Forum / Against Empathy

• 
  strannikov

  May 18, 03:38pm

  Since 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.

  -END-

• 
  strannikov

  May 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.

• 
  User Deleted

  May 19, 06:07pm

  You're disgusting. Against empathy. Go fuck yourself you Elon Musk / Peter Thiel wannabe.

• 
  strannikov

  May 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 Ackley

  May 19, 11:30pm

  Intemperate 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.

• 
  David Ackley

  May 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.

• 
  strannikov

  May 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.)

• 
  David Ackley

  May 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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