Lou Agosta

The distinction between “empathy” and “sympathy” in the context of ethics is a dynamic and challenging one. The eighteenth century texts of David Hume and Adam Smith used the word "sympathy," but not "empathy," although the conceptual distinction marked by empathy was doing essential work in their writings. After discussing the early uses of these terms, this article is organized historically. Two traditions are distinguished. The first is the Anglo-American tradition, and it extends from Hume and Smith to the twenty-first century work of Michael Slote. Stephen Darwall’s contribution is applied in engaging Hume and Smith. Finally, the interrelation of empathy, sympathy and altruism is explored in the work of John Rawls and Thomas Nagel. The second tradition is the Continental one. It extends from the spirituality of Johann Herder to the phenomenological movement of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, and Edith Stein. The intentional analysis of empathy is directly relevant to the constitution of the social community in a broad, normative relationship with the "Other." Available without fee at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP)

Heidegger’s 1927 call to provide “a special hermeneutic of empathy” is linked with his later commitment at the Zollikon Seminars to engage explicitly with issues in psychodynamic therapy with psychiatrists. The task of providing a special hermeneutic of empathy is one that Heidegger assigns in Being and Time, but on which he does not deliver. Inspired by the assignment, this article applies the distinctions of Heidegger’s Daseinanalysis to human interrelations. This article generates a Heideggerian account of empathy as a multi-dimensional process that delimits and illuminates the field of possibilities of authentic human relationships. The multiple dimensions of empathy include affectedness (Befindlichkeit), understanding of possibility, interpretation, and speech, the latter including listening. The result is a reconstruction of a Heideggerian account of empathic human relations in the sense that it goes beyond what Heidegger explicitly says to what the Heideggerian method of inquiry can contribute to understanding and implementing the process of empathy. In particular, a two-by-two matrix is built and engaged in detail, cross referencing the four possibilities of authentic and inauthentic relationships with the individual and the other. A specifically Heideggerian analysis of the multi-dimensional process of empathy is the result. The clinical relevance of Heidegger’s work is made explicit as empathy is positioned as the foundation of clinical practice as exemplified in psychodynamic psychotherapy

We defend in this essay Paul Ricœur’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 Ricœur, 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 Ricœur-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 Ricœurian perspective.

Empathy remains poorly understood, under-theorized, and subject to conflicting and opportunistic uses. Its systematic role in human experience has not been analyzed and interpreted from top to bottom. In this book, the author attempts to provide such an analysis in the philosophical traditions of hermeneutics, phenomenology, analytic philosophy of language, and psychoanalysis. applying his interpretation of empathy to the philosophical issues of intentionality, the emotions, and the checkered transformations of empathy itself. In doing so the author aims to rescue empathy from the margins of intelligibility and reveal its central role in our understanding of the emotions, the integrity of our relations with others, and human community (“intersubjectivity”). The work draws on both the Anglo-American (“analytic”) tradition of ordinary language philosophy and the continental ones of phenomenology and hermeneutics. This work follows the movement of empathy from the periphery of ethics, aesthetics, and theory of mind to a key place in establishing and maintaining the integrity and emotional equilibrium of dynamic interrelations with other individuals. Beginning with the philosophical infrastructure of the hermeneutics of empathy, this work thoroughly explains the complex architecture of empathy, tracing it downward through the levels of authentic human interrelations, empathy with unexpressed emotions, the empathic penetrability of cognitively impenetrable affect, the first-ever intentional analysis of both the empathizer and the “empathasand” in interrelation, and the hermeneutic infrastructure. The consequences of empathy are exposed in the context of the emotions, cognitive impenetrability, empathy and altruism, and the intentionality of empathy as accessed through language and story telling. Drawing on the multi-method approach of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and story telling, this work demonstrates that empathy forms the foundation for community in ways not clearly appreciated in the on-going debate. In a bootstrap operation that is guided by Heidegger’s call for a “special hermeneutic of empathy,” this work achieves a delicate balancing act of unpacking the rich intellectual traditions from which empathy - the phenomenon itself, not the concept - emerged historically. The result is an exposure of the deep structure of empathy as a fundamentally human capability for creating possibilities of community and human relations.

