Empathy

Derek Matravers

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780745670751, 9780745670744
• eBook ISBN: 9781509516735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ästhetik in der Philosophie

How can we understand another person's feelings, thoughts, words or behaviour? Through empathy, it is hoped, we might use our imaginations to shift our perspective into another person's, thereby grasping their thoughts and emotions. In this insightful new book, Derek Matravers negotiates the evolution of this fascinating concept. He explores the roots of the term in the work of David Hume and Adam Smith, its re-emergence in a new form in nineteenth-century German philosophy, and its resurgence as something different again in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. In doing so, he explores the important role empathy, in all its forms, has played in the study of the mind, the emotions and aesthetics, and in ethics. Empathy is an ideal introduction to one of the most absorbing contemporary philosophical debates.

1
Introduction: Some Historical Preliminaries

‘Empathy’ is one of the catchwords of our time. In the course of his political career, Barack Obama has repeatedly called on people to address what he sees as ‘an empathy deficit’; an inability or an unwillingness to see the world from the perspective of those less fortunate than ourselves. People who are training to be doctors are required to show empathy to patients, or, at least, those playing the role of patients for the purposes of examinations (Jamison 2014: Ch. 1). There are international movements dedicated to the cultivation of empathy, an online empathy library, empathy classes in schools, and a recent book has claimed that empathy is ‘a key to a global and social revolution’ (Krznaric 2014). Furthermore, the range of human endeavour in which empathy features is impressive. It is prominent within philosophy: it features in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of history, ethics and aesthetics. It has a key role in the human sciences, particularly within what is known as ‘the phenomenological tradition’. Within psychology, it has a place in developmental psychology, social psychology and clinical psychology. It also features increasingly in the developing cognitive sciences.

As we shall see, ‘empathy’ is a term used to cover a fascinating range of disparate phenomena. To enable us to set out on our journey around these phenomena I will venture a broad characterization: empathy is using our imaginations as a tool so as to adopt a different perspective in order to grasp how things appear (or feel) from there. Even such a broad characterization as this will be controversial; in particular, it does not include any reference to caring about, or helping, the person who is the object of the empathic engagement. In this, it contrasts with another recent attempt to gesture at the general area: an emotion is empathetic if the person who feels it ‘is aware that it is caused by the perceived, imagined, or inferred emotion or plight of another, or it expresses concern for the welfare of another’ (Maibom 2014: 2). However, if this catches the link to an interest in the welfare of another, it does so at the expense of not covering at least some of the recent debates in the philosophy of mind. We shall examine the similarities and differences between these conceptions of the topic as the book progresses. As we need to start somewhere, for the moment I will let them stand as rough characterizations of what I will be talking about.

It comes as something of a surprise to those who do not know, that the English word ‘empathy’ was coined as late as 1909. It is worth a brief historical digression to discover how this came about. In looking at the historical roots of empathy, we need to distinguish the history of the phenomenon from the history of the specific term. As for the phenomenon, I assume that people have been able to imagine themselves into another perspective (whether the perspective of themselves in a different time and/or space or the perspective of another person) for as long as people have been able to think. The phenomenon surfaced as being of some particular philosophical use in the work of David Hume and (more particularly) Adam Smith in the eighteenth century. Both Hume and Smith used the idea of sharing others' mental states as part of their explanation of morality. Of course, they did not have our term, but their term, ‘sympathy’, clearly describes something in the same area. Here is a famous passage from Hume in the Treatise:

We may begin by considering a-new the nature and force of sympathy. The minds of all men are similar in their feelings and operations, nor can anyone be actuated by any affection, of which all others are not, in some degree, susceptible. As in strings equally wound up, the motion of one communicates itself to the rest; so all the affections readily pass from one person to the other, and beget correspondent movements in every human creature. When I see the effects of passion in the voice and gesture of any person, my mind immediately passes from these effects to their causes, and forms such a lively idea of the passion, as is presently converted to the passion itself. In like manner, when I perceive the causes of any emotion, my mind is convey'd to the effects, and is actuated with a like emotion.

