the relation to the Other and Otherness that resonates with my own interests. Speaking in the first person for emphasis, I get my humanness from the Other. In a strategic reversal, the infant humanizes / creates empathy in the parent; the student humanizes / creates empathy in the teacher; the patient, in the doctor; the customer, in the business person. The infant, in her lack of socialization, calls forth empathy in the parent to relate socially. The problem is that in bell hooks the Other relates to the one (and vice versa) in colonization, domination, subordination, imperialization, exploitation, manipulation. Nor do I dispute that these ways of relating are all-too-common. One reader finds a critique of empathy in bell hooks, whereas I find a critique of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, which indeed deserves debunking. Her (bell hooks’) book uses the word “empathy” four times in the standard way without defining it. Arguably hooks’ essay “Eating the Other” (1992) is an implied definition of empathy—though a diligent search does not turn up the word “empathy” in the essay.
The challenge is that empathy is not “eating the other,” either literally or metaphorically. If anyone wishes to cite hooks’ magisterial authority, then the alternative point of view is that “eating the other” is the breakdown of empathy into merger, not the respectful distinction that maintains the integrity of the self and Other in the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy. If one starts by eating the Other (in any sense), one does not get to empathy. Eating the Other is a mutilation of the Other and a mutilation of empathy. If one arrives at eating the Other (in any sense), one has not gotten there via empathy. One gets empathy mutilated by emotional contagion, projection, conformity, and so on. One gets various fragments of humanness and human beings that are the breakdown products of empathy under capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism, oral aggression, and so on. However, above all else—one gets indigestion.
Second, Leslie Jamison’s “Empathy Exams” (2014) is credited with the strategic ambiguity between the gift of empathy and invasion of the Other (though I would argue that falls short of a proper definition). Here are the facts. Ms Jamison is a struggling writer, and she gets a job as a medical actor. What the heck is that, “medical actor”? She is given a script in which she plays the role—pretends to be—impersonates—someone who has a major mental illness – major depression, bipolar 1, PTSD, schizophrenia, and so on. This is part of medical training and the medical students know the medical actor is not a real patient. The medical student must question the “patient” and interact with the “patient” to establish the best diagnosis of the disorder. Speaking personally, I teach a class at Ross University Medical School that uses films with medical actors doing just that—and the students are challenged to get the best diagnosis. As far as I know, Jamison is not in any of the films. Furthermore, the “patient” (medical actor) then provides feedback to the student and the medical authorities on how empathic the MD-in-training was in questioning and relating to the “patient.” That is the empathy exam.
This must be emphasized—and empathized—the integrity of the situation is intact—no one is pretending to be really ill when they are not, or black when they are white, and so on, and people understand the exercise as training; thus, Jamison’s penetrating and engaging and amusing account of her misadventures as a medical actor. In any case, the medical actor does not pretend to be mentally ill the way the Sprigle, etc. pretended to be black. The medical actor and the student MDs know the actors are acting. All the world is a stage, but the audience does not jump up on it to try and rescue the innocent orphan from the villain.
The experiments of Sprigle, Graham, Halsell, etc. provide strong evidence, and I believe Gaines would agree, that when one attempts to take a walk in the other person’s shoes, it is harder to take off one’s own shoes than it might at first seem. Sprigle and company are trying to put the Other’s shoes on, but they cannot quite get their own off. They struggle mightily, and I give them more credit for the effort than Gaines.
Staring with the integrity outage of impersonation does not create integrity—or empathy. I hasten to add it may expose the hypocrisies of Southern segregationists who claims that black people are happy with their subordinate roles (yet another white fantasy); or it may expose the unconscious biases (not explicitly invoked but ever present) of Northerners or the microaggressions of white liberals (and many others), who after all still struggle with racial stereotypes and the “white fantasies” of the subtitle of the stereotypes of the hyper-sexed black male or promiscuous black females. However, that is the thing about fantasies. There is nothing that prevents black people from having them too, though based on different experiences and in a different register than their white neighbors. The really tough question is whether Black for a Day believes that the possibility of racial cooperation and/or harmony—whether as an exemplary cooperative rainbow coalition or peaceful coexistence—is itself a mere fantasy—and so unlikely of realization. The steady drum beat in Black for a Day which calls out “empathic racial impersonation” sixty-five times in some 171 pages provides evidence that this is the main fantasy being debunked.
What my empathy suggests to me is that the author is aggrieved about something—maybe a lot of things—possibly microaggressions—and I am inclined to say, “It sounds like you could use some empathy—please count on mine!” However, based on the text, she is not asking for it—empathy—does not see value in it—and seems to find satisfaction in attacking every possibility of empathic connection that comes forth. When it comes to empathy, Gaines does not “get it”—in just about every sense. Gaines fails a readiness assessment for the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy—and she does not commit to or try to create a safe space in which a debate or empathic listening could occur. One could argue back—one is human, therefore, ready or not, here comes empathy; and one is ready for empathy whether one likes it or not, and the point must be acknowledged—and yet there is an unwillingness to engage with the strongest version of a rigorous and critical empathy rather than a watered-down weird “eat the other.” In short, the rumor of empathy remains a rumor in the case of Black for a Day; the rumor is not confirmed; and empathy does not live in this work. It is where empathy goes to become fake empathy. Don’t go there.
With Migrant Aesthetics: by Glenda Carpio we go from fake empathy to mutilated empathy.
Migrant Aesthetics sets up an either/or choice between ending empire (e.g., racism, colonialism, imperialism, and so on) and expanding a rigorous and critical empathy. The book then mutilates empathy by confusing it with projection, emotional contagion, conformity, and other forms of miscommunication. Not surprisingly, the result is some 285 pages of penetrating analysis in which the reader does not get a single example of the practice of empathy resulting in a successful empathic relatedness in literary fiction. The attempt by Migrant Aesthetics to force a choice between expanding empathy and ending (or limiting) empire must be refused. Both results are needed. More on that shortly.
Meanwhile, the longer review: the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy knows that it can be wrong and can break down, misfire or go astray, flat out fail, as projection, emotional contagion, conformity, or communications getting lost in translation. It is precisely in engaging with and overcoming these obstacles and resistances to empathy that empathic relatedness and community are brought forth. Like with most powerful methods, skills, or interventions, practice makes the master. As a successful and popular teacher, Carpio knows the value of empathy, nor is mention of the word itself required. The good news is that empathy works whether one names it or not, whether one believes in it or not.
As noted, the issue is that in 285 pages of penetrating, incisive analysis of migrant aesthetics (the category, not the title), there is not a single example of what an effective empathy would look like. The reader is not given a single example of a healthy empathic relatedness that works, so that one could identify it if one happened to encounter it. This bears repeating: in some 285 pages of summary and analysis of the literary fictions of Dinaw Mengestu, Teju Cole, Aleksandar Hemon, Valeria Luiselli, Julie Otsuka, Junot Diaz, and some nonfiction of others, Migrant Aesthetics does not cite a single example of empathy that works right or functions as designed. Granted that empathy does not always succeed, the reader does not learn what a healthy, rigorous and critical empathy might look like if, rare as it may be (as empathy skeptics assert), if one happened to encounter empathy. None. Not one single example of what empathy looks like when it succeeds in producing empathic relatedness. This must give the reader pause. We take a step back—but not too far back.
Caprio asserts: “…[W]hat has been my centra argument in this work: that the history of empire is key in understanding the roots of migration at a scale appropriate to its global dimensions (Carpio: 228).” That to be forced from one’s home and become a refugee of the road is surely a source of enormous pain and suffering. Here the connection is direct—cause (routed from one’s home by aggression, starvation, etc.) and effect (pain, suffering). At the risk of over-simplification, yet a compelling one, white Europeans with cannons and machine guns go to Africa and Asia and exploit the natural resources and enslave or dominate the locals. A small subset of the locals is coopted—analogous to the concentration camp capos, both perpetrators and survivors (until they are not) being chosen from the prisoners—to make the job of the ruling class easier. Even the surviving prisoners then become perpetrators as one starving prisoner “steals” bread or water from another or lies to save his own skin, thereby endangering another. And some of those locals migrant back to headquarters, whether Boston, London, Paris, Amsterdam, or New York.
Now if anyone seriously believes that empathy is going to solve the problems created by empire, colonialism, imperialism, and so, then—how shall I put it delicately?—empathy is being “over sold.” This is usually the first step in setting up empathy as a “strawman” to be blamed for not fixing the many challenges facing civilized human beings committed to building a community that works for all persons.
There are at least two hidden variables behind the problematic causal analysis of empire that would help connect the dots between empire and empathy-based solutions: Human aggression and human hunger (hunger for many things, but here for food). These human beings are an aggressive species—and biologically omnivores. People can be kind and compassionate and empathic, but they also can behave aggressively and violently. Even if committed vegetarians, people also need to eat quite regularly, if not exactly three times a day.
To say, as Migrant Aesthetics does, that the arrival of the white European conquistador and their horses in the new world in 1492 was a catastrophe for the original inhabitants gets the measure of the event about right. In a way, the displacement of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia to Oklahoma is a kind of migration; but not really. It is a death march with strong aspects of genocide.
By all means denounce empire, but a more useful approach consistent with such righteous indignation might be to elaborate an analysis of human aggression, territoriality, lack of education, lack of critical thinking, the disturbing tendency of many human beings fanatically to follow authoritarian figures off a cliff (e.g., Hoffer 1951). In that context, empathy is a proven way of deescalating violence and aggression.
Unfortunately, once a “policeman” is kneeling on your neck or someone throws a bomb, it is too late for empathy. The perpetrator fails the readiness assessment for empathy and it is necessary to invoke self-defense. And remember the best defense is a good offense—provided that it is proportionate to the incoming violence (which is notoriously hard to determine). Self-defense, setting limits, establishing boundaries are what is needed. There is a readiness assessment for empathy, and it requires that one be relatively safe and secure in one’s own person. Above all, the readiness requires a willingness to inquire into one’s own blindspots and preconscious biases. Furthermore, Empathy 101 teaches that empathy does not work an active battlefield, if one is starving to death, or hanging upside down in a torture chamber. Never underestimate the power of empathy—never—but empathy in such extreme situations ends up looking like what the FBI Hostage Negotiating team uses to open communication with the hostage takers, or looking like “Red Team, Red Team!”—think like the opponent in a war game (e.g., Zenko 2015). As it stands, Migrant Aesthetics misunderstands empathy, mutilates it, and then blames empathy because empathy can be misapplied by migrant authors, some of the male members of which are both perpetrators and survivors, for calling attention to their plight and that of the devalued Other within us all.
The other hidden variable is that these humans are a hungry species. At the risk of over-simplification, long since incurred, the development of Cyrus McCormick’s combine-wheat-reaper, and the follow-on agribusiness technology, allow some 2% of the population to grow enough food to feed the entire planet; and this in spite of the fact that human choices made under aggression continue to use food as a weapon of starvation. Prior to the Green Revolution, the other 98% of the population had to work twelve to sixteen hours a day to grow enough food to avoid slow death by starvation. As noted, the migrant classics, admittedly shot through with empire, of Willa Cather and Ole Edvart Rolvaag, confront hunger as an ever-present specter, pending a successful harvest. Meanwhile, apparently large dairy herds really do contribute to greenhouse gases.
The grievance against empathy begins: Migrant Aesthetics writes (p. 4): “More broadly, the genre of immigrant literature depends on a model of reading founded on empathy—a model that my book takes to task. Literature promotes empathy, we are told, but empathy can easily slip into a projection of readers’ feelings and even into outright condescension.” As a reviewer, I am holding my head in my hands and rocking back-and-forth quasi-catatonically. I am in disbelief at the lack of common sense, lack of critical thinking, and absence of argumentative charity in confusing empathy and projection. Projection is a breakdown of empathy. Projection is a misfiring and/or going off the rails of empathy. Projection is a “getting lost in translation” of empathy. Now attribute these to empathy and dismiss empathy. Hmmm.
As regards “a model of reading founded on empathy,” please stop right there. Reading the story would not work—would not make any sense—would, strictly speaking, be unintelligible without empathy. Without empathy, the actions and contingencies, the struggles and high spirits, setbacks and successes, that are represented in the story would be strange sounds and gestures appearing to an anthropologist on Mars or on her first day in an alien culture, prior to marshalling her empathic skills. Never underestimate the power of storytelling, but absent empathy, it does not get traction. Reading is founded on empathy.
If the reader did not bring the capacity for empathy to the reading of the text, the text itself would not make sense. Reading the simplest narrative about a snowman melting in the spring thaw, much less Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina’s anguish at being patriarchally denied access to her son, would be unintelligible. Without the vicarious experience of empathic receptivity, the reading of the most dramatic fiction will be indistinguishable from reading the railroad schedule when the rail workers were on strike. Meaningless. Unintelligible. The water streaming from the abandoned child’s face would not be tears; the clenched fist would not be anger but an excess of adrenaline; the trembling would not be fear but Parkinson’s disorder. The migrant bones in the desert over which no one prayed would be calcified carbon, not an anguished cry for help and human response. Without empathy, one would perhaps be able to provide an accurate description, whether as fact or fiction is irrelevant here, of the Other’s behavior from a third person perspective, but the behavior would lack vitality, energy, strength, aliveness, and relatedness to the things that matter to human beings. One would truly be like Descartes looking out the window at people on the street below, wondering if the entities that appear to be people are really rather robot-like automata. Descartes was practicing an exercise in radical doubt, whereas the reader that lacked the capacity for empathy would be practicing an exercise in radical draining of meaning from the text in every sense from pragmatics to semantics—encountering empty words describing empty behavior, as noted, like reading a train schedule during the railway strike, instead of reading an engaging narrative such as Anna’s emotional, moral, cognitive. spiritual struggles to attain self-knowledge and personal fulfillment.
However, Migrant Aesthetic responds: You have now got the point. Drive out empathy to let justice and a small set of related responses come forth. It doesn’t work. Migrant Aesthetics “forecloses” (rejects) empathy, then immediately lets it back in, because empathy is indispensable.
Carpio (p. 8): “[…] [T]he writers I examine reject empathy as the main mode of rationality, opting instead for what Hannah Arendt called “representative thinking” that is, they urge reader to think, as themselves, from the position of another person and thus to call into question their own preconceptions and actions” [italics added]. Thus, Migrant Aesthetics rejects empathy while calling out and requiring including “the position of another person,” which is precisely the folk definition of empathy.
Arendt’s reference here is of course to a single line in Kant’s Third Critique (1791/93 (AA 158)) about “enlarged thinking” [erweiterten…Denkungart] that is, to think from the perspective of the Other. Sounds like the folk definition of empathy to me. This cipher of “enlarged thinking”, which remains unintegrated in Kant, became the inspiration for Arendt’s incomplete third volume of the life of the mind on political judgment. Once again, it is the folk definition of empathy.
The fan out is challenging at this point. This single quote from Arendt plays such a significant role in Migrant Aestheticsthat there is no avoiding a dive into Arendt scholarship. By invoking the formidable name and work of Hannah Arendt, who was herself a migrant refugee (note well!), a Jewish person fleeing from the Nazis, a whole new thread is started.
Arendt rarely uses the word “empathy,” though “animal pity” gets called out in the context of Himmler’s fake empathy (Arendt 1971: 105–106; Agosta 2010: 73). Arendt is not thought of as an advocate for empathy, though, in its own Kantian way, her work is rich in empathic understanding. In one of her few uses of the word “empathy” itself, the otherwise astute Arendt claims that “empathy” requires becoming the Other in a kind of merger, which, of course, is the breakdown of empathy into emotional contagion. Other than this terminological slip up, Arendt’s analysis is an incisive application of empathy to politics in “Truth and Politics” in Between Past and Future (1968: 9):
I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions… The very process of opinion formation is determined by those in whose places somebody thinks and uses his own mind, and the only condition for this exertion of the imagination is disinterestedness, the liberation from one’s own private interests (Arendt 1968: 9; italics added).
The word “empathy” is in principle dispensable here, and Arendt’s lovely phrase “one trains one’s imagination to go visiting [the Other]” is an exact description of empathic understanding, though not empathic receptivity of the Other’s feelings/emotions. One does not blindly adopt the Other’s point of view—one takes off one’s own shoes before trying on the Other’s. Even in a thoughtless moment, more thinking occurs in Arendt’s casual, throw-away use of a word, than in most people’s entire dictionaries. If necessary, Arendt may be read against herself, for the simple introduction of the distinction “vicarious experience” of an Other’s experience is sufficient to contain all the puzzling cases about being or becoming someone else. As a good Kantian, Arendt would align in a universalizing moment with Kant’s sensus communus [“common sense” as an instrument of judgment]. Kant’s “enlarged thinking,” taking the points of view of many Others, is what enables people to judge by means of feelings as well as concepts. This is not loss of one’s self in projection and merger, but rather a thoughtful shifting of perspective and appreciation of what shows up as one does so. It is a false splitting to force a choice between feeling and thinking—both are required to have a complete experience of the Other.
Regarding Arendt’s use of the word “empathy” [Einfühlung] itself, it is likely she encountered it in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927: H125 [pagination of the German Niemeyer edition]), which she studied carefully. There Heidegger undercuts Max Scheler’s use of the term in criticizing Theodor LIpps, who uses of the term in his (Lipps’) Aesthetics (1903; see also Lipps 1909), in which Lipps defines empathy [Einfühlung] as a kind of aesthetic projection of the subject’s feelings onto art and nature (and the Other). The original definition of “empathy” in Lipps’ aesthetics is hard to distinguish from projective empathy. (The matter is a tangle, which I disentangle in Agosta (2014).) The examples of an angry storm at sea or the melancholy weeping willow trees or the smiling clouds and cheerful sunrise come to mind.
The controversy continues to fan out as Migrant Aesthetics marshals the authority of Namwali Serpall’s “The Banality of Empathy” (2019). Nice title. This is a reference to Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1971), about which it is hard to say just a little. I shall try. One of Arendt’s recurring themes is that evil is a consequence of thoughtlessness. She above on “enlarged thinking” and integrating many diverse points of view. According to Arendt, Eichmann was a simpleton, a “Hans Wurst” from the folktale, who did not think and just followed orders. The wanted-dead-or-alive poster for Thoughlessness has Eichmann’s photo on it. The result of thoughtlessness was catastrophe. Indeed. Of course, Eichmann had many “fellow travelers” in genocide.
If one empathizes thoughtlessly, the banality of empathy of Serpall’s title, then one is at risk of empathy misfiring as projection, emotional contagion, conformity, and so on. Just so. A rigorous and critical empathy is required to guard against these risks, and Arendt, no advocate for sloppy anything, much less sloppy empathy, is halfway, but not all-the-way, there with her invocation of Kant’s rigorous and critical method. The above-cited quotation from Arendt and my analysis of terms must count towards a clarification of the nuances of the matter of empathy.
Serpall’s article then raises the question about narrative art “If witnessing suffering firsthand doesn’t spark good deeds, why do we think art about suffering will?” Though this may have been intended as a rhetorical question, the answer requires an empirical, fact-based inquiry. Some witnessing of suffering does indeed spark good deeds. The standard Samaritan becomes the Good Samaritan when he stops to help the survivor of the robbery thereby creating neighborliness and community; whereas the Levite and Priest succumb to empathic distress and cross the road, thereby expanding indifference and alienation. These events get “narrativized” in the Parable of the same name, which, in turn, inspires some to good deeds, though others are left paralyzed by empathic distress.
As Suzanne Keen (2007; see also 2022) points out, some stories such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin have an outsized effect on positive politics, rallying people to the cause of the abolition of slavery; whereas other novels such as The Turner Diaries may arguably have given comfort to white supremacy and provided bomb-making instructions to domestic terrorists. The answer to Serpall’s (or the editor’s) question is direct: we think art will inspire good deeds because we find examples of art’s doing so, albeit with conditions and qualifications. The evidence: that is what happened. The more important but unaddressed issue is to distinguish how art can transfigure the pain and suffering of the migrant (and suffering humanity at large), overcoming trauma, or how such attempts risk devolving into what is sometimes called “trauma porn,” engaging the graphical description of trauma without the “disinterestedness of art,” resulting in a kind of indulgent “orgasm” of aggressive violent fantasies. (As a benchmark, and acknowledging that reasonable people may disagree, an example of trauma porn (other than snuff videos on the dark web) would be Mel Gibson’s film (2004), The Passion of the Christ.)
Arendt is sometimes accused, I believe unfairly, of being tin-eared in her statements about US race relations and desegregation, especially in Little Rock, AK in 1957. When the 13-year-old Arendt was subjected to antisemitic comments by her teacher at school in Königsberg, Germany,1919, her mother withdrew her under protocol and protest and home-schooled Hannah, before sending her off to Berlin for a secondary education. You have to get the picture here: the young Hannah reading the leather-bound Kantian First Critique in her late father’s vast library. Seemingly following the recommendation that Migrant Aesthetics (pp. 8, 13, 201) attributes to Arendt, she adopts a position, not a person, regarding US race relations (circa 1957!). “Positions not persons” is a fine slogan. It doesn’t work. Another false choice? The young black children in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 needed to get into the classroom to actually get books from the school library as some black families did not own a single book other than the bible (which, in a pinch, is an excellent choice, nevertheless…). That Arendt’s empathy misfires no more means that she lacks empathy or that empathy is invalid than that a driver who forgets to use her turn signal does not know how to drive (though she may get a citation!).
What is rarely noted by Arendt scholars is Arendt’s own strategic use of empathy in escaping from the Nazis. Having been arrested for Zionist “propaganda” activity by the Nazis, she builds an empathic rapport with the Gestapo prosecuting attorney, who is interviewing her in the same basement from which other Jewish people are deported to Buchenwald or Dachau. The result was not predictable. Arendt was released on her own recognizance, and, of course, she had immediately to flee across the border illegally. Now while we will never know all the nuances—in the interview (1964) Arendt makes it sound like part of her tactic to save her own life was that she bats her eyelashes at the young naïve Gestapo prosecutor, who has just been transferred from the criminal to the political division—more grim humor—but, don’t laugh, it worked. Never underestimate the power of empathy. (See Arendt’s interview with English subtitles “Hannah Arendt: Im Gespräch mit Günter Gaus” (1964).[1 Thus, never having used the word “empathy” positively even one time, the practice saves her life.
To compete the discussion of Arendt (1955/68: 153–206), she wrote a short intellectual biography of Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) in Men in Dark Times. Separately, Benjamin warned that the aestheticization of politics risks turning artistic expression into fascism. The theatrical (“artistic”) spectacle of a torch light parades at Nurnberg, Germany, (1933–1938) by masses of brown shirt Nazi storm troopers around a bonfire burning the canonical novels of western civilization is a mutilation of empathy into the emotional contagion of crowds as well as a mutilation of that civilization itself. Once again, it is hard to say just a little bit about this, nor is this review going to solve the problem of the relation between the aesthetic and the political. It is a disappointment that Arendt did not live long enough to complete more than a single sentence of her deep dive into the relation between Kant’s Critique of (Aesthetic) Judgment and politics; nor is it likely that such a project would have produced what Hegel produced when he undertook such a deep dive: The Philosophy of Right (1921), which read superficially gives the authority of The State a leading role in political life: “It is the way of God in the world, that there should be a state” according to Walter Kaufman’s translation.
Migrant aesthetics politicizes aesthetics with an anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, anti-empire-ist commitments, rhetoric (in the classical sense), and expressions, without necessarily making practical recommendations for political action. Migrant Aesthetics expels empathy from the garden of artistic achievement, because empathy does not provide a stable basis for political action. Never underestimate the relevance of Immanuel Kant, yet if one wants measurable results from political action, apply Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (1971) or analysis based on Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (1951), not Kant’s Third Critique. Hoffer calls out the mutilated logic of totalitarian thinking; and Alinsky knew quite a lot about building community, and though he did not use the word “empathy,” empathy lives in building community.
References
Tristam Adams. (2016). The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organises Empathy, London: Repeater Books.
Lou Agosta. (2010). Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
_________. (2010b). Heidegger’s 1924 Clearing of the Affects Using Aristotle’s Rhetoric: Book 2, Philosophy Today, Vol.54, no 4: 333–354.
_________. (2014). A Rumor of Empathy: Rewriting Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Pivot.
Hannah Arendt. (1968). Men in Dark Times. New York: Harvest Book (Harcourt Brace).
__________________. (1971a). Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Viking Press.
Simon Baron-Cohen. (2014). Zero degrees of empathy. RSA [Renaissance Society of America] Video Presentation: https://youtu.be/Aq_nCTGSfWE [checked on 2023-02-26]
C. Daniel Batson. (2009), These things called empathy Eight related but Distinct Phenomena. In The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, eds. Jean Decety and William Ickes. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009: 3–16.]]
Lisa Blankenship. (2019). Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. Logan UT: Utah State University Press.
Paul Bloom. (2016). Against Empathy. New York: Ecco (Harper Collins).
Fritz Breithaupt. (2017). The Dark Sides of Empathy, Andrew Hamilton (tr.). Ithaca, NYY: Cornell UP.
Glenda Carpio. (2023). Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy by Glenda Carpio (New York: Columbia University Press
Reed Way Dasenbrock (ed.). (1995). Literary Theory After Davidson. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Donald Davidson. (1973). Radical interpretation. In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2001: 125–139.
Frans de Waal. (2009). The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. New York: Harmony Books (Random House).
Jean Decety and William Ickes. (2009). The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Alisha Gaines. (2017). Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy by Alisha Gaines (University of North Carolina Press.
Jonathan Haber. (2020). Critical Thinking. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Martin Heidegger. (1927). Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trs.). New York: Harper and Row, 1963.
Eric Hoffer. (1951). The True Believer. New York: Random.
Suzanne Keen. (2007). Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
________________. (2022). Reading and Empathy. London: Routledge.
Heinz Kohut. (1981). On empathy. In The Search for the Self: Volume 4: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut 1978-1981, London: Karnac Books, 2011: 525–535.
Susan Lanzoni. (2012). Empathy in translation: Movement and image in the psychology laboratory, Science in Context, vol. 25, 03 (September 2012): 301-327.
Theodor Lipps. (1903). Aesthetik. Volume I. Hamburg: Leopold Voss.
_____________. (1909). Leitfaden der Psychologie. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelman Verlag.
Namwali Serpall. (2019). The banality of empathy. The New York Review: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/03/02/the-banality-of-empathy/?lp_txn_id=1496946 [checked on 10/20/2023].
Micah Zenko. (2015). Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy. New York: Basic Books.
(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
Mutilated empathy in MIGRANT AESTHETICS by Glenda Carpio
Review: Mutilated empathy in spite of itself in Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy by Glenda Carpio (New York: Columbia University Press, 223, 285pp.)
Glenda R. Carpio is well-known for her work Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (Oxford 2008). This work succeeds in a high-wire balancing act in transforming racial stereotypes meant to devalue into humor that liberates, humanizes, and transfigures as only the artform of jokes can do.
There is almost nothing that can be said about making jokes about race that cannot be distorted or misunderstood. The entire field of humor is fraught, and the more edgy and confrontational the joke or skit, the funnier it is—until it isn’t. Someone gets their feelings hurt and the potential laughter mutates into rage. Therefore, I am not going to tell a joke. I am going to make a generalization, which is definitely not as much fun. Acknowledging that reasonable people may disagree, I note the close relationship between humor/jokes and empathy.
For purposes of this review, the folk definition of empathy will suffice—take a walk in the Other’s shoes after first taking off one’s own to guard against the misfiring of empathy as projection. In empathy one navigates the firm boundary between self and Other with dignity, respect, recognition, and acknowledgement, in creating a community of self and Other. A rigorous and critical empathy maintains firm boundaries between self and Other, guarding against merger, emotional contagion, projection, and other common ways that empathic relating can misfire or go astray. Good fences make good neighbors, as the poet said, but there is a gate in the fence, and over the gate is inscribed the word “empathy.” In contrast with empathy, in joking one crosses the boundary between self and Other with aggression, insulting remarks, sexual suggestions or other violations of community standards—but it is all okay—why?—because it is a joke! Pause for laughter. One jumps over the wall—takes a prat fall backwards over the boundary between self and Other, and if joke works, then the speech act of the joke creates a community in the shared laughter. (On the joke as a speech act that creates community see Cohen 1999; one may say the same thing, it creates community, about storytelling as the speech act corresponding to empathic receptivity Agosta 2010; also of note Wisse 2013.)