The argument of the previous chapter is continued and elaborated. With the prohibition of the author’s intention as the canonical standard of interpretation, Roland Barthes’ death of the author is at hand. When writing becomes impersonal—Barthes’ “writing degree zero”—the author is eclipsed and “dies”; as soon as the author dies, the author’s intention becomes one more opinion; as soon as the author’s intention is one more opinion, asserting that opinion as canonical becomes the intentional fallacy; and as soon as the intentional fallacy is endorsed, empathizing with the author’s intention becomes irrelevant; as soon as empathizing with the author becomes irrelevant, empathizing with the text itself moves to the foreground. With the death of the author, “writing degree zero” is born. Camus is considered as the paradigm for writing degree zero. “Writing degree zero” leads to “empathy degree zero.” “Empathy degree zero” points to an empathy “boot camp,” a stress test for empathy. Empathy degree zero is the challenge of the accessibility of the Other. This is exemplified in detail in Woolf’s The Waves. One gets to radical empathy “the hard way” through radical translation to and from the Other, which is foreshadowed in this chapter prior to detailed engagement in the next.

Radical translation consists in finding words for encounters with speakers who talk a different language for which no dictionary or grammar is yet available or, more exactly, a dictionary that is still in the process of being constructed. The example of Eudora Welty’s narrative transfigures the trauma of a cold-blooded assassination into a literary artwork; the reader takes a detour through the radical translation of fiction to attain radical empathy. Radical empathy challenges standard empathy to take empathizing to the next level in confronting experiences that cause empathic distress. Radical translation leads the way to radical empathy in extreme situations. A short “Ted Talk” is provided on trauma and radical empathy. The myth of Perseus-and-the-Medusa and the mirroring intervention of the work of art are witnesses to the empathic transfiguring of trauma. Empathy degree zero (previously introduced) takes on new meaning, and Mann’s Dr Faustus is engaged in this light: The road to hell is paved with radical empathy. Radical translation structures radical empathy: Camus’ The Plague (1947) exemplifies behavior in extreme situation, requiring radical translation of experience through radical empathy. To empathize against empathy until empathy creates out of its own wreck that which it contemplates.

Radical empathy in extreme situations—double-binds, moral trauma, and soul murder—looks at how storytelling is needed to complete impossible predicaments confronting the human condition. Not solve them, but complete them, providing literary closure, leaving the reader whole and complete. The agent is put in a double-bind, caught between a rock and a hard place, risking perpetuating and undergoing moral trauma. In ethics this is called “the Trolley Car Dilemma” (which is defined). In literature this is called “tragedy.” Philoctetes, Antigone, Oedipus, Orestes, Phaedra, and virtually the entire House of Atreus, are actors confronting agency compromised by contingency. Contingency giveth and contingency taketh away. The empathic distress of the tragic dilemma requires standard empathy to become radical. Paul Tremblay’s novel The Cabin at the End of the World presents a narrative that, in its form, is similar to the overall structure of the Dilemma of the Trolley Car problem. With a story one gets inside the experience in a way that matters and which no logical puzzle can provide.

This chapter takes the reader through empathy’s receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness, in examples corresponding to each. Empathy and radical empathy are exemplified in detailed vignettes from Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Mann, and Bulgakov. With two words “Blue Roses,” Tennessee Williams’ Glass Menagerie captures empathic responsiveness. Misfirings and failures of empathy are exemplified in emotional contagion, conformity, projection, and getting lost in translation in the literary examples. Empathy is distinguished from intuition in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Master Flea, which provides an example of an empathy-like technology that shows the limitations of empathy. From the perspective of the omniscient narrator, the realist novel is a “miracle of empathy.” Precisely because minds are not transparent, empathic translation, understood as perspective taking, is required. Boris Uspensky developed an entire poetics based on the dynamics of perspective taking in literature, and it is on the work of Uspensky that we shall rely here. This dynamic perspective shifting would not make sense in literature without the empathic ability to take a walk in the Other’s shoes (the folk definition of empathy).

Anyone who wishes to bring empathy to literature (and vice versa) must engage with Suzanne Keen’s penetrating and incisive study in Empathy and the Novel, defining literary empathy studies. Though Keen is inclined to favor the hypothesis, reading novels is humanizing, expanding empathy, Keen is an empiricist and marshals significant evidence on both sides of the debate, concluding that the jury is still out. On background, Lord Kames famously compared the absorption of the reader in the novel to a waking dream. Old empathy in the New Novel (Nouveau Roman) takes a critical look at “empathic unsettlement,” and, especially, Nathalie Sarraute and her method of narrated monologue. Sarraute’s writing gives to the reader “analogous sensations” as a “projective” translation, which is related to empathy in an outbound direction, proceeding from the character to the reader. The character puts her sensations into the reader, “discovering, lens in hand, the micro-structure of life” (Sarraute). Radical empathy engages the empathic distresses of mimesis under stress, literary shock therapy, and a brain in vat. Mimesis (of all kinds) is under stress in Beckett. In Beckett’s The Unnameable, one particularly powerful misfiring of empathy gives us—a brain in a vat—delivering the experience of solipsism. The consequences of literary shock therapy for empathy are considered.

Exemplifying standard trauma and complex trauma, Toni Morrison’s Beloved also points to a special kind of trauma, namely, moral trauma—moral injury—as the key event. Moral trauma, compromised agency, and double-binds are exemplified and artistically transfigured. The traumatic events are transfigured in literary art. The narratives act as an inquiry into the themes of trauma, survival, transformation, and liberation. Morrison is one of the masters 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. Morrison’s work is brought into connection with the action of the Jewish Zealots at Masada. Radical empathy is required to engage the traumatic vision of the mythical snake-haired Gorgon (Medusa) that turns to stone the people who encounter it. Radical empathy looks like the scar in the shape of a tree whipped with rawhide onto the back of Morrison’s protagonist (Sethe-Margaret). Sethe is confronted with a choice no one should have to make, but which choice cannot not be made, and that she nevertheless makes as she stares into what must have been for her an image of the Medusa, who shows up as The Four Horsemen. The reader will not get across the abyss of moral trauma without the artistic choke tree inscribed into Sethe’s back—will not get across without radical empathy. The method employed throughout this work is applied to Beloved—empathic receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness are applied to Beloved to bring forth radical empathy.

Authors who have focused on the limitations and biases of empathy are reviewed. A critique of the critique of empathy as limited and biased is provided from the perspective of a rigorous and critical empathy. Thinkers engaged include Bloom, Breithaupt, Gaines, Graham, Carpio, Serpall, and Zunshine. The classical philosophical problem of other minds has been replaced with the cognitive task of mindreading—simulating other minds or inventing an account of theory of mind (ToM). ToM is basic to cognitive literary criticism. The relation between cognitive literary criticism and empathy is debated. Cognitive (science) literary criticism is derivative on the folk definition of empathy, taking a walk in the Other’s shoes. Empathy intersects with mimesis, and by engaging mimesis in relation to other minds, a fourth aspect of Ricœur’s threefold mimesis emerges, call it “mimesis4.” “Mimesis of other minds” means “simulating other minds.” In the process, the empathic response to the literary text is completed. In every case, the answer of a rigorous and critical empathy to its critics is to refuse the choice between empathy and compassion, empathy and defeating empire, empathy and enlarged thinking from the perspective of the Other. The world needs expanded empathy as well as more compassion, enlarged thinking, and less empire.

Translation, especially translating between oneself and another, is an undeveloped paradigm for empathy. The innovations of Herder on translation are acknowledged. The poet and innovative thinker, the translator and empathizer, are each in their own respective ways undertaking “a raid on the inarticulate”—invoking T. S. Eliot’s incisive phrase. Examples are cited from Edgar Allen Poe and Goethe, finessing the myth of the given, not refuting it, witnessing the challenge of finding just the right word or sign for a given experience. The argument is engaged that empathy is something one cannot do alone. Objections are considered. Empathy is exemplified in detail Thomas Mann and in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which has a significant fictional component in the very idea of relating to, being present with, having a vicarious experience of, another human being from whom one is biologically and socially completely distinct. This is the fictional empathic moment—the Other as oneself, oneself as the Other. When one’s affective, bottom-up, emotional empathy gets blocked, then one translates oneself, one launches oneself imaginatively into empathic interpretation.

An introduction is distinguished from a beginning. The intersection of empathy and literature in this work takes its commitment from empathy, not from hermeneutics; from empathy, not from cognitive science (or cognitive literary criticism); from empathy, not from deconstruction; and so on. Empathy is always empathy and radical empathy applies the same four aspects of relatedness—receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness. Without bringing the capacity for empathic receptivity to the text, neither the experiences available in the narrative nor the affective dynamics of the lyric would make sense to the reader. The point is a conceptual, not an empirical one (and elaborated in detail in Chap. 2). Radical empathy emerges from standard empathy, when standard empathy fails in the face of empathic distress of the kind called forth by moral trauma, double-binds, soul murder, and tragic circumstances. “Connecting the dots” between tragedy and empathy, a double-bind is a source of tragedy, but is not alone sufficient to generate tragedy. For if one remains with the double-bind, one gets “ruin and wreck,” not tragedy. Moral trauma is the “more” required to turn “wreck and ruin” into tragedy. “Moral trauma” is defined preliminarily. Nietzsche is called as a witness against Plato in defense of tragedy, and the thought experiment of the Trolley Car Dilemma is introduced as an intuition pump (Dennett) to generate intuitions about empathy and tragic literature. Standard empathy is challenged to become radical empathy in encountering empathic distress, trauma, and tragedy.

A thought experiment occurs designed to open a gap between intentionality and literary meaning. The intentional fallacy (Wimsatt and Beardsley) imposes asceticism on empathy. The empathic fallacy is defined as endorsing (fallaciously) the possibility of the reader reaching through the text to reproduce the experiences of the author (including intentions) in producing the work. Such a “reaching through” would require “a miracle of empathy,” that one really has a transparent access to the consciousness of the author as described by Dorrit Cohn. The author has such access by definition (unless the author pretends not to have it as with an unreliable narrator), but the reader does not and must work at understanding the Other the hard way. What is needed is a Turing test for textual empathy. One exists—and in a fictional universe: Philip K. Dick’s masterpiece and fantasy of the future Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep describes the Voight-Kampff Empathy Test (a fiction within a fiction). Science imitates art. The real-world individual, Helen Riess, MD, and her neuroscience colleagues at Empathetics, Inc., a real-world corporation, have really developed a bio-feedback-like set of protocols to train medical doctors in empathy. Meanwhile, no necessary connection, logical or otherwise, exists between what an author experiences in producing a piece of writing and what the reader gets from it. The intentional fallacy and the related empathic fallacy lead like a slippery slope in the direction of the unavailability (“death”) of the author. Empathy in the touch of a hand is exemplified in Thomas Mann and Edith Stein.

Empathy is defined in terms of empathic receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness. Each has characteristic breakdowns, exemplified by emotional contagion, conformity, projection, and communications lost in translation, which, when overcome, promote progress toward a rigorous and critical empathy. In this argument, a rigorous and critical empathy navigates a path between two absurdities—solipsism and merger with the Other, deploying a paradigm of empathy as translation between self and Other, including the puzzling case of self/Other reversal in the folktale of the prince and the pauper. The distinction “philosophical overlay” (Boylan) is defined and elaborated. The intersection of empathy and mimesis is engaged using Paul Ricœur’s reading of mimesis. The model of empathy as translation of experience between oneself and the Other is elaborated. The speech act of storytelling is the performance corresponding to empathic responsiveness, which does not merely pretend to create a community, it actually does so. Empathic responsiveness opens up into (and can be redescribed as) “rhetorical empathy.” Rhetorical empathy clarified. In empathizing the Other is engaged in-person and in-fiction. The intersection of empathy and mimesis is shown. The dynamic of inner imitation (Lipps) is narratively exemplified.