(Hume 1739–40: III.iii.i)

In this passage, Hume is talking in particular about a passion (an emotion) passing from one person to another. He mentions two different ways in which this might happen. The first way, ‘as in strings equally wound up, the motion of one communicates itself to the rest’, looks to be a simple case of what is called ‘emotional contagion’, our ‘catching’ emotions from other people. For example, being in the company of happy people can make us happy, or being in the company of anxious people can make us anxious. We shall examine this in greater detail in the next chapter. The second way, in which ‘my mind immediately passes from these effects to their causes, and forms such a lively idea of the passion, as is presently converted to the passion itself’, looks slightly more complicated. In the Treatise Hume's account of psychology largely works by association. If, in the world, one thing is causally related to some other thing, then a thought about the first thing will tend to be followed by a thought about the second thing. The same is true if the objects are related by resemblance or contiguity in time and place. These associative links guide our thoughts, which suggests that, as with emotional contagion, the mind ‘passing’ from one mental state to another does not break into our conscious awareness. That is, I do not make conscious inferences from others' appearance and behaviour regarding how they feel, and then consciously get myself to feel the same; rather, it happens automatically. In Hume's later work, the Enquiries, his associationism is largely set to one side in favour of a focus on our actual processes of evaluation, which takes him closer to modern debates.¹ However, it is not Hume but Smith who is most startling in the way that he prefigures current discussion.² The opening few pages of his The Theory of Moral Sentiments cover many of the arguments found in contemporary work on empathy:

As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves would feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our own imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.

(Smith 2002 I.i.i.2)

Neither is it those circumstances only, which create pain and sorrow, that call forth our fellow-feeling. Whatever is the passion which arises from any object in the person principally concerned, an analogous emotion springs up, at the thought of his situation, in the breast of every attentive spectator.

(Smith 2002: I.i.i.4)

Hume was concerned with the passions of other people affecting the passions we feel ourselves. Smith's concern is more complex; in his notion of sympathy, we play a more active part. We imagine ourselves in the circumstances of the other person, imagining enduring what they endure. In some sense we identify with that person, and feel, if not exactly what they feel, at least something commensurate with what they feel. It is in this way that we can move ‘beyond our own person’ and discover what ‘our brother’ is feeling. As we shall see, this is very close to at least some of the standard modern accounts of empathy.

If we put aside the history of the phenomenon and look to the history of the term itself, we are taken into a series of debates in German psychology and aesthetics in the late nineteenth century. A key term in such debates was Einfühlung. This is difficult to translate literally – it is usually rendered as ‘feeling into’. A surprising feature of these debates is that those involved were less interested in sharing mental states with, or projecting mental states into, other people as much as they were interested in projecting mental states into other (inanimate) things.

A good deal of stage-setting took place before the emergence of Einfühlung as a concept. Inasmuch as it broadly concerned the relation between active mental life and the inanimate world, at least part of that stage-setting is the concern with the relation between subject and object prevalent in German thought since Kant and Hegel. A further landmark in the history of the concept, which surely had an influence on the more concrete developments at the end of the nineteenth century, was Romanticism, in particular, German Romanticism. The Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was of such a disparate nature (geographically, politically and in almost every other way) that general claims about it will hardly rise above the banal. However, one characteristic was a yearning for unity against the distinctions characteristic of the time, whether subject and object, mind and body, man and world, or reason and the imagination. Finding a way in which our minds can enter into the world promises one way of approaching such a unity.

One manifestation of this, which took Romanticism closer to the modern use of the term ‘empathy’, occurs in the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder. Herder uses the term Einfühlung in his This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity (Herder 1774). Herder's most notable contemporary commentator, Michael Forster, has argued that Herder was not talking about psychological projection (which would take his use close to one important aspect of the modern use) but was using the term metaphorically as a way of describing ‘an arduous process of historical-philological enquiry’. The cash value of the metaphor has five components, none of which are particularly part of our history. Two of them, however, do take us close to a few elements of at least some of the modern meaning of the term ‘empathy’: ‘in order to interpret a subject's language one must achieve an imaginative reproduction of his perceptual and affective sensations’ and ‘the interpreter should strive to develop his grasp of linguistic usage, contextual facts, and relevant sensations to the point where this achieves something of the same immediate, automatic character that it has for a text's original audience when they understood the text in light of such things (so that it acquires for him, as it had for them, the phenomenology more of a feeling than a cognition)’ (Forster 2002: xvii–xviii). In short, when we read historical texts we should, in the first instance, imagine ourselves occupying the perspective of the producer of the text including imaginatively r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series page
• Title page
• Dedication
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction: Some Historical Preliminaries
• 2: Some Conceptual Preliminaries
• 3: Empathy as Simulation
• 4: A Priori and A Posteriori Empathy
• 5: Re-enacting the Thoughts of Others
• 6: Empathy and the Emotions
• 7: Empathy and Ethics
• 8: Empathy and Aesthetics
• 9: Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement