Forum / Against Empathy
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strannikovMay 18, 03:38pmSince my task here is disowning the concept altogether, I need waste no time belaboring the history of the idea of “empathy”.
My objection to the concept of empathy, my disdain for it, stems from the dubious idea’s idealist lineage generally and from the specific conceit that any one of us can in truth and in fact “inhabit” the experience or the perspective of another person or object, the acknowledged powers of poetic imagination notwithstanding.
Inhabiting the experience or perspective of another, through the history of the term’s adoption and its employment in both literary practice and in literary criticism, has gone from formal acknowledgement as “a feat of imagination” to the much more dubious notion that empathy can contribute substantively to “a form of cognition”. Although I cannot assess any other subject’s appropriation of empathy directly, “empathy” seems capable only of performing subjective feats of projection and of demonstrating a subject’s incapacity for simultaneous inhabitation of subjective experience. The history of “empathy” suggests that its uncritical employment has turned out to commit violence to the faculties of both imagination and cognition.
To begin to address the violence that has been inflicted by the notion upon cognition itself: “inhabiting the experience or perspective of another” would be a fine thing, no doubt, were it possible to live through another subject’s experience and personal formation long enough and deeply enough to “live within it”. The notion that any subject can construct the architecture of another subject’s cognition, though, seems to be a fancy embraced most often by people exhibiting a native human incapacity for “fully inhabiting one’s own experience or perspective”: writers eager to think that they can attain imaginatively to the full experience and perspective of another human being seem most often to vastly underestimate the full constitution of human experience and perspective, their own and anyone else’s. “Empathy” is dubious because of its ready resort to a facile notion of psychic and somatic habitation.
Equally, empathy injures the faculty of imagination by imputing powers of cognition to an admitted application of imagination. All that can be conjured by “empathy” is “imaginative thought” at best and “imaginary thought” at worst, owing to the facile and idealist character of the conceit and the actual limitations imposed upon us all as human subjects: empathy imputes a mere transposition of thought, its projection from subject to subject, without ever attaining or exhibiting the ability to embody it. Empathy amounts to an escape from or an evasion of the unacknowledged limitations of self while pretending to inhabit the enormity of an alternate self.
“Empathy” has gained enough popularity across the past century or two in enough academic circles to enjoy deployment into public discourse, where the term has come to be accepted without any skeptical or critical consideration whatsoever. This suggests prior commitments to the cultural force of dramatization and “suspension of disbelief”—volitional concessions to the imaginative powers of dramatic arts but lacking any substantive embrace of actual cognition, lacking thereby an understanding of both the cultural trope and of its facile academic appropriation.
Any defender of empathy willing to define “empathy” modestly as “affective approximation, imaginative perspective-taking, emotional attunement, or moral consideration” no longer subscribes to “empathy” but is implicitly and tacitly invoking “sympathy”—but without observing the nuance that Thomas De Quincey cited in the footnote to his celebrated 1823 essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”: “It seems almost ludicrous to guard and explain my use of a word in a situation where it should naturally explain itself. But it has become necessary to do so, in consequence of the unscholarlike use of the word sympathy, at present so general, by which, instead of taking it in its proper sense, as the act of reproducing in our minds the feelings of another, whether for hatred, indignation, love, pity, or approbation, it is made a mere synonyme of the word pity; and hence, instead of saying ‘sympathy with another,’ many writers adopt the monstrous barbarism of ‘sympathy for another.’” De Quincey seems to have been observing the nineteenth-century slide into “empathy” in real time.
Either empathy claims genuine access to another consciousness and fails philosophically, or it retreats into capacities already adequately described by sympathy.
Being a human being is hard enough as it is. Being oneself without the pretense of imagining that one can adopt fully or adequately the psychic perspective or somatic experience of another today entails an overreach for any who have accepted “empathy” uncritically. After the modern career of “empathy”, our task going forward consists of restoring legitimacy and adequacy to “sympathy”, which affirms the relative stability of psychic, intellectual, and imaginative integrity across a lifetime of continuous change and the native ability (however constrained) to sympathize with and appreciate the respective plights of others.
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strannikovMay 19, 01:56pm
Mea culpa: poor proofreading and editing on my part.
Second sentence in final paragraph amended: 'Being oneself while entertaining the pretense of imagining that one can adopt fully the cognitive breadth or portray adequately the emotional depth, the psychic perspective or somatic experience of another, entails an overreach for any who have accepted “empathy” uncritically.'
That's closer, at least.
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User DeletedMay 19, 06:07pmYou're disgusting. Against empathy. Go fuck yourself you Elon Musk / Peter Thiel wannabe.
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strannikovMay 19, 08:07pm
Tsk and tut, UD: I was prepared to expect that next to no one would empathize with the views I expressed in the essay nor even to sympathize with yours truly.
You seem to have scored high on both counts. -
David AckleyMay 19, 11:30pmIntemperate views have plagued The Forum in the past and I understand the rationale for keeping personal stuff out of discussions, but it begins to seem over the top to delete the person rather than the statements. Over the long haul, Fictionaut has lost a lot of very good writers, in part at least due to fights on the forum. I also think it's a bit smarmy to gloat over the loss of someone who was a very valuable presence in most respects, and certainly one of the best writers remaining on the site. That would be Chris Okum.
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David AckleyMay 19, 11:37pm
By the way, Edward, intellectual quibbling over definitions of concepts like empathy, misses entirely the point of inventing new terms as new expanded understandings of human capacities emerge in language. Reverting back to some archaic term that arose and was used in entirely different historical contexts is wasted effort. As they say, much as you'd apparently like to, you can't turn back the clock.
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strannikovMay 20, 12:39am
David: By the time I saw the "User Deleted" post and then posted my subsequent response, whoever initiated the user deletion had already done so without my knowledge. For all I knew and know, Chris "self-deleted": if instead Chris's intemperate language is what earned him his deletion, his agency in expressing his views would seem to merit due recognition.
Your attribution to me of "gloating" and "smarminess" as a consequence I therefore deem inappropriate to the circumstances.
If I may add, David: you yourself miss a much larger point. You assert with the appearance of dogmatic conjecture that "empathy" in truth and in fact designates "a human capacity": I see no need to apologize for thinking instead that "empathy" designates no human ability or capacity at all, insofar as the term is a modern concept derived directly from German idealism (perhaps one of the more untethered varieties).
The notion seems to have appeared in the late 18th century courtesy of Herder, and it was picked up subsequently by Goethe and Lotze (who seems to have coined "Einfuhlung" [with an umlaut over the first "u"], "feeling into") before the German term entered English language usage only c. 1904.
Nevertheless, while you express an explicit distaste for "archaic terms", you might instead appreciate that empathy seems to exhibit a close structural affinity with a term of quite ancient lineage, namely, "metempsychosis" (or: transmigration of souls).
In the hour before I got here to reply to you, I had posed the following query to ChatGPT and received the answer that follows (here edited for length):
strannikov: The mythopoetic/religious/philosophical concept of "metempsychosis" (transmigration of the soul) seems to share a structural affinity with the modern notion of "empathy", with the added idealist refinement that one can initiate or participate in "empathic metempsychosis" on this side of the grave.
CGPT: Yes — there is a deep structural affinity there, even if the two concepts arise from very different historical and metaphysical horizons.
The connection becomes clearer if we think less about the doctrinal content of metempsychosis and more about the form of subjectivity it presupposes.
Metempsychosis — whether in Platonism, Pythagoreanism, certain strands of Hindu philosophy, or Buddhist philosophy — destabilizes the ordinary assumption that the self is strictly identical with a single embodied perspective. The soul is imagined as capable of passage across forms, lives, conditions, even species. Consciousness is not absolutely bounded by the present ego.
Empathy, in its strongest sense, performs a similar operation phenomenologically rather than cosmologically. It asks the subject to undergo a partial displacement of selfhood:
to inhabit another center of experience without ceasing to be oneself.
So one could say:
metempsychosis = literal or metaphysical transmigration of the soul;
empathy = imaginative or affective transmigration of perspective.Your phrase “empathic metempsychosis” is compelling because it names the possibility that this migration can occur within life, through acts of consciousness rather than death and rebirth.
= = =
CGPT did not report, but I found elsewhere earlier today, the suggestion that the most ancient antecedent of metempsychosis in Greece was to be found in the Orphic cults. If any professional historian of ideas is in a position to confirm my suspicions and CGPT's response, then modern notions of "empathy" could be thought descended from "some archaic term" a bit more ancient (or no less ancient) than De Quincey's resort to "sympathy" in 1823. (Somewhat oddly, "sympathy" is derived from the Greek "pathos" and is attested in English usage dated 1579, whereas "pathos" itself did not enter English usage until 1591.)
Empathy strikes me exactly as an invocation of "transmigration of souls", with the novel modern and idealist twist that humans can wield this "capacity or capability" on this side of the grave. (I suspect that this conjectured ability qualifies as "non-falsifiable", though of course I am no philosopher.)
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David AckleyMay 20, 01:35pm
Defenders of classical grammar long ago lost the battle against usage as the standard . Now you're proposing to elevate derivation as the governor of what terms we apply in our attempts to communicate, another losing battle. Sympathy which you acknowledge was simply a homologue for pity, clearly comes from an aristocratic period and underlines a position of presumptive superiority, where pity/sympathy is awarded by the superior being to the lesser. Empathy is the preferred term now, I think, because it at least tries to express something of equality of the human condition, regardless of social standing, and yours, of the self-elected intellectual elite.
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strannikovMay 20, 03:18pm
David: You actually seem to believe what you're saying here. I would be willing to impute frivolity to your expression if I'd ever detected your ready recourse to irony, but I've never noticed your ready recourse to it in your writing.
I have a record of satiric and ironic practice as demonstrated in my backlist here at Fictionaut, and while I'm capable of writing humorous pieces, I am capable also of pivoting to relative seriousness when I see a reason to do so--thus, my forays into Forum essays.
Seriously: I would never abandon etymology and historical linguistics for the valid approaches to contemporary usage that they offer, for poetry most especially and not much less for prose.
I deny your assertion that I am "proposing to elevate derivation as the governor of what terms we apply in our attempts to communicate", no matter how much I may be tilting at other contemporary windmills. What I did in my previous response to your earlier response(s) was to invoke "the history of ideas" in order to link the modern conceit of "empathy" with what does look (to my eyes) to be the structurally similar ancient conception of "metempsychosis". You chose not to address my argument up front, which is a fine rhetorical dodge on your part, but I'd rather not let you obscure that part of my argument, since it was the most prominent part of my earlier response. (In other words, David: you seem to have failed to engage.)
Nor did I acknowledge that "sympathy was simply a homologue for pity". Not only did you conflate my prose with that of De Quincey (thanks for the offer), you generously misread De Quincey himself, so try again--his prose may well be more clear than mine. De Quincey was decrying usages contemporary to his day that were already reducing "sympathy" to "pity", and he made his distinction by pointing out to his readers the use of the preposition "for" as "a monstrous barbarism". "Sympathy", by De Quincey's reckoning and my own, is "fellow feeling", an admirable human trait that hardly entails "a presumptive superiority" when used in the lexical form "sympathy with". "Sympathy" is a perfectly satisfactory and adequate term for expressing one's regard for fellow human beings, and it enjoys further utility by denoting an actual human capability, as opposed to "empathy" which in its modern historical career seems much more a vaunted "aristocratic conceit" than it has ever been possible to construe as "a democratic practice".
While you may not sympathize with me, you might develop some measure of sympathy with De Qunicey were you to read "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" (the excerpts in any edition of the Norton Anthology might suffice).
Only in your closing expression do I see a glimmer of the frivolity that I could not see in the rest of your comments. Yours truly, member of a self-elected intellectual elite? That is perfectly ludicrous, David, I assure you, and I sympathize with you if you believe your own words seriously. I occupy a marginal and remote position in American life, thank you. I do not aspire to join the ranks of "the intellectual elite": if you haven't noticed, I am critical of American intellectual elites who have helped foist the dubious notion of "empathy" in post-secondary and graduate settings of academia across most of the past century, probably even in the glorified MFA universe that has attracted so many American writers across recent decades (you may recall that I have not only never earned my official MFA credentials [with all the networking benefits they confer] but that I see MFA enrollments most typically as two-year residencies in secluded ivory towers where the immediacies of "downtrodden lives" are remote and invisible).