What then are the guidelines in the aspirational project of promoting empathic humanism? These guidelines map to the distinctions of empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, empathic interpretation, and empathic responsiveness, with the qualification that humans are capable of radical evil. Radical evil is that in the face of which standard empathy is challenged to become radical empathy, that is, the challenge to sustain the commitment to empathy in the face of empathy’s breakdown into empathic distress. This dilemma of the human striving to expand the individual’s humanity is documented in fear and trembling by the classic folktale, in which empathy is radicalized in the story by its absence. To be precise, it is not so much that the human being paradoxically becomes inhuman or nonhuman (these are distinct), but that the individual’s humanity is incomplete—something essential is missing—empathy. Yet the dehumanization that occurs in the radical reduction or elimination of empathy on the part of a given person, rare though such an individual may be, increases the risk of anti-social or even monstrous behavior being perpetrated by that person. Meanwhile, not fear and trembling, but empathy and trembling, is engaged by the folk story containing a thought experiment about a simpleton—a wise fool (sophomore)—who lacks the capacity for empathy and how he recovers it. C. Daniel Batson’s “empathy altruism hypothesis” provides evidence-based social psychology as to the ethical relevance of empathic concern. The work of Heinz Kohut (and others) is cited on “fiendish” empathy. The natural empath, an emerging empathic humanist, encounters the Good Samaritan. The position of this work, aspiring to an empathic humanism, is elaborated in that empathy discloses what the Other experiences and ethics, what to do about it.

Propositional logic is impeccable, but it does not address why the proposition matters. The story delivers the impact experientially—and empathically—rather than expressing it argumentatively. The distinction “philosophical overlay” (Boylan) is further elaborated in terms of alethic truth. How this relates to the use of literary fiction to show what matters—and what is elaborated as “the matter of mattering”—is engaged. An example of a narrative reduction to absurdity of the empathic fallacy found and elaborated in Jorge Luis Borges story, “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote.” Borges’ story exemplifies radical translation. The roots of radical empathy lie in radical translation. In modeling empathizing as translating one gets to “radical empathy” by leveraging the deep work of Davidson and Wittgenstein on radical translation. Wittgenstein’s private language argument (PLA) exemplifies translating between words (signs) and nonlinguistic phenomena such as experiences of personal sensations (what Roman Jakobson would call “intersemiotic translation”). Radical translation is a bridge between self and Other and becomes a model for progressing from standard empathy to radical empathy. While many of the examples of radical empathy engage with dramatic events that are readily describable as traumatically confronting, Henry James gives the reader examples of slow trauma in What Maisy Knew.

The purpose of this chapter is to bring the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy to the hermeneutics of suspicion. Toril Moi’s account of the hermeneutics of suspicion applies to a clumsy, stereotyped version of the hermeneutics of suspicion, not to Ricœur’s approach. Moi’s version is not suspicion; it is dogmatism. What is “hidden in plain view” is exemplified in Wittgenstein (“surface grammar” from “depth grammar” distinguished) and Tolstoy. Moi quotes Simone de Beauvoir, attributing to reading literature the possibility of giving one a “taste of another life.” This is the empathic moment. Ricœur is not regarded as a philosopher of empathy such as Max Scheler or Edith Stein (though Ricœur’s practice of it as a teacher was at a high empathic level), and the title of this chapter is intended as a provocation to “consider the possibility.” For Ricœur, empathy would not be a mere psychological mechanism. Empathy would be 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 in which “hermeneutics can stand on the authority of the resources of past ontologies.” In a rational reconstruction of what a Ricœurian approach to empathy would entail, a logical space is made for empathy to avoid the epistemological paradoxes of Husserl and the ethical enthusiasms of Lévinas. How this reconstruction of empathy would apply to empathic understanding, empathic responsiveness, empathic interpretation, and empathic receptivity is elaborated from a Ricœurian perspective.