At the time of the initial publication of Empathy Lessons in 2018, a number of books appeared then and shortly thereafter that questioned the value of empathy. These extend from works which assert a bold statement of the obvious, that the practice of empathy has its strong and weak points, its breakdowns and break throughs, its misfirings and its successes, all the way to a growing number of works that insist the disadvantages of empathy far outweigh its benefits and sensible practitioners would do well to disregard and even abstain from it. The latter are the ones of concern here.
Full disclosure: I mistakenly subscribed to the view that no such thing as bad publicity existed, and I declined in 2018 (and up until 2023) to mention the anti-empathy authors by name, instead referring to a “celebrity psycholinguist,” a prominent “Germanic studies” teacher, or a mandarin professor of comparative literature. Why give “free publicity” to views that were seemingly committed to inhibiting, contracting, devaluing, rather than expressing, expanding, and implementing the practice of empathy? The gambit did not work. The devaluing of empathy got traction, perhaps driven by publishers whose market research, whether accurate or not, suggested that the sales of empathy books had peaked, and who proposed to keep the pot boiling with works that throw empathy “under the bus.” The challenge is that it is getting crowded under the bus, and the following cases provide a few suggestions about current authors who belong there, too. In the following, the alleged biases and limitations of empathy are so easy to refute that the reader is going to suspect me of having set up the representation of these limitations of empathy as a strawman in order to knock it down. I am not making this stuff up, and I provide references in support.
A second reason that the practice of empathy is hypothetically “on the ropes” is that skepticism about empathy’s value is a consequence of its own success. Empathy works. Empathy makes a profound and lasting difference. But in the age of TikTok does it work fast enough? Empathy and its many successes are themselves the occasions for the skepticism, resistance, and seeming embrace of the obstacles to empathy. A rigorous and critical empathy can be hard work; better to take the easy way out. The reader may say, I want instant empathy, like instant coffee, just add hot water and stir. Wouldn’t it be nice? Nor is anyone saying such a thing as “instant empathy” is impossible. It may work well enough in a pinch; but like instant coffee, the quality may not be on a par with that required by a more demanding or discriminating appreciation and taste – or a more challenging situation. The pervasive cynicism and resignation of the world are naturally attracted to attacking the sources of inspiration and strength, not those of enervation and stagnation. A treatise on “The Dark Sides of Violence” will sadly remain timely and relevant, but no one disputes the accuracy of the description. One does not need a treatise “Against Eating Dirt,” because few are inclined to eat dirt (and if one is so inclined, it seems be a sign of a vitamin deficiency).
This brings us to the poster child for devaluing empathy, Fritz Breithaupt’s The Dark Sides of Empathy (2017) (hereafter referred to as “Dark Empathy”). Breithaupt asserts on page 8 that to “uncritically embrace empathy without caveats” is the goal debunked by the end of this [Breithaupt’s] book. Those who “uncritically embrace empathy” are debunked. Just so. Please stop right there. Who proposed uncritically embracing empathy—or anything? Uncritically embracing empathy is not proposed here. Attributing uncritical thinking to the masters of empathy such as Batson (2009), Baron-Cohen (2014), Frans de Waal (2009), Jean Decety and William Ickes (2009), Lanzoni (2012), Zenko (2015) (this list is not complete), is itself a concerning sign of lack of critical thinking. Dark Empathy is at best naïve and at worse disingenuous in imaging practitioners of empathy are uncritical or lack rigor. “Uncritically embracing empathy” sets up a strawman, and gives a green light to uncritical thinking. The program of Dark Empathy is systematically and sensationally to attribute examples of empathic distress to the practice of empathy itself, charge empathy with these misfirings, and, going forward, invalidate and dismiss the practice of empathy. Instead of engaging with the hard work of self-inquiry into one’s own blind spots to overcome the obstacles and resistances to empathy, Dark Empathy takes the easy way out, discards empathy, gives up on it. It is like giving up on nutrition because the cook may put too much salt in the soup or burned the roast.
Dark Empathy properly lists many of empathy’s breakdowns, misfirings, and obstacles (as do practitioners of a rigorous and critical empathy). Phenomena such as emotional contagion, projection, conformity, messages getting lost in translations in attempting to be empathic. A rigorous and critical empathy is committed to doing the hard work of overcoming these break downs and misfirings in order to relate authentically and in integrity to the other individual. Dark Empathy’s commitment is to sensationalizing the failings of empathy, not demonstrating how empathy works (and does not work) in literature, politics, psychology, etc. Or rather the commitment is that empathy does not work (full stop).
If Dark Empathy would have stopped at page 8—empathy is what makes us human (or words to that effect) and elaborated on that position—then it would have made a useful contribution. The author really says it: empathy is essential to our humanity. However, empathy then breaks down into empathic distress. The issue is that human beings are frequently inhumane—not just a few bad apples, but as the Holocaust and Hannah Arendt taught us about the banality of evil, and the famous quote from Himmler (Arendt 1971: 105–6; Agosta 2010: 73), everyone has the potential for real badness, evil, even if few act on it. Therefore, dial back empathy, abstain from empathy?
Dark Empathy asserts a few sensible things about empathy up front, and then sensationalizes the negative and the resulting empathic distress by saying that empathic human beings perpetrate horrid actions. Accurate enough. Human beings are a difficult species. They are an empathic, caring, and kind species as well as an aggressive, territorial, and rapacious one. Wouldn’t we want to work on expanding the former and inhibiting the latter? That Roman soldiers drove nails through the limbs of the people they were crucifying does not invalidate the art of carpentry. Dark Empathy makes it sound like it does as it seemingly intentionally applies the same argument to empathy. Dark Empathy perpetrates a similar series of fallacies of numbing grossness by saying the forms of empathy are the motives for the horrid actions. Aren’t the hidden variables aggression, uninhibited desire, territoriality (this list is not complete)?
Dark Empathy cites Nietzsche to support the case against empathy. The reading of Nietzsche is highly problematic. The text sounds like Nietzsche is discussing empathy, has an argument about empathy, and indeed may be considered a major contributor to the conversation on empathy. Breithaupt writes things like: “Nietzsche’s argument is not that empathy leads to a narrowed range of vision” (p.43). “Empathy, Nietzsche suggests…” (p. 44). “Nietzsche situates the empathic or objective person…” (p. 45). “…Nietzsche’s argument on empathy…” (p. 46). “…A second thesis of Nietzsche’s conception of empathy” (p. 48). “…[A]bout Nietzsche’s argument concerning empathy” (p. 55). The problem is that Nietzsche does not mention empathy. Ever. Nietzsche does not have an argument about empathy. Nietzsche does not situate empathy. Nietzsche does not have a conception of empathy as (for example) Johann Herder or Theodor Lipps or Novalis or any modern thinker engaged with it. Empathy is not implicit in Nietzsche, unless one projects it there.
Yet Breithaupt does not propose a rational reconstruction of empathy (or of anything in this book). He is writing as if Nietzsche had a position on empathy (or an account of empathy) at the level of Nietzsche’s text or very close to it. Not accurate. Regarding explicit or implicit references to empathy in Nietzsche, there is nothing to site. Granted that Nietzsche is notoriously difficult, the editor and reviewers must think the readers are really inattentive. This is a scholarly breakdown of numbing grossness. I am at a loss to comprehend how the editor let this occur.
Now if Dark Empathy were to have written (condition contrary to fact) that Nietzsche has a position on the moral sentiments such as guilt, shame, ressentiment, love, compassion, that the moral sentiments have a “dark side,” and then added empathy to the list, it might have a case. According to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Judeo-Christian morality (such as one finds in the Ten Commandments or Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount) is a reaction formation transforming aggression and hostility into slave morality (Nietzsche’s key term: “slave morality”). The Roman slaves, with whom Christianity became popular (in spite of their initially being fed to the lions) turn the tables on the Roman masters by means of the conventional Christian practices that privilege turning the other cheek, being kind to the poor, predicting the meek shall inherit the earth. The “meek” are precisely the slaves. But then the reduction to absurdity of Dark Empathyoccurs: it is all of conventional morality that has a dark side—the dark side of the Ten Commandments and the Good Samartian (he really was acting selfishly!?)—not merely the practice of empathy. Though Nietzsche does not do so, a reconstruction of Nietzsche’s position might add “empathy” to the list of characteristics of slave morality such as altruism, compassion, charity, helping those in need, being kind to animals, turning the other cheek, and so on (even though empathy is not a sentiment as such but a form of emotional communication). But Dark Empathy says no such thing. I cannot site a reference because there is none. Not even close. Once again, if Dark Empathy were to have said that the pessimist (read: “Schopenhauer”) is at odds with the “objective man,” who gives up his self rather than face pessimistic annihilation, then one might say Dark Empathy opens the way to an empathic communication. But even then the other horn of the dilemma gores Dark Empathy. According to Dark Empathy, to be empathic one must have a self, be a listening self, be a receptive self. Dark Empathy attributes to Nietzsche an imaginary assertion that one needs to have an empty self to be empathic. Nietzsche may indeed attribute a hollow self to the objective man, but empathy remains uninvolved.
In a deep sense, this book lacks integrity—not in the sense that contains any moral improprieties or ethical lapses, but that it lacks wholeness. Empathy is fragmented. The interpretation is fragmented. The understanding of Stockholm Syndrome is fragmented (e.g., p. 39, 69). The short version of Stockholm syndrome is that the hostage/prisoner identifies with the hostage taker, the jailer, or the concentration camp guard in order to survive, save his or her life. This is called “identification with the aggressor” (not empathy), in which the aggressor is the authority figure who has the monopoly of the means of force and violence. Thus, for example, Patty Hearst, the media heiress, after being held in the closet for two seeks (it is not clear if she was allowed to use the bathroom), finally says, “Okay, I’ll join up”; and the next thing she is caught on camera with the other terrorists of the Symbionese Liberation Front, trying to rob a bank. Unfortunately, the jury did not understand Stockholm Syndrome either. The hostage does not just pretend to join the “bad guys” who are her captors: the hostage really does join up. Now notice also that this same mechanism is the means by which the conscience is formed—which is relevant to Nietzsche. If five-year-old Louie gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar, violating the rule “No cookies before dinner,” and gets punishment (say, a time out), Louie feels shame at getting caught “red handed” (red because he is blushing) and given a time out. However, if tomorrow, Louie puts his hand in the cookie jar and Mom does not catch him in the act and he bites into the cookie, what happens? The cookie does not taste right. Guilt! He has interiorized the authority (Mom) and the rule (no cookies before dinner—you will ruin your appetite) and Louie ruins his own appetite. The cookie does not taste right due to identification with the aggressor. It is a standard means by which the conscience is formed, but it does not function as designed—it goes out of kilter—when people are taken hostage, abused, and made to obey nefarious actors. Returning to Stockholm Syndrome, which of course is a pathological phenomenon, whereas the formation of a conscience is a positive one, work with trauma survivors and empathic distress comes into view. Now Dark Empathy assets that is not the meaning of Stockholm Syndrome in which it is interested (p. 69), but it is going to be hard to avoid, given all the hostages. Work with trauma survivors is usually not in the competence of literary critics, and this example shows the hazards of so engaging. One example which dishonors the survivors and gives meaning to “integrity outage” is when Dark Empathy writes “Stockholm syndrome might describe one extreme of the range of possible forms a marriage can take” (p. 60). Hmmm. This is concerning. This is not marriage, it is domestic violence or intimate partner abuse, and may require intervention by the authorities. It is unfortunate that neither Dark Empathy nor the editor, Mahindre Kingra, noticed this fragmenting statement, which may usefully be cleaned up. It shows the author to be tin-eared when it comes to the suffering of the survivors of domestic violence, marginalized women and marginalized groups.
The Dark Sides of Empathy succeeds in being provocative, even sensationalistic, identifying ways in which empathy can (and does) breakdown, misfire, and go astray. Yet The Dark Sides of Empathy is argumentatively uncharitable (in Donald Davidson’s sense): it uses the weakest versions of the opponent’s (or empathy advocate’s) arguments, not the strongest. On background, the analytic philosopher of language Donald Davidson (1973: 136–137) innovated in defining a “a principle of charity.” The principle of [argumentative] charity goes beyond honest translation or statement of an argument, as noted, asking the thinker to engage with the strongest version of an argument rather than intentionally weaking it through setting up a strawman or a distorted, ambiguous representation (Haber 2010: 74) of the logic. At the risk of mixing the metaphor, one can always make a splash by throwing a rotten tomato, and that is what The Dark Sides of Empathy does. The only concern is that my criticisms will sound like there is no such thing as bad publicity or sound like buying the book is worth it. It is not. I have read it very carefully, cover-to-cover, dear reader, so you do not have to. What a chore! Dark Empathy name drops Hölderlin, Goethe, Flaubert, Fontane, Hawthorne ((p. 172) one page only!), before turning to an in-depth engagement with the execution of the domestic terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, which says as much about the dark side of the author as about any aspect of empathy.
The fundamental fallacy is to confuse empathic distress with empathy itself. That empathy can misfire and fail does not mean one should abstain from empathy. It means to expand one’s empathy one may usefully practice and develop one’s empathic capability. With practice and effort, one’s empathic abilities are broadened and deepened. The celebrated Self Psychologist and empathy innovator Heinz Kohut, MD, (who is not mentioned in Breithaupt) gives the example of the Nazis who equipped their dive bombers with sirens, the better to impart empathic distress in their victims, thus demonstrating their (the Nazis’) subtle “empathic” appreciation of their victims’ feelings. One is tempted to say, “The devil may quote scripture.” The devil frequently does, and Nazis may try to apply some subset of a description of “empathy.”
Note that Kohut speaks of “fiendish empathy” and the use of empathy for a “hostile purpose” while emphasizing his (Kohut’s) value neutral definition of empathy as “vicarious introspection” and a method of data gathering about the other person (1981: 529, 580). Nevertheless, the point is well taken that empathy is a powerful phenomenon in all its dimensions and requires careful handling. (For further details see: “On Empathy,” The Search for the Self: Volume 4: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut 1978-1981, London: Karnac Books, 2011: 525–535).
The Nazi applies a kind of entry level emotional contagion or affective transmission of feelings, but the process breaks down at the point of empathic responsiveness. Empathic responsiveness requires a core of acknowledgement and recognition of the other person’s humanity.
Thus, it is arguably plainly evident that the would-be “empathy” of the Nazis or the white supremacists such as Timothy McVeigh, and so on, misfires. It is contradictory. It is a flat-out contradiction to relate authentically to another human being while dehumanizing him or her. Empathy doesn’t work that way. Empathic responsiveness simply does not admit of bombing people or disqualifying them as “less than” or other than human when they plainly are human.
However, the really tough question is how does “empathy” as a psychological mechanism relate to “empathy” as an interpersonal process and both these, in turn, to “empathy” as a way of being with other people in practice. One starts out talking about empathy as a psychological mechanism, subsumed by a biological mirroring system and invoking identification, projection, and introjection. Immediately one has to give an example of two people having a conversation, in which the speaker is feeling, experiencing, and trying to express something that the listener is trying to “get” or “understand.” Then one finds oneself immediately discussing the practical considerations of why, in the course of the personal interaction, the empathy succeeded or broke down in a misunderstanding, and how to improve one’s practice of empathy based on experience.
The risk of Dark Empathy to the reader is that the reader may think its author is an expert in empathy and start quoting the distortions, lack of rigor, critical faux pas, and simple inaccuracies as if they shed light on empathy. For example, in a case of shocking inaccuracy, the book sites Stockholm Syndrome as an example of the dark side of empathy (p. 37). The mechanism of Stockholm Syndrome is not empathy, but “identification with the aggressor.” Because the hostages identified with the aggressor (the bank robber and hostage taker) in order to survive a five-day traumatic kidnapping means that people do what they have to do to survive. It is not an example of empathy, but of Dark Empathy’s lack of psychological acumen – and of empathy. On background, identification with the authority figure is crucial in forming the human conscience during childhood; and identification is consistent with the process going off the rails in the case of a kidnapping, in which, in order to survive, the victim actually builds a relationship with the perpetrator – does not pretend to do so, actually builds the relationship. Breithaupt’s interpretation depends on overlooking the basic definition of empathy that empathy requires a firm boundary between the self and the other. Schopenhauerian compassion and selflessness and/or merger, against which Nietzsche’s occasionally raged, are break downs of empathy. Never was it truer that “Good fences make good neighbors” (a fence, not a wall!), and there is a gate in the fence over which is the welcoming word “Empathy!”
In comparison with the long, hard slog through Dark Empathy, Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy is relatively easy to comprehend and situate. The case against empathy is that it is parochial, biased and limited based on preferences for “in group” individuals and associations such as family, neighborhood, and superficial similarities such as ethnic background, race, or local custom. Bloom’s recommendation is to pursue rational compassion. Bloom actually makes it sound like one has to choose between rational compassion and empathy. Given the state of the world, doesn’t it need both more compassion and expanded empathy? The forced choice between the two must be declined.
Furthermore, the answer on the part of empathy advocates to the criticism of the “bias and limitation” of parochialism is direct: if empathy is sometimes parochial, the solution is not to abstain from empathy but to expand it. The empathic imperative is precisely: Be inclusive! Expanded empathy is what is required to broaden the scope and limits of the community to build harmonious and cooperative relationships that work for everyone. That building such a community is a high bar, takes nothing away from empathy. Given the complexity of the challenge, one would think that deploying various methods to make progress is proper. As noted, Bloom’s choice between rational compassion and, as the title says, against empathy seems forced. Given the challenges at hand, don’t we need both empathy and compassion (of all kinds) to deal with this difficult species, human beings? Though I might be mistaken, I am not aware of any advocate of a rigorous an critical empathy who recommends abstaining from compassion. Why should advocates of rational compassion abstain from empathy?
Given that Bloom operates with the distinctions rationality and critical thinking (the latter implicitly), he has much to offer – just not against empathy. His discussions of compassion fatigue, self-control, delayed gratification, caring and mirroring, the basis of morality, violence and cruelty, thinking about the consequences of one’s speech and actions, are all relevant to the dynamic between empathy and rational compassion.
Many of these distinctions such as self-control, delayed gratification, thinking about the consequences of one speech and actions, are features of adult behavior and action. Now that many adults are going about behaving in immature ways like children says a lot about the breakdown of civility, education, and politics in our world, and, once again, the antidote is expanded rationality, compassion, and empathy. This is a good place to note that empathy has a developmental sequence. The empathy of a two year old, who offers his own teddy bear to grieving grownup whose adult suffering the child cannot possibly understand, is on a continuum with, but different than, full adult empathy. The latter deploys all the aspects of a vicarious affect matching with the Other, appreciating who the Other person is as a possibility, taking a walk cognitively in the Other person’s shows (while remembering to take off one’s own to avoid project), and responding to the Other in a form of words and gestures that indicates to the Other that the listener “got” that with which the Other was struggling.
What is characteristic of those against empathy is that they engage with the weakest version of the empathically-relevant phenomena at issue, not the strongest. They engage with the breakdowns and misfirings of empathy such as emotional contagion, projection, conformity, and communications getting lost in translation. The tactic is to roll these u into the efinition of empathy, and then invalidate empathy. In contrast with this argumentative lack of charity, the sound practice of empathy “gets it” that empathy can fail; and it is precisely in overcoming these failures, obstacles and resistances that a rigorous and critical empathy comes forth and gets implemented.
As noted above, on background, the analytic philosopher of language Donald Davidson (1973: 136–137) innovated in defining a “a principle of [argumentative] charity.” The principle of [argumentative] charity goes beyond honest translation or statement of an argument requiring that the thinker engage with the strongest version of an argument or position rather than intentionally weaking it through setting up a strawman or a distorted, ambiguous representation (Haber 2010: 74) of the logic. One seeks for that in vain in Against Empathy, where the title itself seems to be a provocation. Nor is there anything wrong with that as such – just do not pretend that provocation and rhetoric (in the negative sense) are going to expand one’s empathy. Never was it truer, resistance to empathy makes obstacles to empathy a part of the defining features of empathy in order to dismiss it.
For example, if one is suffering from compassion fatigue or empathic distress, a professional risk of first responders and members of the helping professions such as doctors and therapists, then one recommendation is to “dial down” the compassion and/or empathy. If one uncharitably represents empathy or compassion as an “on off” switch, then one is faced with the false choice between these pro-social practices and hard-heartedness. However, if one represents compassion and empathy as being something that one can dial up and down, then one has the possibility of sampling the other person’s suffering and pain vicariously. One has a sample or trace affect of the Other’s experience, and one is able to put one’s toe in the river of the Other’s suffering (so to speak) without being flooded by it. Much remains to be said about this, but, for our present purposes, the point is to decline the false choice.
A particularly problematic example that Bloom cites is the case in which empathy allegedly incites to violence. The example Bloom gives is the cases of lynchings of black men in the US South who were accused of raping white woman, in which lynchings, Bloom maintains, empathy for the white woman became a motive to the violence. How shall I put it delicately? Simply stated, lynchings were a way of maintaining white supremacy and should never be represented in any other way. Racism is the systematic denial of empathy. These false accusations against innocent black men, literally grabbed off the street, str at the level of delusion that Jewish people drank the blood of Christian babies or that extra-terrestrials from Mars invaded New Jersey in 1931 – lies, damn lies, and total nonsense. I am sitting here holding my head in my hands and rocking back-and-forth quasi-catatonically. I am sick at heart. To site this racist accusation of rape as an example of empathy or motivating an empathic reaction is the reduction to absurdity of Bloom’s entire project. He just doesn’t get it. At the very least, Bloom is tin-eared and unempathic to site this common racist stereotype of rhetorical violence preceding physical violence, which is a tactic of domination, Jim Crow, white supremacy, and the imposition of injustice by violence.
On background for the reader’s historical empathy, in 1931 eight black young adults and one juvenile, The Scottsboro boys, were falsely accused of raping two women. After examination by a medical doctor, no evidence of rape was found. They were tried by an all-white male jury for rape and sentenced to death for it (except for the juvenile, who was sentenced to life in prison). The NAACP and the Communist Party provided legal assistance to the young men and stopped the State from executing them; but they had to endure long and unjust years in prison.
In a stunning example of rhetorical empathy Malcolm-X said to his black audience, “You didn’t’ land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock landed on you.” Rhetorical empathy is not a well-known distinction, but refers to empathic responsiveness – speaking into the listening of the person with whom one is attempting to empathize with a form of words that indicates one understands what the Other has experienced (see Blakenship 2019). One aspect of rhetorical empathy is that, when it works, the audience has the experience of being heard, even though it is the audience that is doing the listening. The speaker takes the experience of the audience – which means the listens has to know her or his audience in the sense of what they are about and what is important to them – and gives back to the audience the experience of their struggle and suffering and success in such a way that the audience recognizes it as their own experience. That, of course, is what Malcom did in his famous short one-liner about Plymouth Rock.
Empathy should never be under-estimated, but empathy requires a safe space of acceptance and tolerance. Once someone throws the first stone, then self-defense, limit setting, drawing boundaries is appropriate. Empathy does not work with psychopaths, certain kinds of autism, most bullies, and lynch mobs. It is not joke, but especially in the latter case, call for backup. I am skeptical after Gandhi, King, and Malcolm, to add race relations to the list of things with which empathy does not work, but Alisah Gaines has tried to make a case for doing so in Black for a Day
Empathy and white fantasies of empathizing with black people are debunked in Alisha Gaines’ Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy by Alisha Gaines (University of North Carolina Press, 2017: 212 pp). As will be elaborated, one cannot find a single instance where empathy succeeded in establishing or even contributing to improving the relations between black and white folks. Not one. Now we know that race relations are a touch challenge – but not a single instance? Hmmm.
Back covers of books are famously misleading, but after reading Black for a Day line-by-line, cover-to-cover, I believe the cover accurately represents the author’s position. I am not aware that anyone, black or white, has ever said—as does the back cover of Black for a Day—that “empathy is all that white Americans need” (my italics) to racially navigate social relations. With the exception of the second to last paragraph of Black for a Day, the reader does not find a single statement in this book that is positive about the practice of empathy. None. One does not find a single example in the text of a rigorous and critical empathy that works to produce healthy empathic relatedness. If empathy is not “all” that is needed, what then is needed? Someone may usefully ask—because the author has not done so: what then is needed?
The list of what is need is long, but it starts with a small set of related skills such as critical thinking, showing respect, acknowledgement, dignity, rigorous examination of one’s own implicit biases, considering the point of view of one’s opponent (which includes both critical thinking and empathy), and, of course, the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy. A case can also be made for reparations for survivors of slavery, such as a college education, but to get there is a whole issue in itself, and that cannot be pursued here. Okay, be charitable and attribute the “all” to the marketing department. However, once again, whatever the source, this “all”—as in “all you need is empathy”—is a nice example of an uncharitable argument, setting up a strawman—not in the sense of the Good Samaritan—but in the sense of engaging with the weakest, distorted, watered-down version of an argument, not the strongest. As noted, positively expressed, the scholarly standard is to try to make the opponent’s argument work.
Gaines does not make such a connection with social psychology, nor does she necessarily need to do so. A number of responses from black people suggested to John Howard Graham that he could never know the black person’s struggle without literally getting inside the skin of a black person. But that was his commitment—so that is what he tried to do. Being too literal in taking the coaching? Gaines notes that Graham personally rescued Jewish children from the Nazis by pretending they were mentally ill and sending them abroad—a righteous use of deception if I have ever heard of one. Still, it turns out that changing one’s exterior color and working for a few weeks on changing the interior conversation makes great headlines, but does not work in establishing empathic relatedness. How could it?
Empathy is based on being authentic about who one is in relating to another person. Empathy is based on integrity and being straight with the other person to and with whom one is trying to relate. So the idea of starting off by pretending to be someone who one is not—impersonating a person one is not—is not going to produce empathy. One cannot start out by being a fake and expect to produce an authentic relationship. Hence, the idea of an empathic impersonation is a contradiction in terms.
Staring with the integrity outage of impersonation does not create integrity—or empathy. It does not make a difference if one adds “race” to the mix. Empathic racial impersonation still results in fake relatedness and fake empathy. Now one may still learn a lot by going “under cover” and seeing how other people behave when they think you belong to the “in group” (in this case the “in group” of Southern segregationists or Northern racists), but one is going to get a complex, morally ambiguous integrity outage rather than an authentic relationship.
In short, the muck-raking, memoires and experiments of Sprigle, Graham, Halsell are social psychology experiment that go “off the rails.” The same can be said of the consistently devaluing assessment of these works in Black for a Day. These experiments, including Gaines’, provide engaging adventures and misadventures the demonstrate that when one starts out by faking solidarity, integrity, relatedness, and empathy as input, then one gets fake solidarity, fake integrity, fake relatedness, and fake empathy. This is not surprising. Fake in; fake out. The author calls this “empathic racial impersonation.”
At every turn—I counted them—sixty-five times, we get “empathic racial impersonation,” and the steady drum beat of invalidation. Empathy goes off the rails as projection, conformity, bad faith, conscious and unconscious bias, communications lost in translation. Indeed, empathy is a most imperfect practice, nor are these struggling and misguided impersonators given the benefit of the doubt. Black for a Day does not engage with the strongest version of the argument that empathy is valuable. Empathy is the weakest, watered-down, or distorted one—“eating the other” (bell hooks) or being a fake medical actor (Leslie Jamison’s hilarious account of her misadventures). Hmmm. Positively expressed, the scholarly standard is to try to make the opponent’s argument work rather than engaging with a distorted, strawman version of it. The one possible exception is if an author wishes to write a polemical piece. For example, Nietzsche explicitly subtitles his Genealogy of Morals “A Polemic.” If that is the author’s intention here, it is nowhere expressed, for example, in the preface.
The main white fantasy that “racial impersonation” brings forth is the attempt by some white people to empathize with blacks. The narrative of Black for a Day consists in critically reviewing several non-fiction narratives of individuals, born Caucasian, who go “under cover,” changing the color of their skin cosmetically and chemically from white to black, in order to “pass” as African American while travelling in the American south (or, in one case, Harlem) in the late 1940s and 1950s. Ray Sprigle, John Howard Graham, Grace Halsell, the cast of a Fox Reality TV show called Black.White (the latter show being an exception in premiering in the year 2006) engage in what may be described as a bold, though misguided, experiment in social psychology (my terms, not Gaines’). These racial impersonations are supposed to produce empathy between the races and/or in white people for black people, but what they actually produce is fake empathy. Key term: fake empathy (once again, my term, not Gaines’).
Black for a Day by Gaines (2017: 8, 171) claims to get its definition of empathy from Leslie Jamison and bell hooks. First, following up on bell hooks’ Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), there is much about the relation to the Other and Otherness that resonates with my own interests. Speaking in the first person for emphasis, I get my humanness from the Other. In a strategic reversal, the infant humanizes / creates empathy in the parent; the student humanizes / creates empathy in the teacher; the patient, in the doctor; the customer, in the business person. The infant, in her lack of socialization, calls forth empathy in the parent to relate socially. The problem is that in bell hooks the Other relates to the one (and vice versa) in colonization, domination, subordination, imperialization, exploitation, manipulation. Nor do I dispute that these ways of relating are all-too-common. One reader finds a critique of empathy in bell hooks, whereas I find a critique of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, which indeed deserves debunking. Her (bell hooks’) book uses the word “empathy” four times in the standard way without defining it. Arguably hooks’ essay “Eating the Other” (1992) is an implied definition of empathy—though a diligent search does not turn up the word “empathy” in the essay.
The challenge is that empathy is not “eating the other,” either literally or metaphorically. If anyone wishes to cite hooks’ magisterial authority, then the alternative point of view is that “eating the other” is the breakdown of empathy into merger, not the respectful distinction that maintains the integrity of the self and Other in the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy. If one starts by eating the Other (in any sense), one does not get to empathy. Eating the Other is a mutilation of the Other and a mutilation of empathy. If one arrives at eating the Other (in any sense), one has not gotten there via empathy. One gets empathy mutilated by emotional contagion, projection, conformity, and so on. One gets various fragments of humanness and human beings that are the breakdown products of empathy under capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism, oral aggression, and so on. However, above all else—one gets indigestion.
Second, Leslie Jamison’s “Empathy Exams” (2014) is credited with the strategic ambiguity between the gift of empathy and invasion of the Other (though I would argue that falls short of a proper definition). Here are the facts. Ms Jamison is a struggling writer, and she gets a job as a medical actor. What the heck is that, “medical actor”? She is given a script in which she plays the role—pretends to be—impersonates—someone who has a major mental illness – major depression, bipolar 1, PTSD, schizophrenia, and so on. This is part of medical training and the medical students know the medical actor is not a real patient. The medical student must question the “patient” and interact with the “patient” to establish the best diagnosis of the disorder. Speaking personally, I teach a class at Ross University Medical School that uses films with medical actors doing just that—and the students are challenged to get the best diagnosis. As far as I know, Jamison is not in any of the films. Furthermore, the “patient” (medical actor) then provides feedback to the student and the medical authorities on how empathic the MD-in-training was in questioning and relating to the “patient.” That is the empathy exam.
This must be emphasized—and empathized—the integrity of the situation is intact—no one is pretending to be really ill when they are not, or black when they are white, and so on, and people understand the exercise as training; thus, Jamison’s penetrating and engaging and amusing account of her misadventures as a medical actor. In any case, the medical actor does not pretend to be mentally ill the way the Sprigle, etc. pretended to be black. The medical actor and the student MDs know the actors are acting. All the world is a stage, but the audience does not jump up on it to try and rescue the innocent orphan from the villain.
The experiments of Sprigle, Graham, Halsell, etc. provide strong evidence, and I believe Gaines would agree, that when one attempts to take a walk in the other person’s shoes, it is harder to take off one’s own shoes than it might at first seem. Sprigle and company are trying to put the Other’s shoes on, but they cannot quite get their own off. They struggle mightily, and I give them more credit for the effort than Gaines.
Staring with the integrity outage of impersonation does not create integrity—or empathy. I hasten to add it may expose the hypocrisies of Southern segregationists who claims that black people are happy with their subordinate roles (yet another white fantasy); or it may expose the unconscious biases (not explicitly invoked but ever present) of Northerners or the microaggressions of white liberals (and many others), who after all still struggle with racial stereotypes and the “white fantasies” of the subtitle of the stereotypes of the hyper-sexed black male or promiscuous black females. However, that is the thing about fantasies. There is nothing that prevents black people from having them too, though based on different experiences and in a different register than their white neighbors. The really tough question is whether Black for a Day believes that the possibility of racial cooperation and/or harmony—whether as an exemplary cooperative rainbow coalition or peaceful coexistence—is itself a mere fantasy—and so unlikely of realization. The steady drum beat in Black for a Day which calls out “empathic racial impersonation” sixty-five times in some 171 pages provides evidence that this is the main fantasy being debunked.
What my empathy suggests to me is that the author is aggrieved about something—maybe a lot of things—possibly microaggressions—and I am inclined to say, “It sounds like you could use some empathy—please count on mine!” However, based on the text, she is not asking for it—empathy—does not see value in it—and seems to find satisfaction in attacking every possibility of empathic connection that comes forth. When it comes to empathy, Gaines does not “get it”—in just about every sense. Gaines fails a readiness assessment for the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy—and she does not commit to or try to create a safe space in which a debate or empathic listening could occur. One could argue back—one is human, therefore, ready or not, here comes empathy; and one is ready for empathy whether one likes it or not, and the point must be acknowledged—and yet there is an unwillingness to engage with the strongest version of a rigorous and critical empathy rather than a watered-down weird “eat the other.” In short, the rumor of empathy remains a rumor in the case of Black for a Day; the rumor is not confirmed; and empathy does not live in this work. It is where empathy goes to become fake empathy. Don’t go there.
With Migrant Aesthetics: by Glenda Carpio we go from fake empathy to mutilated empathy.
Migrant Aesthetics sets up an either/or choice between ending empire (e.g., racism, colonialism, imperialism, and so on) and expanding a rigorous and critical empathy. The book then mutilates empathy by confusing it with projection, emotional contagion, conformity, and other forms of miscommunication. Not surprisingly, the result is some 285 pages of penetrating analysis in which the reader does not get a single example of the practice of empathy resulting in a successful empathic relatedness in literary fiction. The attempt by Migrant Aesthetics to force a choice between expanding empathy and ending (or limiting) empire must be refused. Both results are needed. More on that shortly.
Meanwhile, the longer review: the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy knows that it can be wrong and can break down, misfire or go astray, flat out fail, as projection, emotional contagion, conformity, or communications getting lost in translation. It is precisely in engaging with and overcoming these obstacles and resistances to empathy that empathic relatedness and community are brought forth. Like with most powerful methods, skills, or interventions, practice makes the master. As a successful and popular teacher, Carpio knows the value of empathy, nor is mention of the word itself required. The good news is that empathy works whether one names it or not, whether one believes in it or not.
As noted, the issue is that in 285 pages of penetrating, incisive analysis of migrant aesthetics (the category, not the title), there is not a single example of what an effective empathy would look like. The reader is not given a single example of a healthy empathic relatedness that works, so that one could identify it if one happened to encounter it. This bears repeating: in some 285 pages of summary and analysis of the literary fictions of Dinaw Mengestu, Teju Cole, Aleksandar Hemon, Valeria Luiselli, Julie Otsuka, Junot Diaz, and some nonfiction of others, Migrant Aesthetics does not cite a single example of empathy that works right or functions as designed. Granted that empathy does not always succeed, the reader does not learn what a healthy, rigorous and critical empathy might look like if, rare as it may be (as empathy skeptics assert), if one happened to encounter empathy. None. Not one single example of what empathy looks like when it succeeds in producing empathic relatedness. This must give the reader pause. We take a step back—but not too far back.
Caprio asserts: “…[W]hat has been my centra argument in this work: that the history of empire is key in understanding the roots of migration at a scale appropriate to its global dimensions (Carpio: 228).” That to be forced from one’s home and become a refugee of the road is surely a source of enormous pain and suffering. Here the connection is direct—cause (routed from one’s home by aggression, starvation, etc.) and effect (pain, suffering). At the risk of over-simplification, yet a compelling one, white Europeans with cannons and machine guns go to Africa and Asia and exploit the natural resources and enslave or dominate the locals. A small subset of the locals is coopted—analogous to the concentration camp capos, both perpetrators and survivors (until they are not) being chosen from the prisoners—to make the job of the ruling class easier. Even the surviving prisoners then become perpetrators as one starving prisoner “steals” bread or water from another or lies to save his own skin, thereby endangering another. And some of those locals migrant back to headquarters, whether Boston, London, Paris, Amsterdam, or New York.
Now if anyone seriously believes that empathy is going to solve the problems created by empire, colonialism, imperialism, and so, then—how shall I put it delicately?—empathy is being “over sold.” This is usually the first step in setting up empathy as a “strawman” to be blamed for not fixing the many challenges facing civilized human beings committed to building a community that works for all persons.