As far as I can tell, your reading of my essays is hobbled if not crippled by your own prior intellectual commitments, however and wherever you came by them. I only ask that you read what I actually write, and if you don't like the diction I employ, you might sympathize with me for having the temperament and undisciplined practice of an auto-didact, since my exposure to formal education largely explains my recoiling from it.
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David AckleyMay 20, 07:18pm
Yes, it's always the cry of the aspirant theorist when his argument is met on other than his preferred grounds that he has been "misunderstood." Or "misread." Never reckoning that he might have been understood too well because someone has read the implications of what he's saying.
I've done you the credit, Edward, of engaging with what you're saying, figuring that it's worth reading since you've gone to the trouble of writing it. And responding straightforwardly to what I see as the weakness in your various arguments. Evidently, you prefer the other response, which is silence, so then you can presume that your audience is simply overawed and persuaded by your self-conscious displays of erudition. Whining about being misunderstood while you make snide asides about my own prior intellectual commitments (about which you know absolutely sweet damn-all) is not even worth this much response.
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strannikovMay 20, 08:47pm
Well, take heart, David: I've derived some actual insights from our exchanges, thank you, and I've also found material for further investigations.
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strannikovMay 21, 03:47pm
In partial response to David Ackley, I posted earlier the response I solicited and elicited from LLM ChatGPT. I've since submitted more or less the same query (slightly modified) to the Claude Sonnet 4.6 LLM for analysis and assessment. I only post it below because this assessment offers a few more specifics to the German idealist lineage of the modern conceit of "empathy", which history I bypassed in assembling my essay "Against Empathy". (My 20 May attribution of the coinage of "Einfuhlung" to Hermann Lotze derived from the 1960 ed. of Thrall, Hibbard, and Holman's Handbook to Literature [Rev. Ed.], which view Claude amends.)
= = = = =
strannikov: The ancient mythopoetic/religious/philosophical concept of "metempsychosis" (transmigration of the soul) seems to share a structural affinity with the modern notion of "empathy", with the added refinement (supplied by a trend within 18th and 19th German idealism) that one can initiate or participate in "empathic metempsychosis" on this side of the grave.
Claude Sonnet 4.6: This is a genuinely rich observation, and the structural affinity you're identifying is real and philosophically significant. Let me trace the conceptual lineage carefully.
The Core Structural Parallel
Metempsychosis, in its classical forms (Pythagorean, Platonic, Orphic, later Hindu and Neoplatonic), posits that the psyche is not permanently bound to a single individuated form — it can migrate, inhabit other loci of experience, and thereby accumulate a kind of trans-individual experiential history. The self is, at bottom, promiscuous with respect to the bodies and perspectives it can occupy.Empathy (especially in its stronger, more philosophically loaded formulations) posits something structurally analogous: a capacity to genuinely inhabit another's inner life — not merely to infer it or simulate it from the outside, but to undergo a kind of temporary migration into their experiential standpoint.
The shared structure is something like: the locus of subjectivity is not absolutely fixed to a single perspective.
The German Idealist Refinement
The tradition you're pointing to runs roughly through Herder → Schiller → Schelling → Hegel → Vischer → Lipps, and the key move is precisely the one you identify: the voluntarization and immanentization of what was previously a cosmic, involuntary, post-mortem process.Several specific threads are worth distinguishing:
Herder's Einfühlung avant la lettre — his aesthetic and hermeneutic theory held that genuine understanding of another culture, text, or historical epoch required a kind of Hineinversetzen (placing-oneself-into), a disciplined self-displacement into a foreign experiential horizon. This is metempsychosis as hermeneutic method — practiced by the living scholar rather than enacted by cosmic necessity.
Schiller's concept of the naive and sentimental poet touches this: the naive poet is their object (like the soul that simply is the animal it inhabits), while the sentimental poet must effortfully cross over into an alien nature. The latter is a willed, incomplete, aesthetically mediated transmigration.