The connection of empathy with Carpio’s next work is evident in the title: Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy (Columbia UP 2023, 285 pp.). Now it is a bold statement of the obvious that empathy has its limits. A naïve merger with victimhood results in pity and sentimentality rather than taking a stand for social justice and positive politics in a productive sense. Nothing wrong as such with having a good cry, but that is already arguably a breakdown of would-be empathy. On the other hand, if one’s eyes get a bit moist that is another matter. Empathy is so fundamental an aspect of one’s being human, that lack of empathy can be seen as being inhuman (e.g., Keen 2008: 6; Blankenship 2019: 38).
The short review of Migrant Aesthetics is that it sets up an either/or choice between ending empire (e.g., colonialism, imperialism, racism, and so on) and expanding a rigorous and critical empathy. Then mutilates empathy by confusing it with projection, emotional contagion, conformity, and other forms of miscommunication. Not surprising, the result is some 285 pages of penetrating analysis in which the reader does not get a single example of the practice of empathy resulting in a successful empathic relatedness in literary fiction. The forced choice between expanding empathy and ending (or limiting) empire must be refused. Both results are needed. More on that shortly.
Meanwhile, the longer review: the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy knows that it can be wrong and can break down, misfire or go astray, flat out fail, as projection, emotional contagion, conformity, or communications getting lost in translation. It is precisely in engaging with and overcoming these obstacles and resistances to empathy that empathic relatedness and community are brought forth. Like with most powerful methods, skills, or interventions, practice makes the master. As a successful and popular teacher, Carpio knows the value of empathy, nor is mention of the word itself required. The good news is that empathy works whether one names it or not, whether one believes in it or not.
As noted, the issue is that in 285 pages of penetrating, incisive analysis of migrant aesthetics (the category, not the title), there is not a single example of what an effective example of successful empathy. The reader is not given a single example of what healthy empathic relatedness would look like, so that one could identify it if one happened to encounter it. This bears repeating: in some 285 pages of summary and analysis of the literary fictions of Dinaw Mengestu, Teju Cole, Aleksandar Hemon, Valeria Luiselli, Julie Otsuka, Junot Diaz, and some nonfiction of others, Migrant Aesthetics does not cite a single example of empathy that works right or functions as designed. Granted that empathy does not always succeed, the reader does not learn what a healthy, rigorous and critical empathy might look like if, rare as it may be, one happened to encounter empathy. None. Not one single example of what empathy looks like when it succeeds in producing empathic relatedness. This must give the reader pause. We take a step back—but not too far back.
If truth is the first casualty of war—try substituting one of Carpio’s key words “empire” for “war”—then empathy is a close second. In an astute and penetrating analysis, consistently engaging and controversial, Migrant Aesthetics periodically pauses to “foreclose empathy” or the possibility of an empathic response. The steady drumbeat of foreclosing, undercutting, invalidating, or dismissing empathy occurs like a recurring rhythm that, to this reviewer, suggests an editorial decision or personal commitment or both.
Now I might be wrong but I understand “foreclose” as used in Migrant Aesthetics, not the Lacanian/Hegelian sense of “aufgehoben,” cancel and preserve, but what one does when one can’t pay the mortgage—hand over the property, abandoning it in lieu of payment. You wouldn’t want to be aufgehoben would you? In any case, the term is used in a devaluing way—like it is a bad thing to empathize at the point of foreclosure.
There are many things about which to be aggrieved in a world inheriting the violent outcomes (still ongoing) of colonialism, imperialism, prejudice, summarized as “empire,” but Migrant Aesthetics’ main grievance is reserved for empathy. I hasten to add that I am against pain and suffering of all kinds including that caused by empire, imperialism, colonialism, and prejudice. I do not carry water for the pathologies of capitalism and call out the distortions of empathy under capitalism. The boss is “empathic” towards the wage slaves in their cubicles—in order to expand productivity. Happy workers work harder and are more productive. The salesman takes a walk in the shoes of the customer—in order to sell him or her another pair!
Granted, Michael Jordan reportedly said that even Republicans (people in the political party) buy athletic sneakers (see also Adams 2016), implying he was happy to sell them while disagreeing politically. Under empire one gets mutilated empathy.
That empathy can be distorted, misused, and pathologized—mutilated—no more invalidates empathy than that Roman soldiers drove spikes into the limbs of the people they were crucifying invalidates carpentry. Admittedly an extreme example, but it does make the point that carpentry is a wholesome and useful practice – and so is empathizing.
In Migrant Aesthetics, the problems of empire are so complex, messy, intractable, one has to blame something—let’s blame empathy—for example, instead of pointing to human aggression as a variable hidden in plain view. Empathy did not and does not succeed in solving these problems, though empathy is a proven method of deescalating violence in situations of conflict. However, note well, there is a readiness assessment for empathy—the parties must be willing to try.
The critique of empire, colonialism, prejudice, and so on, is indispensably committed to empathy for another reason that does not seem to occur to Migrant Aesthetics. Whenever a great injustice is about to be perpetrated, the first step is to deny, suspend, cancel, the empathy of the proposed devalued Other, the soon-to-be-victim. Thus, the comparison of about-to-be-victims to insects, with whom we humans notoriously have trouble empathizing; and thus, the required wearing of the yellow star prior to deportation; and parallel methods of alienation. The perpetrators apply mutilated empathy to the intended victims. No good comes of it.
Migrant Aesthetics does not “get it” regarding empathy, and, strangely enough, risks incurring the aesthetic reeducation that gives comfort to certain forms of fascist thinking that begin by driving out critical thinking, empathy, and, above all, a rigorous and critical empathy. We shall recur frequently to the empathic blind spots of the mutilated empathy of migrant aesthetics (the category, not merely the book) in this review. I hasten to add, this review is long, and engaging with this book has been vexing, albeit an empathic labor of love, but the review is still a lot shorter than the book, thereby sparing you, dear reader, who will not need further to engage after this thorough discussion.
Meanwhile, at the risk of being cynical, consistency is over-rated: Migrant Aesthetics makes significant use of standard empathy, though unacknowledged. The simplest narrative would be unintelligible and would read like the railroad schedule unless one brings empathy to the narrative. One can engage in producing “impassable” distances “between the reader and the text” (p. 39) and a “forceful rejection of readerly empathy” (p. 148), but, having done so, one should not be surprised that the narrative is drained of vitality, strength, energy, and aliveness. And sometimes that is the point as in Ronald Barthes (1953) “writing degree zero,” a “colorless writing, freed from all bondage to a pre-ordained state of language.” Less is more. (For example, see the rediscovery of “writing degree zero” without acknowledging the phrase (Carpio: 11).)
In addition, though reasonable people may disagree, Barthes asserts that in writing degree zero the author is collective and group-oriented. The distinction “choral” as used in Migrant Aesthetics had not been invented yet, but the idea is the various authors “pass around” the manifesto, literary artwork, or press release on which they are working. The sun sets on the individual author’s voice, who, even if she is not dead, joins the FBI witness protection program and goes underground (Barthes 1968).
My assertion is that empathy is indispensable even when employing distancing methods of alienation (think of Berthold Brecht’s Epic Theatre). Perspective taking, taking a walk in the Other’s shoes after first taking off one’s own (the folk definition of empathy), is a necessary condition for making sense out of the story as the occurrence of human events. Indeed a minimalist approach often lets the empathy emerge more forcefully, for example, in Virginia Woolf,’s Nathalie Sarraute’s, or Albert Camus’ writings. Of Migrant Aesthetics’ favorite authors, Teju Cole, Julie Otsuka and Valeria Luiselli are towards the top of the “less is more” in writing list.
A possible way forward (not called out by Migrant Aesthetics), in which, in spite of the resistances and obstacles of empire, empathy and literary fiction intersect productively, is invoking the speech act of conversational implicative. This, as noted, brings forth the didactic alienation effect of Brecht’s epic theatre. “Conversational implicature” is an indirect speech act that suggests an idea or thought, even though the thought is not literally expressed. Conversational implicature creates distance between the reader and the text, which is more like a tenuous suspension bridge of rope over the river rapids in the jungle than a highway on the interstate. Conversation implicature lets the empathy in—and out—to be expressed without the psychological mechanisms of emotional contagion, projection, conformity, and so on, which result in mutilated empathy. Such implicature expands the power and provocation of empathy precisely by not saying something explicitly but hinting at what happened. This distinction (conversational implicature) seems to live in the empathic blind spot of migrant aesthetics. The information is incomplete, the context unclarified, 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. In an example, not in Carpio, from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, 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).
The reader does a double-take. What just happened? Then the casual conversation resumes about getting a different place to live, which one had been having when this erupted, 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? When the event are inhumane perhaps the empathic receptivity consists precisely in being with their inhumanity without doing something “human” like weeping or rending one’s garments. 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 and empathy lessons 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: 9 –165.)
For example, at the end of Berthold Brecht’s Mother Courage, all her children are dead—but she continues to follow the soldiers, selling them gun powder and provisions, more dedicated to her commercial (read: “capitalist”) enterprises than to her children. No catharsis of pity and fear here, and the viewer’s empathy is not mutilated by emotional upset, projection, conformity, and so on. The viewer’s empathy is left with pent up emotional upset that may usefully be directed into changing the social and economic conditions that allow such a possibility. Any maybe that is the point. However, even in this case the distancing does not work without a “top down,” cognitive empathy that gets one to think.
There is nothing wrong as such with Migrant Aesthetics. But there is something missing. The reader (audience) does not find out what a healthy relationship looks like. As for Morrison, she discovers the hope of wholeness and integrity elsewhere in the text, pointing to an example of one as the shadows of the characters are holding hands, indicating the possibility of family (Morrison 1987: 67). Otherwise, migrant aesthetics is littered with limbs and fragments of human beings—both the bones of dead refugees in the desert and emotional trauma—not a whole person in sight anyway. The author may argue back: “You have now got the point—thus, the consequences of empire!” Point taken, yet—the issue is that one is not on the slippery slope to the aestheticization (and anesthetization) of violence, trauma porn, and moral trauma, one is at the bottom of it. The empathy is as mutilated by projection, emotional contagion, conformity, and so on, as the desperate lives of the migrants wandering in the wilderness of empire. Heavens knows, empathy has its limitations, but not one single example of a healthy, robust, effective application of empathy?
As an exercise, the reader is invited to find an example of an empathic relationship in the writings of Dinaw Mengestu, Teju Cole, Junot Diaz, exemplified in Migrant Aesthetics. Once again, there is nothing wrong as such with the roll call of traumatic outrages perpetrated by bad actors and the survivors themselves—yet one must be a tad masochistic to engage with the outcomes of so much toxicity, violence, and aggressive masculinity—so much empire. Tragedy—the artform, not merely today’s news—is rich in examples of survivors who become perpetrators (and vice versa (e.g., 9, 19, 30, 43, 167)) but, without empathy, the result is just catastrophe, wreck, and ruin.
The choice between expanding empathy and ending empire is a false choice. It must be declined. Both are worthy objectives. In two cases, the migrant authors with whom Migrant Aesthetics is engaging get close to a successful application of empathy, but then fall short. The short coming (I assert) is not in Edwidge Danticat or in Karla Carnejo Villavicencio, but in Migrant Aesthetics’ misreadings of their contribution to a rigorous and critical empathy, a misreading that seems designed uncharitably to make sure that empathy is not credited with making a difference.
First, in the case of Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying (which, however, is a memoir not fiction), the author comes close to endorsing the use of Danticat’s work empathically to train U.S. custom officers and immigration workers, directly quoting Danticat: “[…] [F]or if ‘they can only remember that they are dealing with human beings at possibly the worst moments of their lives and not mere numbers or so-called ‘aliens,’ then they would do a better job” (Carpio 2023: 218). But then Migrant Aesthetics pulls back and forcloses the empathy as providing a handbook for welcoming migrants instead of part of systemic empire, for example, that aligns the U.S. imperialism of the invasion of Haiti with the invasion of Iraq. What I can’t figure out is why one has to choose between welcoming those migrants, whether using an empathic “handbook” or not, and further debunking the by now well-known and appalling mistakes of the so-called war on terrorism? Doesn’t the world need both expanded empathy and political action against the abuses of the war on terrorism and imperialism?
Second, Carpio credits Karla Cornejo Villavicencio with being motivated by the belief that literature can create productive empathy, or at least compassion (Carpio: 234), quoting Karla:
Art allows us to feel for the pain of others who have or will experience pain we cannot imagine or cannot ever happen to us. Even if we cannot feel it, or imagine it, that’s just human limitation. A failure of imagination can be compensated by the construction of a sturdy enough bridge of artistic articulation of that pain, and if it’s honest enough, we may not feel it—though in some cases we may—but we will feel for our fellow humans, and that is the job of the artist (Carpio: 234)
However, then Migrant Aesthetics undercuts this quote by detecting “ambivalence” in Villavicencio. Heavens to Murgatroyd! If Villavicencio were not ambivalent about vicariously feeling the pain of Others, one would have to dismiss her as being unempathic. And Migrant Aesthetics actually does something like that as it again tries to force a choice where none is warranted between struggling human beings, the unnamed migrants over whose graves no one has prayed, and contingent forces (including empire, etc.) that force them to migrate and become refugees. Migrant Aesthetics devalues Villavicencio’s empathy for struggling humanity—she almost gets there—but then she does not—and ends on a note of haunting and shame. This steady drum beat of the devaluing of empathy must give one pause. There’s another agenda here with the constant rhythm of dozens of mentions of various forms of empathy, and not a positive productive application of empathy in sight. What’s going on here?
Caprio asserts: “…[W]hat has been my centra argument in this work: that the history of empire is key in understanding the roots of migration at a scale appropriate to its global dimensions (Carpio: 228).” That to be forced from one’s home and become a refuse of the road is surely a source of enormous pain and suffering. Here the connection is direct—cause (routed from one’s home by aggression, starvation, etc.) and effect (pain, suffering). At the risk of over-simplification, yet a compelling one, white Europeans with cannons and machine guns go to Africa and Asia and exploit the natural resources and enslave or dominate the locals. A small subset of the locals is coopted—analogous to the concentration camp capos, both perpetrators and survivors (until they are not) being chosen from the prisoners—to make the job of the ruling class easier. Even the prisoners then become perpetrators as one starving persons “steals” bread or water from another or lies to save his own skin, thereby endangering another. And some of those locals migrant back to headquarters, whether London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, London, New York or Paris.
Now if anyone seriously believes that empathy is going to solve the problems created by empire, colonialism, imperialism, and so, then—how shall I put it delicately?—empathy is being “over sold.” This is usually the first step in setting up empathy as a “strawman” to be blamed for not fixing the many challenges facing civilized human beings committed to building a community that works for all persons.
There are at least two hidden variables behind the problematic causal analysis of empire that would help connect the dots: Human aggression and human hunger (hunger for many things, but here for food). These human beings are an aggressive species—and biologically omnivores. People can be kind and compassionate and empathic, but they also can behave aggressively and violently. Even if committed vegetarians, people also need to eat quite regularly, if not exactly three times a day.
To say, as Migrant Aesthetics does, that the arrival of the white European conquistador and their horses in the new world in 1492 was a catastrophe for the original inhabitants gets the measure of the event about right. In a way, the displacement of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia to Oklahoma is a kind of migration; but not really. It is a death march with strong aspects of genocide.
By all means denounce empire, but a more useful approach consistent with it might be to elaborate an analysis of human aggression, territoriality, lack of education, lack of critical thinking, the disturbing tendency of many human beings fanatically to follow authoritarian figures off a cliff. In that context, empathy is a proven way of deescalating violence and aggression.
Unfortunately, once a “policeman” is kneeling on your neck or someone throws a bomb, it is too late for empathy. The perpetrator fails the readiness assessment for empathy and it is necessary to invoke self-defense. And remember the best defense is a good offense—provided that it is proportionate to the incoming violence (which is notoriously hard to determine). Self-defense, setting limits, establishing boundaries are what is needed. There is a readiness assessment for empathy, and it requires that one be relatively safe and secure in one’s own person. Empathy 101 teaches that empathy does not work an active battlefield, if one is starving to death, or hanging upside down in a torture chamber. Never underestimate the power of empathy—never—but empathy in such extreme situations ends up looking like what the FBI Hostage Negotiating team uses to open communication with the hostage takers, or looking like “Red Team, Red Team!”—think like the opponent in a war game (e.g., Zenko 2015). As it stands, Migrant Aesthetics misunderstands empathy, mutilates it, and then blames empathy because empathy can be misapplied by migrant authors, some of the male members of which are both perpetrators and survivors, for calling attention to their plight and that of the devalued Other within us all.
The dialectic of unanticipated consequences marches on. The “classic” traditional migrant fictions of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) are noticeably absent in streets paved with gold, though one recurring, invariable constant among immigrants, refugees, and migrants is that they all express motivation to make a better life for their children. The Lithuanian migrants in The Jungle claw their way to a conclusion in which they are learning to speak socialist truth to power, having adopted a progressive socialist program that is today considered unradical because it is the law of the land. Sinclair joked: “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach” as citizens insisted on the Meat Inspection Act the Pure Food and Drug act. The folks in My Ántonia are trying to grow crops in Nebraska, which in the first map of North American was designed as “the great American desert.” In Ole Edvart Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth(1927), set in South Dakota, also part of the Great American Desert, no mention is made of the original inhabitants, who have already been buried at Wounded Knee, and the main action is the battle against a ferocious climate: snow storms, locusts who ravage the crops, hunger, isolation, cultural alienation of the children, and the stereotypical mad scene of the heroine prior to a Christian-based recovery of spirituality. Though the sustainability of the Ogalala Aquifer continues to be a concern, the migrants succeed in getting the desert to bloom.
The other hidden variable is that these humans are a hungry species. At the risk of over-simplification, long since incurred, the development of Cyrus McCormick’s combine-wheat-reaper, and the follow-on agribusiness technology, allow some 2% of the population to grow enough food to feed the entire planet; and this in spite of the fact that human choices made under aggression continue to use food as a weapon of starvation. Prior to the Green Revolution, the other 98% of the population had to work twelve to sixteen hours a day to grow enough food to avoid slow death by starvation. As noted, the migrant classics, admittedly shot through with empire, of Willa Cather and Ole Edvart Rolvaag, in which hunger is an ever-present specter, pending a successful harvest. Meanwhile, apparently large dairy herds really do contribute to greenhouse gases.
It is hard not to be a tad cynical: quit one’s day job as a Mandarin professor pronouncing ex cathedra or a highly compensated empathy consultant and spend twelve hours a day growing one’s own food. “We are star dust, we are billion-year-old carbon – get back to the land and get your soul free”? The melting of the polar ice cap at the north pole and the opening of the long-sought “northwest passage” is evidence of global warming that, absent delusional thinking, is hard-to-dispute. Nor is it a contradiction that both human-made greenhouses gases the earth’s procession of the equinox work together multiplicatively toward the trend of global warming. On background, the procession of the equinoxes is the tilt of the planet earth that causes an arrow pointing upward from the north pole towards the North Star to spin around the North Star rather than directly at it in a 25K year cycle, resulting in a regular measurable tilt toward and away from the sun that arguably is enough to contribute significantly to global cycles of warming and cooling. Splitting—either human’s hunger for meat versus the continency of a wobbly planet—offers a false choice and must be declined.
The grievance against empathy continues: Migrant Aesthetics writes (p. 4): “More broadly, the genre of immigrant literature depends on a model of reading founded on empathy—a model that my book takes to task. Literature promotes empathy, we are told, but empathy can easily slip into a projection of readers’ feelings and even into outright condescension.” As a reviewer, I am holding my head in my hands and rocking back-and-forth quasi-catatonically. I am in disbelief at the lack of common sense, lack of critical thinking, and absence of argumentative charity in confusing empathy and projection. Projection is a breakdown of empathy. Projection is a misfiring and/or going off the rails of empathy. Projection is a “getting lost in translation” of empathy. Now attribute these to empathy and dismiss empathy. Hmmm.
As regards “a model of reading founded on empathy,” please stop right there. Reading the story would not work—would not make any sense—would, strictly speaking, be unintelligible without empathy. The story would sound like reading the bus schedule when the public transit was on strike. Nonsense. Mumbo-jumbo. Without the empathic ability to translate the thoughts and feedings enacted in the story into actions and conditions that matter to the reader, the story would be empty and meaningless, lacking vitality, energy, strength or aliveness. Without empathy, the actions and contingencies, the struggles and high spirits, setbacks and successes, that are represented in the story would be strange sounds and gestures appearing to an anthropologist on Mars or on her first day in an alien culture, prior to marshalling her empathic skills. Never underestimate the power of storytelling, but absent empathy, it does not get traction. All reading is founded on empathy.
Migrant Aesthetics “forecloses” (rejects) empathy, then immediately lets it back in, because empathy is indispensable. Carpio (p. 8): “[…] [T]he writers I examine reject empathy as the main mode of rationality, opting instead for what Hannah Arendt called “representative thinking” that is, they urge reader to think, as themselves, from the position of another person and thus to call into question their own preconceptions and actions.” Thus, Migrant Aesthetics rejects empathy while calling out including “the position of another person,” which is precisely the folk definition of empathy.
Arendt’s reference here is of course to a single line in Kant’s Third Critique (1791/93 (AA 158)) about “enlarged thinking” [erweiterten…Denkungart] that is, to think from the perspective of the Other. Sounds like the folk definition of empathy to me. This cipher of “enlarged thinking”, which remains unintegrated in Kant, became the inspiration for Arendt’s incomplete third volume of the life of the mind on political judgment. Once again, it is the folk definition of empathy.
The fan out is challenging at this point. This single quote from Arendt plays such a significant role in Migrant Aesthetics that there is no avoiding a dive into Arendt scholarship. By invoking the formidable name and work of Hannah Arendt, who was herself a migrant refugee (note well!), a Jewish person fleeing from the Nazis, a whole new thread is started.
Arendt rarely uses the word “empathy,” though “animal pity” gets called out in the context of Himmler’s fake empathy (Arendt 1971: 105–106; Agosta 2010: 73). Arendt is not thought of as an advocate for empathy, though, in its own Kantian way, her work is rich in empathic understanding. In one of her few uses of the word “empathy” itself, the otherwise astute Arendt claims that “empathy” requires becoming the Other in a kind of merger, which, of course, is the breakdown of empathy into emotional contagion. Other than this terminological slip up, Arendt’s analysis is an incisive application of empathy to politics in “Truth and Politics” in Between Past and Future (1968: 9):
I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions… The very process of opinion formation is determined by those in whose places somebody thinks and uses his own mind, and the only condition for this exertion of the imagination is disinterestedness, the liberation from one’s own private interests (Arendt 1968: 9; italics added).
The word “empathy” is in principle dispensable here, and Arendt’s lovely phrase “one trains one’s imagination to go visiting [the Other]” is an exact description of empathic understanding, though not empathic receptivity of the Other’s feelings/emotions. One does not blindly adopt the Other’s point of view—one takes off one’s own shoes before trying on the Other’s. Even in a thoughtless moment, more thinking occurs in Arendt’s casual, throw-away use of a word, than in most people’s entire dictionaries. If necessary, Arendt may be read against herself, for the simple introduction of the distinction “vicarious experience” of an Other’s experience is sufficient to contain all the puzzling cases about being or becoming someone else. As a good Kantian, Arendt would appreciate in a universalizing moment that Kant’s sensus communus [“common sense” as an instrument of judgment] is what enables people to judge by means of feelings as well as concepts, but that it is a false splitting to force a choice between feeling and thinking—both are required to have a complete experience of the Other.
Regarding Arendt’s use of the word “empathy” [Einfühlung] itself, it is likely she encountered it in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927: H125 [pagination of the German Niemeyer edition]), which she studied carefully. There Heidegger undercuts Max Scheler’s use of the term in criticizing Theodor LIpps, who uses of the term in his (Lipps’) Aesthetics (1903; see also Lipps 1909), in which Lipps defines empathy [Einfühlung] as a kind of aesthetic projection of the subject’s feelings onto art and nature (and the Other). The examples of an angry storm at sea or the melancholy weeping willow trees or the smiling clouds and cheerful sunrise come to mind. The matter is a tangle, which I disentangle in Agosta (2014).
The controversy continues to fan out as Migrant Aesthetics marshals the authority of Namwali Serpall’s “The Banality of Empathy” (2019). Nice title. This is a reference to Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1971), about which it is hard to say just a little. I shall try. One of Arendt’s recurring themes is that evil is a consequence of thoughtlessness. Eichmann was a simpleton, a “Hans Wurst” from the folktale, who did not think and just followed orders. The wanted-dead-or-alive poster for Thoughlessness has Eichmann’s photo on it. The result of thoughtlessness was catastrophe. Indeed. Of course, Eichmann had many fellow travelers in genocide.
If one empathizes thoughtlessly, the banality of empathy of Serpall’s title, then one is at risk of empathy misfiring as projection, emotional contagion, conformity, and so on. Just so. A rigorous and critical empathy is required to guard against these risks, and Arendt, no advocate for sloppy anything, much less sloppy empathy, is halfway, but not all-the-way, there with her invocation of Kant’s rigorous and critical method. The above-cited quotation from Arendt and my analysis of terms must count towards a clarification of the nuances of the matter.
Serpall’s article then raises the question about narrative art “If witnessing suffering firsthand doesn’t spark good deeds, why do we think art about suffering will?” Though this may have been intended as a rhetorical question, the answer requires an empirical, fact-based inquiry. Some witnessing of suffering does indeed spark good deeds. The typical Samaritan becomes the Good Samaritan when he stops to help the survivor of the robbery thereby creating neighborliness and community; whereas the Levite and Priest succumb to empathic distress and cross the road, thereby expanding indifference and alienation. These events get “narrativized” in the Parable of the same name, which, in turn, inspires some to good deeds, though others are left paralyzed by empathic distress.
As Suzanne Keen (2007) points out, some stories such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin have an outsized effect on positive politics, rallying people to the cause of the abolition of slavery; whereas other novels such as The Turner Diaries may arguably have given comfort to white supremacy and provided bomb-making instructions to domestic terrorists. The answer to Serpall’s (or the editor’s) question is direct: we think art will inspire good deeds because we find examples of art’s doing so, albeit with conditions and qualifications. The evidence isthat’s what happened. The more important issue is to distinguish how art can transfigure the pain and suffering of the migrant (and suffering humanity at large), overcoming trauma, or how such attempts risk devolving into what is sometimes called “trauma porn,” engaging the graphical description of trauma without the “disinterestedness of art,” resulting in a kind of indulgent “orgasm” of aggressive violent fantasies. (As a benchmark, and acknowledging that reasonable people may disagree, an example of trauma porn (other than snuff videos on the dark web) would be Mel Gibson’s film (2004), The Passion of the Christ.)
Arendt is sometimes accused, I believe unfairly, of being tin-eared in her statements about US race relations and desegregation, especially in Little Rock, AK in 1957. When the 13-year-old Arendt was subjected to antisemitic comments by her teacher at school in the late 1920s, her mother withdrew her under protocol and protest and home-schooled Hannah. You have to get the picture here: the young Hannah reading the leather-bound Kantian First Critique in her late father’s vast library. Seemingly following the recommendation that Migrant Aesthetics (pp. 8, 13, 201) attributes to Arendt, she adopts a position, not a person, regarding US race relations (circa 1957!). “Positions not persons” is a fine slogan. It doesn’t work. Another false choice? The young black children in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 needed to get into the classroom to actually get books from the school library as some black families did not own a single book other than the bible (which, in a pinch, is an excellent choice, nevertheless…). That Arendt’s empathy misfires no more means that she lacks empathy or that empathy is invalid than that a driver who forgets to use her turn signal does not know how to drive (though she may get a citation!).
