Abstract
The aim of this paper is to mount a philosophical challenge to the currently highly visible research and discourse on empathy. The notion of empathetic perspective-shifting—a conceptually demanding, high-level construal of empathy in humans that arguably captures the core meaning of the term—is criticized from the standpoint of a philosophy of normatively accountable agency. Empathy in this demanding sense fails to achieve a true understanding of the other and instead risks to impose the empathizer’s self-constitutive agency upon the person empathized with. Attempts to ‘simulate’ human agency, or attempts to emulate its cognitive or emotional basis, will likely distort their target phenomena in profound ways. Thus, agency turns out to be empathy’s blind spot. Elements of an alternative understanding of interpersonal relatedness are also discussed, focusing on aspects of ‘interaction theory’. These might do some of the work that high-level constructs of empathy had been supposed to do without running into similar conceptual difficulties.
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Notes
I should briefly mention in what way Hume’s view on “sympathy” differed from that of Smith. Chiefly, it can be said that whereas Smith pointed towards a more demanding mediation by the faculty of imagination, Hume rather foregrounded automatic processes such as the unreflective mirroring of another person’s emotions (cf. Coplan and Goldie 2011, p. x–xii).
This is how Coplan justifies the additional condition of a clear self-other-differentiation: “Without clear self-other differentiation, we are almost certain to fail in our attempts to empathize. We either lose our sense of self and become enmeshed [with the other’s experience] or, more often, we let our imaginative process become contaminated by our self-perspective and thus end up engaged in a simulation that fails to replicate the experience of the other. Self-other differentiation allows for the optimal level of distance (…). We are neither fused nor detached.” (Coplan 2011, 17).
The central idea behind Ratcliffe’s (2008) proposal is that of a fundamental felt relatedness of self and world. As “ways of finding oneself in the world”, felt existential orientations establish the most basic self/world mutuality in experience—long before conscious reflection sets in and even at a point “before” it makes sense to separate at all a subject of experience from the world it confronts. Examples for existential feelings are feelings of connectedness to the world, feelings of familiarity and security, feelings of belonging to a group or to other people in general, feelings of being in control and feeling capable of this or that action, but also a quite general sense of the “being” of worldly entities, of oneself, and of others as fellow persons. The key for present purposes is that existential feelings are usually so deeply engrained in a person’s overall perspective on the world that one is at a loss as regards their simulation or deliberate “deployment” (see Slaby and Stephan 2008 for a more detailed discussion of Ratcliffe’s proposal).
Note that this does not entail that belief is active in the sense of voluntarism. I cannot believe ‘whatever I want to believe’ exactly because I am actively committed, qua my capacity to belief, to only believe what I deem true. One might say that as a believer, I am actively bound by truth. The activity in question concerns the capacities to adjust my attitudes in accordance with what I discover to be the case (see also Moran 2001, 51–55).
One reviewer asked who the “you” is that is called upon to determine what it is that is felt in a given moment. Given the fundamental role of agency for human mentality, one might be tempted to assume, in a Kantian spirit, that this cannot be the fully constituted empirical subject and instead has to be some kind of transcendental ego that is there at the very beginning, an instance without qualities except the bare capacity to act, and then self-constitute successively in a series of empirical acts. In line with Heidegger and Sartre, I think this would be a grave mistake: There is only one agentive instance, and this is the empirical person with all her contingent characteristics already in place. What often happens, however, is that we do not stand up to the challenge of acting (deciding, resolving conflicts) in a given situation, let alone in a situation of emotional turmoil, but instead let things just run their course. This inauthentic, routine everyday mode of mauvaise foi can thus mask the fact that our agency is constantly “there” as long as we are conscious, making us constantly able to take charge and intervene in a current situation, including so as to resolve upon an emotional response adequate to it. Thus, obviously, and as will become clearer below, the account of agency given here is very much in the tradition of existential phenomenology. On the specific case of “activity” in regard to feeling and emotion, see Sartre (1994 [1939]).
I will not here discuss Zahavi’s interesting and original phenomenological critique of empathy-as-simulation approaches. To Zahavi, the cognitively demanding form of empathy discussed here rests on a primordial form of intersubjectivity which is regularly missed by authors in the simulation tradition, so that they mistakenly think that our access to another person’s mentality can only be established through such high-level simulative activities; see, e.g., Zahavi (2001).
What must be added to the interactionist perspective is an background understanding of social situations and interaction contexts in terms of narrative, and accordingly a narrative competency, i.e. the ability to relate events and happenings within meaningful common contexts. For more on narrative as an element of interaction theory, see Gallagher (2012) and Gallagher and Hutto (2008).
In elaborating this further one would have to include lower-level mechanisms of attunement and resonance into the theory, so as to find room for a pre-cognitive relationality—probably established and sustained on the level of affect and affect attunement (see Stern 1985)—that sets the stage for more sophisticated forms of interactive engagement. Proponents of interaction theory attempt to supply such a foundation (Froese and Fuchs 2012; Krueger 2009).
I keep the discussion of interaction theory deliberately brief as it is not in the center of the present account. Obviously, much more complexity has to be added to these outlines in order to arrive at a viable theoretical account. See Ratcliffe (forthcoming) for a discussion of some aspects of interaction theory from a perspective similar to the one adopted here.
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Slaby, J. Empathy’s blind spot. Med Health Care and Philos 17, 249–258 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-014-9543-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-014-9543-3