Schelling's Naturphilosophie and philosophy of identity provide a metaphysical grounding: if subject and object share a common ontological root (the Absolute), then the apparent impenetrability between self and other is a secondary phenomenon. Genuine empathic penetration is, on this view, a return to a more primordial non-separation — metempsychosis as the recovery of a metaphysical intimacy that individuation normally conceals.
Robert Vischer's 1873 coining of Einfühlung in the strict sense (in his work on optical form) explicitly involves the projection of bodily and affective life into aesthetic objects — the self genuinely animates what it contemplates. This is metempsychosis aestheticized and miniaturized: not the soul migrating between bodies across lifetimes, but the self migrating into a form within the span of aesthetic attention.
Theodor Lipps then extended this into a full psychology of interpersonal understanding: to empathize with another person is to enact their inner life within oneself — what he called innere Nachahmung (inner imitation). The other's soul, in a real sense, temporarily inhabits you, or you inhabit them.
The Added Philosophical Refinements Your Framing Implies
Your phrase "empathic metempsychosis on this side of the grave" highlights several important upgrades over classical metempsychosis:Agency: Classical transmigration happens to the soul (cosmically determined, karmic, involuntary). Empathic metempsychosis is initiated — it's a practice, a discipline, even an ethical obligation (as in Schopenhauer's moral philosophy, where compassion literally involves recognizing the other as oneself — the veil of Maya dissolved).
Reversibility: The empathic soul can return. It migrates without ceasing to be itself, which is actually a more sophisticated model of identity than classical metempsychosis, which generally involves amnesia and discontinuity.
Simultaneity: One can, in principle, enact multiple empathic migrations at once, or in rapid succession — something impossible in literal transmigration. This connects to Keats's notion of negative capability and the poet's capacity to inhabit contradictory positions simultaneously.
Epistemological yield: The point of empathic metempsychosis is understanding — cognitive and moral — rather than (or in addition to) karmic purification.
A Suggestive Corollary
There's also a dark underside that the structural parallel illuminates: just as metempsychosis in some traditions involves the loss or dilution of individual selfhood (the soul that migrates too promiscuously may lose its coherence), empathy at its extreme threatens ego-dissolution — a point Lipps worried about, and which resurfaces in contemporary debates about empathic distress, vicarious trauma, and the pathologies of excessive identification. The same structure that enables moral and aesthetic richness also carries the risk of de-individuation.This suggests your concept of "empathic metempsychosis" isn't merely a metaphor but a genuine structural homology — one that reveals something about the underlying metaphysics of selfhood that both doctrines are circling around from different directions.
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David AckleyMay 21, 11:44pm
Somewhere among these exercises in pseudo-intellectual piffle ( in which-mea culpa- I now profoundly regret engaging)I think I called--quoted really--the accusation that 'AI is the world's largest plagiarism machine.' Thus the following article covering the suit by a number of major publishers, and authors, against META for using copyrighted works without permission to "train," its particular version of AI to "think."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/05/publishers-sue-meta-copyright-ai
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strannikovMay 22, 06:49pm
Apart from its intrinsic humor, this report (that does seem to've been produced by Deutsche Welle) has enough content both to stimulate realistic fears and to amplify incipient paranoia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qVbE9DHkEk
I almost got halfway through it on the first go but have not decided yet whether to return to it, it's that dispiriting.
"Applied Technology giveth, and Applied Technology taketh away: blessed be the name of Applied Technology."
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Darryl PriceMay 26, 08:33pmSome people love chaos. They can't get enough of it. It's just a blow against boredom. A blow against the empire. The Devil's advocate making mischief for the sake of having something to do. Thorns can be beautiful if you don't think of them only as thorns. They are also natural wonders. They have their own beauty. It's not to everyone's taste. It doesn't have to be. The world has everything you can imagine in it. When you think about it, You really wouldn't want it any other way. To paraphrase Pogo, we have met the enemy and he is us, but then Einstein would insist on the opposite must also be true--we have met the savior, and he is us. We just can't seem to get away from the fact that we are here whether we like it or not.
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