What is rarely noted by Arendt scholars is Arendt’s own strategic use of empathy in escaping from the Nazis. Having been arrested for Zionist “propaganda” activity by the Nazis, she builds an empathic rapport with the Gestapo prosecuting attorney, who is interviewing her in the same basement from which other Jewish people are deported to Buchenwald or Dachau. The result was not predictable. Arendt was released on her own recognizance, and, of course, she had immediately to flee across the border illegally. Now while we will never know all the nuances—in the interview (1964) she makes it sound like part of her tactic to save her own life was that she bats her eyelashes at the young naïve Gestapo prosecutor, who has just been transferred from the criminal to the political division—more grim humor—but, don’t laugh, it worked. Never underestimate the power of empathy. (See Arendt’s interview with English subtitles “Hannah Arendt: Im Gespräch mit Günter Gaus” (1964).[1]
Resuming the main line of the argument, Migrant Aesthetics continues the devaluation of empathy. It is choral. Migrant Aesthetics paraphrases the novelist, professor, and celebrity migrant [Viet Thanh] Nguyen (p. 31): “Nguyen argues that empathy, while being necessary for human connection, cannot be relied upon as the basis of political action because it is selective and unstable; it can easily morph into solipsism and escapism.” Wait a minute! Empathy “being necessary for human connection,” please stop right there! Take away empathy, the requirement for human connection is cancelled and—solipsism and escapism are the result. How shall I put it delicately? By their own words, they shall be exposed; looks like a solid case of the emperor’s new clothes, to quote the late Sinéad O’Connor. Once again, I am sitting here holding my head in my hands, rocking back and forth semi-catatonically, amazed that the breakdown of connectedness such as solipsism and escapism should be made an essential part of empathy’s defining features. Take away human connection, which empathy brings forth, pathological forms of domination occur such as “the structural inequities of a settler colonial state.” Ouch! It is like invalidating carpentry because an apprentice carpenter hits his thumb with the hammer (we will leave that other example behind for now). It is a problem that empathy is sometimes selective (parochial) and unstable like the human beings who try to apply it. The solution is expanded empathy. Unstable indeed. So far, the only thing stable about Migrant Aesthetics’ argument is its devaluing of empathy.
Nor is this necessarily an accurate representation of Nguyen position, who (I suggest) sees himself as an educator not a political infighter. Two wrongs do not make a right. The commitment to human rights is worth sustaining even in the face of the inhumanity of empire, which presents false choices between empathy and conformity. Human beings are a kind and empathic species, as noted, and they are also an aggressive and hungry one. Nguyen: “Art is one of the things that can keep our minds and hearts open, that can help us see beyond the hatred of war, that can make us understand that we cannot be divided into the human versus the inhuman because we are, all of us, human and inhuman at the same time” (quoted in Goldberg 2023). Nor is this to endorse the inhumane behavior of many humans. Once again, Nguyen knows one does not have to choose between ending empire and expanding empathy.
To compete the discussion of Arendt (1955/68: 153–206), she wrote a short intellectual biography of Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) in Men in Dark Times. Separately, Benjamin warned that the aestheticization of politics risks turning artistic expression into fascism. The theatrical (“artistic”) spectacle of a torch light parades at Nurnberg, Germany, (1933–1938) by masses of brown shirt storm troopers around a bonfire burning the canonical novels of western civilization is a mutilation of empathy into the emotional contagion of crowds as well as a mutilation of that civilization itself. Once again, it is hard to say just a little bit about this, nor is this review going to solve the problem of the relation between the aesthetic and the political. It is a disappointment that Arendt did not live long enough to complete more than a single sentence of her deep dive into the relation between Kant’s Critique of (Aesthetic) Judgment and politics; nor is it likely that such a project would have produced what Hegel produced when he undertook such a deep dive: The Philosophy of Right (1921), which read superficially gives the authority of The State a leading role in political life: “It is the way of God in the world, that there should be a state” according to Walter Kaufman’s translation. Migrant aesthetics politicizes aesthetics with an anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, anti-empire-ist commitments, rhetoric (in the classical sense), and expressions, without necessarily making practical recommendations for political action. Migrant Aesthetics expels empathy from the garden of artistic achievement, because empathy does not provide a stable basis for political action. Never underestimate the relevance of Immanuel Kant, yet if one wants measurable results from political action, apply Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (1971) or analysis based on Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (1951), not Kant’s Third Critique. Hoffer calls out the mutilated logic of totalitarian thinking; and Alinsky knew quite a lot about building communities, and though he did not use the word “empathy,” empathy lives in building community.
Migrant Aesthetics cites the eight definitions of empathy, or, more exactly, empathically-relevant phenomena, starting from C. Daniel Batson (2012). Migrant Aesthetics is also conversant with Susan Lanzoni’s (2018) magisterial account Empathy: A History, which includes many more definitions. Martha Nussbaum’s (and other’s) argument is cited that “the belief that reading fiction improves individuals’ empathic power” (Carpio: 11). However, on the latter position, see Suzanne Keen’s above-cited point about this requiring an empirical, fact-based inquiry. Those who bring an ounce of empathy to quality literature, often come away with a pound of empathy; but bad actors who, for example, bring white supremacy to their reading come away with further bad actions. If a slave owner had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it is probable that he would have come away saying, as regards the beating death, “That slave had it comin!’ Was exactly what he deserved!” The reader missed the point. And on that grim note we turn to the survivor/perpetrators, who form a large part of the “data,” the literary narratives, in Migrant Aesthetics.
The first fictional witness is Dinaw Mengestu’s protagonist Isaac from All Our Names (2014). Fleeing from war in Ethiopia to Uganda, he goes from the frying pan to the fire. His mentor perpetrates mass murder. Isaac is forced to cover up the crimes by burying the victims in a mass grave. Isaac is coopted into delivering arms to young boys—child soldiers—who perpetrate their own outrages before perishing. Isaac survives, smuggling himself to the States in a small trunk in a scene reminiscent of the animation Aladdin with the Genie who has to spend 10,000 years in the bottle, but it is not nearly as funny. The entire story is told from two points of view, that of Isaac, who has survived the atrocities of the unnamed but Ida-Amin-like authoritarian monster; and that of the mild-mannered white social worker, Helen, assigned to Isaac to help with his recovery—as it were, the poster child for empathy. The differences in their respective experiences are a powerful setup to challenge anyone’s empathy—but especially Helen’s and the reader’s.
The social worker, Helen, strives to map the scope and limits of her empathy, but her empathy is tin-eared, ineffective, and misfires. The client, Isaac, needs a lot of things that Helen can’t give him—fluency in English, a good paying job, a relationship with a romantic partner who appreciates him as a possibility (and vice versa). The one thing Helen is most able to do—give Isaac a good listening—give him empathic receptivity—she fails at—badly. In a clumsy social psychology experiment, Helen tries to overcome the de facto segregation of her small town’s local diner by having dinner there with Isaac. This role playing results in a kind of fake empathy, the projection of a stereotype onto Isaac, not the building of community. In a perfect storm of projection, emotional contagion, and the breakdown of empathic boundaries into sentimentality, Helen gets over involved.
Once again, how shall I put it delicately? Pretending to address the fictional heroine, the therapy does not work, Helen, if you sleep with the client. She does. Predictably this blows up any possibility of a rigorous and critical empathy, restoration of wholeness, or overcoming trauma. This is not to say that the sex was not satisfying. Empathy makes for great sex between mutually consenting partners, but regardless of the details, Helen perpetrates a boundary violation. Certainly unethical, possibly illegal, the power differential between therapist and patient is such that the client cannot give consent, even if he initiates the “seduction.” He is a powerful actor in escaping from civil war and so on; but his agency is compromised, and he cannot escape from bad therapy. It is neither empathy nor pity; it is a boundary violation and should not be represented otherwise. Granted, it makes for a great melodrama and a great screen play such as Netflix’s “In session.” Just that the breakdown of boundaries between self and Other in the context of therapy forecloses the client’s, Isaac’s, recovery. Fortunately, his aspirations as a writer—perhaps the shadow cast by Mengestu over his character, Isaac, – showing the latter the way forward. The survivor/perpetrator creates some empathy, however incomplete and tentative, for himself in his art.
The cultural difference, language difference, difference in experience, and Isaac’s traditional devaluation of woman’s power, are all obstacle to empathy. This is supposed to invalidate empathy? Drive out the obstacles and resistances and empathy naturally comes forth. When the obstacles and resistance are human aggression and empire, that is going to be a big job, though not impossible as the client and therapist are caught in a double bind. Isaac is already a perpetrator and a survivor. Helen becomes one too. The result is the double bind of moral trauma (a distinction missing from Migrant Aesthetics), to which we shall return momentarily. The relationship between Helen and Isaac fails as tragedy because it delivers wreck and ruin instead of recovery form trauma (whether standard or moral) or artistic transfiguration. However, that does not mean that empathy caused xenophobia. The narrow-minded parochialism of projection causes xenophobia; and the solution to parochialism is expanded empathy.
In another story, migrant aesthetics’ mutilated empathy is painfully on display. Migrant Aesthetics writes (p. 7): “The narrator, now known as Jonas, struggles to come to terms both with himself and with his father’s silence about his migration and his physical abuse of the narrator’s mother. One might even argue that the narrator instrumentalizes Yosef’s migration story to explain his own abusive impulses toward his girldfriend.” How shall I put it delicately? Intimate partner physical abuse is not an “instrumentalization”—whatever that is—it is a crime, and should never be represented any other way. Is it not the reader’s empathy—and perhaps the author’s—that is precisely at stake here? This does not mean I am in favor of empire. I am against empire, colonialism, and so on, as well as using them as excuses for people rich with possibility behaving badly.
The next witness to the many mutilations of empathy is Teju Cole’s anti-hero, Juilus, in Open City (2011). Information asymmetries in fiction are at least as old as Oedipus’ not knowing his biological parents—oh boy, did that create some mischief. Arguably Oedipus was the original refugee, seeing as how he was abandoned to die by his biological parents and rescued by poor people from the neighboring country, Thebes.
In addition to information asymmetries, moral ambiguities are key ways of creating engaging narratives. For example, Stephen Boccho’s cop show Hill Street Blues (1981–1987) innovated in popularizing moral ambiguities. A protagonist is introduced sympathetically, inviting the identification, if not the empathy, of the audience, then he or she does something appalling. The good cop is the bad cop (and vice versa). The viewer’s (reader’s) emotional conflict is guaranteed—and the audience is hooked. Highly derivative, but no less engaging for all that, the mild-manner medical student/resident in psychiatry, Julius, is burdened with an altered mental state, a fugue state not exacty epilepsy and resembling multiple personality disorder, in which the “alters” do not know about one another. The issues comes out like a slap to the reader at the end of the story, as Julius is credibly accused of having perpetrated a rape, however, also credibly without remembering it. Gustav Flaubert’s flaneur meets Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jerkel and Mr Hyde, thankfully without the Jack the Ripper gore.
Migrant Aesthetics is explicitly dismissive of trauma studies (e.g., pp. 10, 20), which are essential to surviving empire and fighting back. Without empathy, empire gets the last laugh, as nothing is available but fragments of broken human beings and drying bones in the desert, mutilated empathy and mutilated humans.
While migrant aesthetics (the category not merely the title) “calls out” the distinctions that survivors can also be perpetrators (and vice versa) as well as the distinctions trauma and complex trauma, it stumbles in applying them. More problematically, Migrant Aesthetics misses the distinction moral trauma, which is an unfortunate oversight. It might have saved Migrant Aesthetics from simplistic splitting and trying to force a choice between feeling and thinking, positions and persons, truth and empathy.
Though determining the truth remains challenging, even illusive—especially for survivors of violence, war, and trauma—empathy cannot be sustained without a commitment to truth. Thus, the “take down” of war novels that are critical of war (Carpio: 30) misses the moral trauma of soldiers, who are both survivors and perpetrators. Nor is this justification for war crime(s). Some soldiers are put in an impossible situation—they are given a valid military order and innocent people end up getting killed. The solider is now a perpetrator and a survivor. One cannot practice a rigorous and critical empathy without integrity, commitment to truth, commitment to critical thinking, and fact-based inquiry (granted that “facts” are slippery).
On background, trauma is medically defined at that which causes the person to experience or believe they are in imminent risk of dying or being gravely injured. Rape is on the list of grave injuries. Moral trauma is also on the list and includes such things as the Trolley Car Dilemma; “I will kill you if you do not kill this other person” (different than the Trolley Car); double binds such as those occurring to Isaac and Helen; soul murder such as occurs to Winston at the end of Orwell’s 1984; and seemingly valid military orders that result in unintentional harm to innocent people. In moral trauma people can be both perpetrators and survivors, and become just atht when someone gets hurt who did not need to get hurt.
Here radical empathy comes into its own. A person is asked to make a decision that no one should have to make. A person is asked to make a decision that no one is entitled to make. A person is asked to make a decision that no one is able to make—and yet the person makes the decision anyway, even if the person does nothing, since doing nothing is a decision. The result is moral trauma—the person is both a perpetrator and a survivor. Now empathize with that. No one said it would be easy.
When one is hanging by a frayed rope with one’s face to the side of the mountain, every mountain looks pretty much the same, granite gray and cold and like one is going to die or be gravely injured (the definition of trauma). Strictly speaking, the challenge is not only that the would-be empathizer was not with the surviving Other when the survivor experienced the life-threatening trauma, but the survivor her- or himself was there and did not have the experience in such a way as to experience it whole and completely. That may sound strange that the survivor did not experience the experience. That is the definition of “unclaimed” experience (Caruth 1996). The traumatic experience is not the kind of overwhelming, fragmenting experience that one would ever want to experience, so neuro-biological mechanisms were deployed by the mind-body-self to split off, numb, and defend against experiencing the experience. Isaac, Julius, and Yunior have more than their fair share of that.
Thus trauma survivors report out of body experiences or watching themselves at a distance as the crash occurs or the perpetrator enacts the boundary violation. Or the survivors do not remember what happened or important aspects of it. One is abandoned. Help is not coming—no one is listening. Yet the experience = x keeps coming back in the survivor’s nightmares, flashbacks, or as consciousness flooding anxiety. It comes back as a sense of suffocation, an undifferentiated blackness, or diffuse and flooding fear. The trauma remains split off from the survivor. Yunior’s “The Curse”? The treatment or therapy consists of the survivor re-experiencing the trauma vicariously from a place of safety. In doing so the trauma loses its power and when it returns (as it inevitably does), it does so with less force, eventually becoming a distant unhappy and painful but not overwhelming memory. (See van der Kolk 2014; LaCapra 2001; Leys 2000; Caruth 1995, 1996; Freud 1920.)
It is precisely the nature of trauma for a person to go through the trauma and yet not be able to grasp, comprehend, or integrate the trauma in their other life experiences. Extreme situations—that threaten death or dismemberment—call forth radical empathy. Standard empathy is challenged by extreme situations out of remote, hard-to-grasp experiences to become radical empathy. As noted, some remote, hard to grasp situations are remote and hard to grasp even for the people who go through the situations and survive them. That the experience is unintegrated and sequestered in a split off part of the personality and corresponding neurological sector is precisely what makes the experience a trauma (van der Kolk 2014; LaCapra 2001; Leys 2000; Caruth 1995, 1996; Freud 1920). Hence, the need for radical empathy.
Radical empathy is called forth by extreme situations, with which migrant literature is dense, in which radical translation is the bridge between self and Other. Ultimately, radical empathy consists in being fully present with the survivor, acknowledging the survivor’s humanity, and if there are no survivors, as a special case, then radical empathy is with the memory of the victim in the shocked and suffering community – those bones in the Arizona desert over which no one prayed or reflected. Radical empathy acknowledges, witnesses, recognizes, that the survivor will be able to “move on” with life when what had to be survived = x becomes a resource for her or him, in which “resource” means a source of empathy, in which the person is able to be contributed to Others. As regards the victims, those who do not survive, their remembrance becomes the resource, the source of empathy that contributes to the community of Others.
Thus, the third witness is Junot Diaz. “The Curse”—a major distinction in Diaz—is that one cannot have a standard, “normal” relationship in a history bounded by slavery, exploitation, and ongoing abuse. Survivors of domestic violence can be burdened with Stockholm Syndrome, identification with the aggressor, and related derealization phenomena. Recovery, whether in the form of formal therapy or writerly artistic transfiguration of the trauma—requires that the survivor be relatively safe and not entangled in ongoing perpetrations. The challenge to Diaz and anyone who wants to write criticism about his work is that, as noted, we lack a picture of what a healthy relationship looks like. As an exercise, the reader may try to find an example of a healthy relationship that allows for empathic relatedness in this work.
With Diaz, migrant aesthetics moves from minimalist writing degree zero to a chorus of voices in one’s head that is Joycean and near manic in its intensity: “Yunior’s hyperbolic and promiscuous narrative style—mixing everything from Dominican Spanish to African American slang to ‘tropical magic realism […] hip-hop machismo, [and] post-modern pyrotechnics’—yields a certain interpretive flexibility in defining the Curse” (Carpio: 165). The reader gets a sense of the toxic gangster rap which the protagonist had to survive and which, to an extent, still obsessively lives on in the practices and performances in his thinking and relating. The voices in his head are a bad neighborhood, and it is tempting to urge, “Don’t go there! You’re gonna get mugged!” Lots of violence. This is trauma writing.
The following is not the truth and consider the possibility (and it applies not only to Diaz): Diaz’s “The Curse” is Medusa’s snake-haired Gorgon—it turns one to stone—literally in the story and emotionally if one is in the audience. It is trauma, complex trauma, moral trauma. Historically it is violence, sexual violence, all kinds of violence, and soul murder, murdering the capacity for empathy. An argument can be made that Diaz, however clumsily and ineptly, is trying to use his art like the mythical Perseus’ magic shield to reflect and refract the complex moral trauma in such a way that it can be mitigated and contained and soothed, even if not disappeared or completely healed. And, in its own way, that is the high art of empathy.
Migrant Aesthetics (Carpio: 171): “Becoming and falling for Trujillo-like goons are sure signs of the Curse for Dominicans, and Diaz leaves no doubt about its [wide] range …” Examples of intimate partner violence, abuse (domestic violence), and “toxic masculinity,” are called out as that with which the protagonist struggles. On background, Trujillo was the local dictator of the Dominican Republic (1930–1961), who was sustained by US imperialism and corporate money from banana plantations and mining. Hence, the origin of the expression “banana republic.”
Migrant Aesthetics writes of the protagonist (p. 173): “Yunior identifies his Dominicanness with his experience of the Curse, and that his compulsive promiscuity is a legacy of a long history of colonial misogyny and violence [….] culminates with the story “A cheater’s guide to love.” As noted, Yunior has probably never seen an example of a healthy relationship nor will the reader find one here in Diaz—though obviously Migrant Aesthetics condemns the violence, misogyny, and so on.
Migrant Aesthetics is at risk. It is fascinated and needs Diaz for the academic distinction “migrant aesthetics.” In its own way, Migrant Aesthetics becomes another sparrow among sparrows—Ana, Ybón, Lola, La Inca—to the hypnotic attraction of the gangsta snake. These are vulnerable, abused women who are candidates to be trafficked. Such women are in an altered mental status, semi-permanently conditioned by trauma from a young age, and they seem to go for those “bad boys.” No good comes of it. Nor is this necessarily to blame the snake. Even Dale Carnegie, of winning friends and influencing people fame, acknowledges that if your parents were snakes, then you would be a snake too. The snake may have to be quarantined to protect the community, but that does not mean the perpetrator does not need treatment. He does, though he all-too-rarely gets it.
In summary, it is not a choice between expanding empathy and ending/reducing empire, and an engagement with both is needed. Survivors ask for empathy. When survivors are asked, “What do you want—what would make it better? What would soothe the trauma?” then rarely do they say punish the perpetrator (though sometimes they do). Mostly they ask for acknowledgement, to be heard and believed, to hear the truth about what happened, for apology, accountability, restitution, rehabilitation, prevention of further wrong (see Herman 2023). Rarely do survivors make forgiveness a goal if that would require further interaction with the perpetrator (though self-forgiveness should not be dismissed). It bears repeating: survivors ask for empathy, not an end to empire, though, once again, both are needed. Thus, the utopian false consciousness of survivors and migrant aesthetics?
The final witness in this review is Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine (2002). I was about to write that the internment of over 127K Japanese citizens during World War II was “extra judicial,” but then a colleague pointed out to me that the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the internment camps in the December 1944 Korematsu v. United States decision. This disgraceful decision was rebuked and finally overturned in 2018. Reparations were finally approved in 1988 by the Civil Liberties Act and enacted into law. In spite of its inadequacy to the injustice some forty years later, such a gesture may have created a space in which recognition of wrong, apology, recovery, and healing were imaginable.
In the face of this disgraceful internment of Japanese citizens during World War II by the US government, Julie Otsuka writes: “I didn’t write this book with an angry screed, and I didn’t want it to be a moralizing book. I just wanted it to be a book people and what they had gone through. I hope it’s an experience that the reader can enter” (cited in Caprio: 135). Sounds like a request for empathy. Amidst the anger and moralizing, which require a committed empathic effort to limit stop from making a bad situation worse, Otsuka’s commitment to empathy shines through. Without empathy, the family’s anger, grief, despair, and longing would read like a railroad time table (when the trains were on strike!). The minimalist language powerfully marshalled by Otsuka—see the above about “writing degree zero”—lets the empathy land powerfully as a gut punch to any reader who has been paying attention. Pets are not allowed in the internment camp, and the mother kills the family dog (p. 135), which it to say the mother kills childhood, innocence, decency, love, kindness, hope, relatedness—and, above all, empathy. Over the entrance to the internment camp is written: “Abandon empathy, all ye who enter here,” which does not mean the narrative lacks empathy or is not about empathy. One is never hungrier for empathy than when it is missing. As noted at the start of this review, empathy is so fundamental an aspect of one’s being human, that lack of empathy can be seen as being inhuman (e.g., Keen 2008: 6; Blankenship 2019: 38).
Notwithstanding the powerful rhetorical empathy marshalled by Otsuka, migrant aesthetics asserts that “stylistic restraint” short-circuits empathy ( Carpio: 135 (regarding “rhetorical empathy” see Blankenship 2019)). Migrant aesthetics aligns empathy with fake “sentimentality” (another name for “empathy” (Carpio: 147)). That does not mean that empathy is not relevant; it means without empathy, humans are physically, emotionally, morally, and spiritually dismembered into fragments of human beings.
In short, the rumor of empathy remains a rumor in the case of Migrant Aesthetics; the rumor is not confirmed; and empathy does not live in this work. It is where empathy goes to become projection, emotional contagion, and fake empathy. It is where empathy goes to become mutilated empathy like mutilated fragments of human bones in the desert. Don’t go there.
References
Tristam Vivian Adams. (2016). The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organises Empathy. London: Repeater Books.
Lou Agosta. (2010). Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
_________. (2014b). From a rumor of empathy to a scandal of empathy in Lipps. In A Rumor of Empathy: Rewriting Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Pivot: 53–65. DOI: 10.1057/978113746534.0007.
Hannah Arendt. (1964). Im Gespräch mit Günter Gaus (1964): Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVSRJC4KAiE [checked on 10/20/1950]
_____________.. (1968). Between Past and Future. New York: Viking Press.
_____________. (1971). Eichmann in Jerusalem: Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press.
Roland Barthes. (1953). Writing Degree Zero. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (trs.). London: Jonathan Cape, 1967.
________________. (1968). The death of the author, Stephen Heath (tr.). In Image – Music – Text. London: Fontana Press (HarperCollins): 142–148.
C. Daniel Batson. (2012). The empathy-altruism hypothesis: Issues and implications. In Empathy: From bench to Bedside, Jean Decety (ed.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press: 41–54.
Lisa Blankenship. (2019). Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. Logan UT: Utah State University Press.
Cathy Caruth (ed.). (1995). Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: John Hopkins.
Cathy Caruth. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins.
Ted Cohen. (1999) Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sigmund Freud. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Standard Edition of the Psychological Writings of Freud, Vol 18: 1–64.
Michelle Goldberg. (2023). With war in Israel, the cancel culture comes full circle. October 23, 2023. The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/23/opinion/israel-cancel-culture-debate.html [checked on 10/24/2023]
Martin Heidegger. (1927). Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trs.). New York: Harper and Row, 1963.
Eric Hoffer. (1951). The True Believer. New York: Random.
Suzanne Keen. (2007). Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University 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.
Susan Lanzoni. (2018). Empathy: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Stephen Levinson. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ruth Leys. (2000). Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Theodor Lipps. (1903). Aesthetik. Volume I. Hamburg: Leopold Voss.
_____________. (1909). Leitfaden der Psychologie. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelman Verlag.
Toni Morrison. (1987). Beloved. New York: Vintage Int.
Namwali Serpall. (2019). The banality of empathy. The New York Review: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/03/02/the-banality-of-empathy/?lp_txn_id=1496946 [checked on 10/20/2023].
(Bessel) van der Kolk. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Viking Press.
Ruth R. Wisse. (2013). No Joke: Making Jewish Humor. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Micah Zenko. (2015). Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy. New York: Basic Books.
[1] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVSRJC4KAiE ; see also Agosta 2010: 70–77.
© 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
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
Historical empathy, guns, and the strict construction of the US Constitution
I am sick at heart. This is hard stuff. All those kids. Teachers and principals, too, dying trying to defend the children. Everyone cute as button. Just as bad, I have to re-publish this article, since the needed breakthrough has not yet occurred. What to do about it? My proposal is to expand historical empathy. Really. Historical empathy is missing, and if we get some, expand it, something significant will shift.
Putting ourselves in the situation of people who lived years ago in a different historical place and time is a challenge to our empathy. It requires historical empathy. How do we get “our heads around” a world that was fundamentally different than our own? It is time – past time – to expand our historical empathy (Kohut 2020). For example …
Brown Bess, Single Shot Musket, standard with the British Army and American Colonies 1787
When the framers of the US Constitution developed the Bill of Rights, the “arms” named in the Second Amendment’s “right to keep and bear arms” referred to a single shot musket using black powder and lead ball as a bullet. The intention of the authors was to use such weapons for hunting, self-defense, arming the nascent US Armed Forces, and so on. No problem there. All the purposes are valid and lawful.
One thing is for sure and my historical empathy strongly indicates: Whatever the Founding Fathers intended with the Second Amendment, they did NOT intend: Sandy Hook. They did not intend Uvalde, Parkland, Columbine, Buffalo, NY, Tops Friendly. They did not intend some 119 school shootings since 2018. They did not intend a “a fair fight” between bad guys with automatic weapons and police with automatic weapons. The Founding Fathers did not intend wiping out a 4th grade class using automatic weapon(s). They did not intend heart breaking murder of innocent people, including children, everyone as cute as a button.
Now take a step back. I believe we should read the US Constitution literally on this point about the right to “keep and bear” a single shot musket using black powder and lead ball. The whole point of the “strict constructionist” approach – the approach of the distinguished, now late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who passed away on Feb 13, 2016 – is to understand what the original framers of the Constitution had in mind at the time the document was drawn up and be true to that intention in so far as one can put oneself in their place. While this can be constraining, it can also be liberating.
Consider: No one in 1787 – or even 1950 – could have imagined that the fire power of an entire regiment would be placed in the hands of single individual with a single long gun able to deliver dozens of shots a minute with rapid reload ammo clips. (I will not debate semi-automatic versus automatic – the mass killer in LasVegas had an easy modification to turn a semi-automatic into an automatic.)
Unimaginable. Not even on the table.
This puts the “right” to “bear arms” in an entirely new context. You have got a right to a single shot musket, powder and ball. You have got a right to a single shot every two minutes, not ten rounds a second for minutes on end, or until the SWAT team arrives. The Founding Fathers did not intend the would-be killer being perversely self-expressed on social media to “out gun” school security staff who are equipped with a six shooter. Now the damage done by such a weapon as the Brown Bess should not be under-estimated. Yet the ability to cause mass casualties is strictly limited by the relatively slow process of reloading.
The Founding Fathers were in favor of self-defense, not in favor of causing mass casualties to make a point in the media. The intention of the Second Amendment is to be secure as one builds a farm in the western wilderness, not wipe out a 4th grade class. I think you can see where this is going.
Let us try a thought experiment. You know, how in Physics 101, you imagine taking a ride on a beam of light? I propose a thought experiment based on historical empathy: Issue every qualified citizen a brown bess musket, powder, and ball. What next?
Exactly what we are doing now! Okay, bang away guys. This is not funny – and yet, in a way, it is. A prospective SNL cold open? When the smoke clears, there is indeed damage, but it is orders of magnitude less than a single military style assault rifle weapon. When the smoke clears, all-too-often weapons are found to be in the hands of people who should not be allowed to touch them – the mentally unstable, those entangled in the criminal justice system, and those lacking in the training needed to use firearms safely.
More to the point, this argument needs to be better known in state legislatures, Congress, and the Supreme Court. All of a sudden the strict constructionists are sounding more “loose” and the “loose” constructionist, more strict. It would be a conversation worth having.
The larger question is what is the relationship between arbitrary advances in technology and the US Constitution. The short answer? Technology is supposed to be value neutral – one can use a hammer to build a house and take shelter from the elements or to bludgeon your innocent neighbor. However, technology also famously has unanticipated consequences. In the 1950s, nuclear power seemed like a good idea – “free” energy from splitting the atom. But then what to do with the radioactive waste whose half life makes the landscape uninhabitable by humans for 10,000 years? Hmmm – hadn’t thought about that. What to do about human error – Three Mile Island? And what to do about human stupidity – Chernobyl? What to do about unanticipated consequences? Mass casualty weapons in the hands of people intent on doing harm? But wait: guns do not kill people; people with guns kill people. Okay, fine.
There are many points to debate. For example, guns are a public health issue: getting shot is bad for a person’s health and well-being. Some citizens have a right to own guns; but all citizens have a right not to get shot. People who may hurt themselves or other people should be prevented from getting access to firearms. There are many public health – and mental health – implications, which will not be resolved here. There are a lot of gun murders in Chicago – including some using guns easily obtained in Texas and related geographies. The point is not to point fingers, though that may be inevitable. The guidance is: Do not ask what is wrong – rather ask what is missing, the availability of which would make a positive different. In this case, one important thing that is missing is historical empathy.
Because the consequences of human actions – including technological innovation – often escape from us, it is necessary to consider processes for managing the technology, providing oversight – in short, regulation. Regulation based on historical empathy. Gun regulation . Do it now.
That said, I am not serious about distributing a musket and powder and ball to every qualified citizen in place of (semi) automatic weapons – this is an argument called a “reduction to absurdity”; but I’ll bet the Founding Fathers would see merit in the approach. There’s a lot more to be said about this – and about historical empathy – but in the meantime, I see a varmint coming round the bend – pass me my brown bess!
Additional Reading
Thomas Kohut. (2020). Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past. London: Routledge.
PS Please send a copy of this editorial to your US Congressional representatives in the House and Sensate.
Review: Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person by James Jardine
The occasion for James Jardine’s engaging and complex book is the publication of the critical edition of Husserl’s drafts for Ideas II, edited (separately) by Edith Stein and Ludwig Landgrabe as Husserliana IV/V [Hua]. Jardine notes:
“I draw upon a forthcoming volume of Husserliana which, for the first time, presents the original manuscripts written by Husserl for the project of Ideen II (Hua IV/V), a now-finished editorial task which was carefully pursued for several years by Dirk Fonfara at the Husserl-Archiv in Köln” [Jardine 2022: 4].
For this substantial scholarly contribution, we, the academic reading public, are most deeply grateful. We are also grateful for James Jardine’s penetrating and dynamic engagement with the cluster of issues around empathy, ego, embodiment and community raised in Husserl’s Ideas II. This is also the place to note that like many academic books, the pricing is such that individuals will want to request that their college, university, or community library order the book rather than buy it retail.
Empathy is a rigorous and critical practice. The commitment is always to be charitable in reviewing another’s work, and this is especially so when the topic is empathy. An empathic review of a work on empathy requires – sustained and expanded empathy. Any yet is not a softball review and Jardine’s work presents challenges from logical, phenomenological and rational reconstruction perspectives. It is best to start by letting Jardine speak for himself and at some length:
“I motivate and explore in detail the claim that animate empathy involves the broadly perceptual givenness of another embodied subject as experientially engaged in a common perceptual world. Interpersonal empathy, which I regard as founded upon animate empathy, refers by contrast to the fully concrete variety of empathy at play when we advert to another human person within a concrete lifeworldly encounter” [Jardine: 5].
“ […] [O]nce we recognise that the constitution of a common perceptual world is already enabled by animate empathy—without an analysis of the latter being exhausted by our pointing out this function—this allows us to render thematic the specific forms of foreign subjectivity and interpersonal reality that are opened up by interpersonal empathy, which involves but goes far beyond animate empathy” [Jardine: 88].
The key distinction is clear: “animate empathy” is distinct from “interpersonal empathy.” This distinction is widely employed in empathy scholarship, even if not in these exact terms, with many varying nuances and shades of meaning. This distinction roughly corresponds to the distinctions between affective and cognitive empathy, between empathic receptivity and empathic understanding, and, most generically, between “top down” and “bottom up” empathy. Arguably, the distinction even corresponds to that between the neurological interpretation of empathy using mirror neurons (or a mirroring system just in case mirror neurons do not exist) and the folk definition of empathy as “taking a walk in the other person’s shoes (with the other’s personality)”.
I consider it an unconditionally positive feature of Jardine’s work that he does NOT mention mirror neurons, which are thoroughly covered elsewhere in the literature (e.g., V. Gallese, 2006, “Mirror Neurons and Intentional Attunement,” JAPA).
From a phenomenological point of view, Jardine succeeds in showing that Husserl is a philosopher of empathy – animate empathy. Even if Maurice Merleau-Ponty does carry the work of phenomenology further into neurology and psychology, having inherited Jean Piaget’s chair, Husserl is already the phenomenologist of the lived experience of the body. The human (and mammalian!) body that one encounters after every phenomenological bracketing and epoché is a source of animate expressions of life. A pathological act of over-intellectualization is required not to see the body as expressing life in the form of sensations, feelings, emotions, affects, and thoughts. There are dozens and dozens of pages and lengthy quotations devoted to this idea. Here are a couple of quotes by Husserl that make the point:
“We ‘see’ the other and not merely the living body of the other; the other itself is present for us, not only in body, but in mind: ‘in person’” (Hua IV/V 513/Hua IV 375, transl. modified [1917]).
“The unity of the human being permits parts to be distinguished, and these parts are animated or ensouled (beseelt) unities (Hua IV/V 582 [1916/1917])” [Jardine 2022: 78].
Animate empathy LIVES in Husserl’s Ideas II. In addition, the shared space of living physical bodies creates a clearing for the intersubjective perception of natural (physical) objects in the common world of things and events. In that sense, empathy is at the foundation of the shared intersubjective world of thing-objects (as Heidegger would say “present to hand”).
However, the big question – for Husserl, Jardine, and all of us who follow – is does Husserl’s version of empathy found the intersubjective world of conscious human beings with intentional perceptions, emotions, actions, and personal engagements?
After nearly three hundred pages of engaging, useful, and lengthy quotations from Landgreb’s and Stein’s drafts of Ideas II, closely related texts of Husserl, and Jardine’s penetrating and incisive commentary, this reviewer was still not sure. In addition to my own shorting-comings, there are significant other reasons and considerations.
Jardine’s work is an innovative train-wreck, rather like Leonardo’s fresco the “Last Supper” – even at the start, da Vinci’s masterpiece was a magnificent wreck as the underlying plaster of the fresco did not “set up” properly. In this case, the underlying plaster is Husserl’s “work in progress” of Ideas II. (I acknowledge “work in progress” is my description, not Jardine’s.)
As is well known, Husserl himself withheld the manuscript of Ideas II from publication. He was not satisfied with the results, having been accused of succumbing to the problematic philosophical dead-end of solipsism, the inability to escape from the isolated self, knowing only itself. Will empathy solve the problem?
It is a further issue (not mentioned by Jardine) that everything without exception that Husserl actually published in his life about empathy after he published Ideas I (1913), makes “empathy [Einfühlung]” nonfoundational in relation to the givenness of the other individual, displacing it “upstairs.” For example, Husserl writes in the Cartesian Meditations:
“The theory of experiencing someone else, the theory of so-called ‘empathy [Einfühlung],’ belongs in the first story above our ‘transcendental aesthetics’” [Husserl 1929/31: 146 (173); see also Agosta, 2010: 121].
Now strictly speaking, Jardine could reply that quoting Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations is out of scope for an engagement with Ideas II, and that is accurate enough as it stands; but what is not out of scope is the challenge of solipsism with which Husserl was wrestling philosophically throughout his career. As noted, at the level of the Cartesian Meditations (which Jardine does occasionally quote when it suits his purpose (but not the above-cited quote!)), empathy belongs to the first story upstairs above his “transcendental aesthetics,” as Husserl writes, quoting a Kantian distinction.
Thus, we engage with Jardine’s implicit reconstruction of Husserl’s repeated attempts to navigate the labyrinth of phenomenological experience, joining and separating the subject/self and other individual.
Jardine follows Husserl from the solipsistic frying pan into the fire by quoting Husserl accurately as saying the self and other are separated by an abyss:
“Husserl calls out a “series of appearances (…) are exchanged, while each subject yet remains ineluctably distinct from every other by means of an abyss, and no one can acquire identically the same appearances as those of another. Each has his stream of consciousness displaying a regularity (Regelung) that encompasses precisely all streams of consciousness, or rather, all animal subjects (die eben über alle Bewusstseinsströme bzw. Animalischen Subjekte übergreift)” (Hua IV/V 254–255/Hua IV 309, transl. modified [1913])” [Jardine: 134 (emphasis added)].
Husserl tries a reduction to absurdity to escape from the solipsistic world of this abyss between self and other, supposing the world really were mere semblances. One will eventually encounter a person who is a non-semblance. This other individual who transforms the mere semblance into actually appearance awakens one from the dream of solipsism If it could be shown or argued that this other individual is necessarily given/presented/encountered, then all one’s previous solipsistic experience would be like hallucinatory madness. With apologies to Hilary Putnam, this is Husserl’s “brain in a vat” moment [Jardine: 126]:
“…[A]ny intersubjective “apperceptive domain”, Husserl claims, it is conceivable that, in the solipsistic world, “I have the same manifolds of sensation and the same schematic manifolds,” and, in as much as functional relations hold between such manifolds, then it may be that “the ‘same’ real things, with the same features, appear to me and, if everything is in harmony, exhibit themselves as ‘actually being’” (Hua IV/V 295 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 80). And yet, if other human living bodies were to then “show up” and be “understood” as such, the feigned reality of our experienced ‘things’ would be called into question:
Now all of a sudden and for the first time human beings are there for me, with whom I can come to an understanding [. . . .] As I communicate to my companions my earlier lived-experiences an d they become aware of how much these conflict with their world, constituted intersubjectively and continuously exhibited by means of a harmonious exchange of experience, then I become for them an interesting pathological object, and they call my actuality, so beautifully manifest to me, the hallucination of someone who up to this point in time has been mentally ill (Hua IV/V 295–296/Hua IV 79–80, transl. modified [1915])” [Jardine: 126].
This is a remarkable passage from Husserl, and we are indebted to Jardine’s scholarship for calling it to our attention. The thing that is missing or must be rationally reconstructed in Husserl is the necessity of the givenness of the other; but then, of course, the hermeneutic circle closes and the problem of solipsism is undercut, does not arise, and the character of phenomenology shifts. As is often the case, the really interesting work gets done in a footnote:
“For Husserl, this insight, that a phenomenological treatment of the constitutive relation between subject and world would have to address the (co-)constitutive role played by intersubjectivity, raises issues which cannot be addressed by a single analysis, but which rather demand a rethinking of the entire project of phenomenology” [Jardine: 127 (footnote) (reviewer’s embolding)].
There is nothing wrong with Jardine’s argument, yet, as noted, since this is not a softball review, there is something missing. The distinction “reconstruction” or “rational reconstruction” may usefully be applied to Husserl’s description and/or analysis of empathy. Jardine attempts to cross the abyss by means of interpersonal empathy. To that purpose, Jardine marshals the resources of narrative and of Alex Honneth’s distinction of “elementary recognition.”
To his credit, Jardine holds open the possibility that Husserl’s use of “empathy” does provide the foundation, at the time of Ideas II (1915 – 1917 and intermittently in the 1920s as Stein and Landgrabe try to “fix” the manuscript). Yet Jardine pivots to Alex Honneth’s (1995) key distinction of recognition (“elementary recognition,” to be exact) to provide the missing piece that Husserl struggled to attain. I hasten to add that I think this works well enough, especially within the context of an implied rational reconstruction of empathy within Husserlian/Honnethian dynamics and Husserl’s verstickung in solipsism.
However, this move also shows that Husserl did not quite “get it” as regards empathy being the foundation of interpersonal relations or community. As noted, Husserl is quite explicit in his published remarks that empathy gets “kicked upstairs” and is not a part of the foundation but of the first story above immediate experience, which as those in Europe know well is really the second story in the USA.
As noted, Jardine makes the case for bringing in supplementary secondary, modern thinkers to complement the “work in progress” status of Ideas II as a “messy masterpiece” (Jardine’s description, p. 4). I hasten to add that I do not consider Edith Stein a secondary thinker as her own thinking is primarily and complexly intertwined with that of Husserl. Likewise, Dan Zahavi is an important thinking in Jardine’s subtext and background, whose (Zahavi’s) contributions on empathy and Husserlian intersubjectivity (Husserliana XIV – XV) align with my own (2010) and are not an explicit part of the surface structure of the Jardine’s text.
Relying on the good work that Jardine initiatives, the reconstruction of Husserl’s relationship to empathy can be done in three phases. Husserl first attempts straightaway to connect the subject/self and the other individual person using empathy in Ideas I (1913). This results in the accusation of solipsism. The accusation “has legs,” because arguably Husserl fails to clarify that the other is an essential part of the intentional structure of empathy, even if the noematic object is inadequate or unsatisfied in a given context. Husserl then tries different methods of crossing the “abyss,” including Ideas II and the animate empathic expressions of the lived body. Husserl himself is not happy with the result as it does not quite get to what Jardine properly calls “interpersonal empathy.” At the risk of over-simplification, “interpersonal empathy” what happens we when “get understood” by another person in the context of human emotions and motivations.
The engagement with the critical edition of the second and third volumes of Ideas, provides extensive evidence that for Husserl, the world of experience is dense with empathy. But at the level of Ideas II (and HuaIV/V), there is an ambivalence in Husserl whether he wants to make empathy a part of the superstructure or infrastructure of the shared, common intersubjective world (especially non-animate things in that world). This can be tricky because, as Jardine makes clear, animate empathy is enough to give us intersubjective access to a world of physical objects and things. However, that is still not intersubjectivity in the full sense of relating to other selves who are spontaneous separate centers of conscious emotional and intentional acts.
I have suggested, separately (Agosta 2010, 2014) that Husserl steps back in his published works from embracing the intentional structure of empathy (in all its aspects) as full out foundation of intersubjectivity. However, in the Nachlass, especially Hua XIV and XV, empathy is migrating – evolving – moving – from the periphery to the foundation of intersubjectivity in the full sense of a community of intentional subjects.
Meanwhile, Husserl attempts to constitute intersubjectivity along with empathy (the latter as not foundational) by reduction to a “sphere of ownness” in the Cartesian Meditations (1928/32). The debate continues and Husserl later elaborates the distinction lifeworld (Lebenswelt), arguably under the influence of Heidegger, Scheler, and others, which lifeworld, however, is applied to nature not social human community. Husserl’s Nachlass, especially volumes Hua XIV and Hua XV demonstrate in detail that Husserl was moving in a hermeneutic circle and empathy was evolving from the periphery to the foundation of intersubjectivity (Zahavi 2006; Agosta 2010, 2014).
In lengthy quotations for the Cartesian Meditations and Phenomenological Psychology, Jardine validates that Husserl engages with personal character in the sense of personality. Jardine is on thin ice here, for though Husserl calls out “autobiography” and “biography” – and what are these except “self writing” and “life writing,” yet that is a lot to justify that Husserl goes more than two words in the direction of narrative.
Of course, one can build a case for a rational reconstruction of Husserl’s subtext as a hermeneutic phenomenology of narrative or the other as oneself and vice versa. And it results in the work of – Paul Ricoeur! That Husserl is not Paul Ricoeur – or Levinas or Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty or Sartre or Hannah Arendt, or, for that matter, Donald Davidson – takes nothing away from the innovations contributed by Husserl. It is rather a function of Jardine’s noodling with the interesting connections between all these. Nothing wrong with that as such – yet there is something missing – Husserl!
Therefore, the guidance to the Jardine is to let Husserl be Husserl. The author really seems to be unable to do that. There is nothing wrong with what Jardine is doing – from sentence to sentence, the argument proceeds well enough. But the reader finds himself in a discussion of “narrative” in the same sentence as Husserl and Ideas II. I hasten to add that I appreciate narrative as a research agenda, and have seven courses by Paul Ricoeur on my college and graduate school transcripts. And yet, once again, there is something missing – one can read Husserl against himself and maybe Jardine thinks that is what he is doing – but it is rather like what The Salon said about the paintings of Cezanne – he paints with a pistol – paint is splattered all over the place – the approach is innovative – but we were expecting impressionism and get – Jackson Pollack! We were expecting phenomenology and got – Donald Davidson or P.F. Strawson or Honneth – all penetrating thinkers, everyone, without exception.
In reading Jardine, I imagined that the transition from animate to interpersonal empathy could be facilitated – without leaving the context of Husserl’s thinking – by the many passages in which Husserl describes the subject’s body as being the zero point and the other’s as being another zero point.
Allowing for an intentional act of reversing position with the other, does this not provide an ascent routine to the folk definition of [interpersonal] empathy of “taking a walk in the other’s person’s shoes” [or, what is the same thing, the other person’s zero point]? Unless I have overlooked something, I do not find this argument in Jardine, though it might have been made the basis of a rational reconstruction of interpersonal empathy sui generis in Husserl without appeal to other thinkers. Thus, Jardine describes the “here/there” dynamic in Husserl:
“Accordingly, we can say that for a subject to empathetically grasp another’s living body she must comprehend it as a foreign bodily “here” related to a foreign sphere of sense-things (to which foreign “theres” correspond), where these are recognised as transcending – but also, at least in the case of “normality,” as harmonious with – my own bodily “here” and the sense-things surrounding it [. . . . ] Husserl suggests that, when the materiality of the other’s body ‘over there’ coincides, in its “general type,” with my own lived body ‘here’ in its familiar self-presence, “then it is “seen” as a lived body, and the potential appearances, which I would have if I were transposed to the ‘there,’ are attributed to as currently actual; that is, an ego is acknowledged in empathy (einverstanden wird) as the subject of the living body, along with those appearances and the rest of the things that pertain to the ego, its lived experiences, acts, etc.” That is, alongside the perceptible similarity of my lived body and the other’s [. . . ], this empathetic apprehension of a foreign sphere of sense-things also rests upon a further structural feature of perceived space; namely, that each ‘there’ is necessarily recognised as a possible ‘here,’ a possibility whose actualisation would rest solely upon my freely executing the relevant course of movement’” [Jardine: 131].
Jardine performs engaging inferential and speculative gyrations to save Husserl from so much as a hint of the accusation of inconsistency instead of emphasizing that Husserl’s use and appreciation of empathy develops, evolves, is elaborated. Husserl gets more intellectual distance from and closeness to empathy as he learns of Max Scheler’s work on the forms of sympathy and Heidegger’s work on Mitsein (which, I hasten to add, are in Jardine’s extensive and excellent footnotes and references).
Another approach to crossing the abyss between self and other is a transcendental argument. This goes beyond anything Jardine writes, but if offered in the Husserlian spirit and if it helps to put his project in the broader context, then it warrants consideration.
The argument informally: The distinction between self and other is not a breakdown of empathy; the distinction is the transcendental requirement, the presupposition, for empathy. If I lose the distinction between self and other, then I get emotional contagion, conformity, projection (Lipps), or communications that get lost in translation. Only if the distinction between self and other stand firm, is it possible, invoking aspects of acts of empathic intentionality, to communicate feelings (sensation, emotion) across the boundary between self and other; relate to the other individual as the possibility of reciprocal humanity; take a walk in the other’s shoes with aspects of their personality; and respond empathically to the other with performative linguistic acts of recognition. We do not merely express recognition; we perform it, thereby, instituting mutual dignity.
Husserl’s blind spot in this area and – do I dare say it? – perhaps Jardine’s as well is a function of remaining at the level of a single subject phenomenology, at least until the elaboration of the distinction, life-world (Lebenswelt). Until we explicitly get to the lifeworld, what would a multisubject phenomenology look like? The short answer is Heidegger’s Mitsein, Levinas on the fact and face of The Other, Ricoeur on oneself as other, or Sartre on the gaze of the other bestowing individuality and identity on the one.
Along these lines, Jardine usefully identifies the text where Husserl credits the other with constituting the social self of the self. The other gives me my humanity and without the other’s constitutive activity, one does not get to be a human being. Here Husserl comes closest to acknowledging that the one individual gets her/his humanity from the other individual. This is Jardine directly quoting Husserl:
“I arrive at the construal of myself as a human being (in the sense of mind) by way of a comprehension of others, i.e., insofar as I comprehend them as centres not only for the rest of their surrounding world but also for my lived body, which is for them an object of their surrounding world. It is precisely thereby that I comprehend them as construing me similar to the way I construe them, thus as construing me as social human being, as comprehensive unity of living body and mind. Therein is rooted an identification between the ego that I encounter in direct inspection – as ego which has its lived body over and against it – and the ego of the other’s presentation of me, the ego that the other can understand and posit, at one with my living body as, for the other, present “externally,” in acts which I for my part attribute to the other. The comprehensive presentation others have, or can have, of me is of service to me as regards the construal of myself as social “human being,” hence the construal of myself totally different from the way I apprehend myself in direct inspection. By means of this construal, with its complicated structure, I fit myself into the human family (Menschheitsverband), or, rather, I create the constitutive possibility for the sense of this “family.” I can now say “we,” and then for the first time do I become “I” and the other precisely another” (Hua IV/V 218–219 [1913]; cf. Hua IV 325, 242)” [Jardine: 227].
This is one of the most innovative things Husserl ever wrote – too bad it is such a bad fit with a one-person phenomenology. As Husserl famously puts the point in the Cartesian Meditations, the verifiable accessibility of others, and with this their existential character for me, consists exactly in their original inaccessibility (Hua I: 144) [Jardine: 81]. Two steps forward; one backwards?
However, even within a one-person phenomenology, one can rationally reconstruct an extension of Husserl’s thinking, going beyond Husserl and Jardine here, that dialectically mediates original and nonoriginal experience as allowing a third term – vicarious experience.
Phenomenologically what is missing is the distinction “vicarious feeling” or “vicarious experience.” Max Scheler elaborated such a distinction as Nachfühlen or Nachleben, and Jardine notes Scheler in the footnotes without, however, making the phenomenological connection to an intermediate form of experience between originally owned and nonoriginal. A vicarious experience is my original experience of another person’s original experience. So is it original? My experience is by definition original, but the other’s original experience is nonoriginal to and for me. So, the distinction between original and nonoriginal breaks down and is mediated by vicarious experience, an experience of the other that is mine own without my being the other. Hidden in plain view? (For further details on Scheler see Agosta 2014a.)
Another path to intersubjectivity that Husserl calls out but that both Husserl and Jardine leave undeveloped is that of joint intentionality. Key term: joint intentionality. There is very little new under the sun, but Michael Tomasello (2008) and R. Peter Hobson (2005) have separately and innovatively elaborated this distinction, “joint intentionality.”
Consider an example. The placement of the parenthesis is key: “I see the cathedral.” “You see the cathedral.” “I see you (you see(ing) the cathedral).” Once my intentionality includes yours, we have a non-solipsitic relationship. Solipsism is undercut and cannot become a serious issue. My intentionality in relating to another can be inadequate or unsatisfied, but an inadequate or unsatisfied relatedness to an other is still relatedness.
We can misunderstand one another, which means we can clarify the misunderstanding and reach an understanding. This would give us what Jardine calls interpersonal empathy. Thus, Jardine identifies “joint intentionality” in Husserl (without, however, identifying it as such):
“As Husserl notes, if I am looking at a cathedral and I notice another standing by me, ‘his gaze directed at this cathedral, then I understand this without any further ado. His seeing, which I experience through empathy, is equally an immediate having-over-against: the object is immediately given’ (Hua IV/V 510–511/Hua IV 373, transl. modified [1917]). While we normally only take human others to see a cathedral as a cathedral—in that this sense is one generated and sustained by human experience and social praxis—Husserl’s claim that we would empathetically take the other to immediately see the ‘colossal black thing’ (which is a cathedral for us) surely holds with regard to some non-human animate others too” [Jardine: 140].
Once again, a powerful approach, if not a complete answer, is “hidden in plain view.” In a sense, it is a scandal that we still lack a thorough intentional analysis of empathy. So here it is: The other and the other’s intention are a fundamental part of the structure of empathy. Empathy aims at and includes the other. Without the other, empathy is not empathy. It is emotional contagion or conformity or projection or misunderstanding.
Another consideration. Is the distinction between animate and interpersonal empathy exhaustive? Is “sustained empathy” different than “interpersonal empathy”? This would be analogous to the difference between a snapshot – a single instance – and a video – a series of instances across time (for more on “sustained empathy” see Goldberg, 2015: 89 – 98). Like a video as opposed to a snapshot, sustained empathy opens up possibilities, emergent properties, and a depth of engagement, that is at a qualitatively different level than an isolated encounter. One has to listen to another person and respond to them empathically over a period of time and get to know them in order to appreciate not just that (for example) the person is angry and what triggered the anger, but the motivational, development, historical, emotional, and even the future context in depth. When interpersonal empathy is sustained across time and numerous encounters with the other person, then a network of empathic relatedness, empathic responsiveness, and authentic human relations based in empathy opens up.
Never underestimate Husserl. Never underestimate empathy. Never. Jardine quotes Husserl as describing sustained empathy (the term is not used). It remains unnamed, but, I submit, it is not reducible to animate and/or interpersonal empathy. This begins a new thread and perhaps a new book. It is best to let Husserl have the next to last word [Jardine: 266]:
“ …[W]e can now see why Husserl regards fully understanding another person as an infinite task, and maintains that reaching its ideal form would require me to relive the other’s personal live in extenso, and to comprehend the developmental contours of her personal character by situating them within an infinitely detailed narrative (Hua IV/V 458 [1916/1917]). A deep understanding of another person’s actions, emotions, and beliefs can always be informed by familiarising oneself with their personal character and the history of its coming-to-be, and on the other hand, such an understanding is exactly a way of acquiring and developing such a familiarity (Hua IV/V 579 [1916/17]; see also Hua IV/V 312 (HuaIV 104) [1915]). Consequently, our ability to envisage and understand the motivational context of another’s actions is best seen as embedded within ongoing personal relationships, in which our acquaintance with the other person’s character has gradually developed through repeated empathetic contact, as well as through communicative engagement and, more generally, through participating with the other in a common human world.”
Having urged “let Husserl be Husserl,” I have a final thought about what is missing from the entire discussion of empathy in Husserl, Jardine, and the philosophical handbooks of empathy, and this is so even if one includes “sustained empathy” as having been implicitly engaged (even though I would maintain that is not the case). When a person receives empathy, when a person “gets a good listening,” when a person is responded to empathically, when a person experiences authentic relatedness to another – regardless of the form – then the person often experiences an opening in what is possible in the person’s life, choice, and situation. The person is empowered by the empathy to inquire into what is available and accessible for him- or herself that goes beyond mere psychology into a fundamental inquiry that transforms possibilities of knowing and acting. Something in the person’s way of being and relating changes, shifts, transforms. The person shifts out of stuckness and into action that makes a profound and positive difference. How does that come about? Now that is something worthy of further inquiry.
References
Review: Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person: Husserlian Investigations of Social Experience and the Self by James Jardine. Chaum, Switzerland: Springer Nature. ISSN 0079-1350 ISSN 2215-0331 (electronic). ISBN 978-3-030-84462-2 ISBN 978-3-030-84463-9 (eBook). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84463-9
Zahavi, D. (2005). Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press.
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Arnold Goldberg. (2015). The Brain, the Mind and the Self. New York: 2015.
V. Gallese, 2006, “Mirror Neurons and Intentional Attunement,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
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(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Lou Agosta, Ph.D., Listening With Empathy 