There are at least two hidden variables behind the problematic causal analysis of empire that would help connect the dots between empire and empathy-based solutions: Human aggression and human hunger (hunger for many things, but here for food). These human beings are an aggressive species—and biologically omnivores. People can be kind and compassionate and empathic, but they also can behave aggressively and violently. Even if committed vegetarians, people also need to eat quite regularly, if not exactly three times a day.
To say, as Migrant Aesthetics does, that the arrival of the white European conquistador and their horses in the new world in 1492 was a catastrophe for the original inhabitants gets the measure of the event about right. In a way, the displacement of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia to Oklahoma is a kind of migration; but not really. It is a death march with strong aspects of genocide.
By all means denounce empire, but a more useful approach consistent with such righteous indignation might be to elaborate an analysis of human aggression, territoriality, lack of education, lack of critical thinking, the disturbing tendency of many human beings fanatically to follow authoritarian figures off a cliff (e.g., Hoffer 1951). In that context, empathy is a proven way of deescalating violence and aggression.
Unfortunately, once a “policeman” is kneeling on your neck or someone throws a bomb, it is too late for empathy. The perpetrator fails the readiness assessment for empathy and it is necessary to invoke self-defense. And remember the best defense is a good offense—provided that it is proportionate to the incoming violence (which is notoriously hard to determine). Self-defense, setting limits, establishing boundaries are what is needed. There is a readiness assessment for empathy, and it requires that one be relatively safe and secure in one’s own person. Above all, the readiness requires a willingness to inquire into one’s own blindspots and preconscious biases. Furthermore, Empathy 101 teaches that empathy does not work an active battlefield, if one is starving to death, or hanging upside down in a torture chamber. Never underestimate the power of empathy—never—but empathy in such extreme situations ends up looking like what the FBI Hostage Negotiating team uses to open communication with the hostage takers, or looking like “Red Team, Red Team!”—think like the opponent in a war game (e.g., Zenko 2015). As it stands, Migrant Aesthetics misunderstands empathy, mutilates it, and then blames empathy because empathy can be misapplied by migrant authors, some of the male members of which are both perpetrators and survivors, for calling attention to their plight and that of the devalued Other within us all.
The other hidden variable is that these humans are a hungry species. At the risk of over-simplification, long since incurred, the development of Cyrus McCormick’s combine-wheat-reaper, and the follow-on agribusiness technology, allow some 2% of the population to grow enough food to feed the entire planet; and this in spite of the fact that human choices made under aggression continue to use food as a weapon of starvation. Prior to the Green Revolution, the other 98% of the population had to work twelve to sixteen hours a day to grow enough food to avoid slow death by starvation. As noted, the migrant classics, admittedly shot through with empire, of Willa Cather and Ole Edvart Rolvaag, confront hunger as an ever-present specter, pending a successful harvest. Meanwhile, apparently large dairy herds really do contribute to greenhouse gases.
The grievance against empathy begins: Migrant Aesthetics writes (p. 4): “More broadly, the genre of immigrant literature depends on a model of reading founded on empathy—a model that my book takes to task. Literature promotes empathy, we are told, but empathy can easily slip into a projection of readers’ feelings and even into outright condescension.” As a reviewer, I am holding my head in my hands and rocking back-and-forth quasi-catatonically. I am in disbelief at the lack of common sense, lack of critical thinking, and absence of argumentative charity in confusing empathy and projection. Projection is a breakdown of empathy. Projection is a misfiring and/or going off the rails of empathy. Projection is a “getting lost in translation” of empathy. Now attribute these to empathy and dismiss empathy. Hmmm.
As regards “a model of reading founded on empathy,” please stop right there. Reading the story would not work—would not make any sense—would, strictly speaking, be unintelligible without empathy. Without empathy, the actions and contingencies, the struggles and high spirits, setbacks and successes, that are represented in the story would be strange sounds and gestures appearing to an anthropologist on Mars or on her first day in an alien culture, prior to marshalling her empathic skills. Never underestimate the power of storytelling, but absent empathy, it does not get traction. Reading is founded on empathy.
If the reader did not bring the capacity for empathy to the reading of the text, the text itself would not make sense. Reading the simplest narrative about a snowman melting in the spring thaw, much less Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina’s anguish at being patriarchally denied access to her son, would be unintelligible. Without the vicarious experience of empathic receptivity, the reading of the most dramatic fiction will be indistinguishable from reading the railroad schedule when the rail workers were on strike. Meaningless. Unintelligible. The water streaming from the abandoned child’s face would not be tears; the clenched fist would not be anger but an excess of adrenaline; the trembling would not be fear but Parkinson’s disorder. The migrant bones in the desert over which no one prayed would be calcified carbon, not an anguished cry for help and human response. Without empathy, one would perhaps be able to provide an accurate description, whether as fact or fiction is irrelevant here, of the Other’s behavior from a third person perspective, but the behavior would lack vitality, energy, strength, aliveness, and relatedness to the things that matter to human beings. One would truly be like Descartes looking out the window at people on the street below, wondering if the entities that appear to be people are really rather robot-like automata. Descartes was practicing an exercise in radical doubt, whereas the reader that lacked the capacity for empathy would be practicing an exercise in radical draining of meaning from the text in every sense from pragmatics to semantics—encountering empty words describing empty behavior, as noted, like reading a train schedule during the railway strike, instead of reading an engaging narrative such as Anna’s emotional, moral, cognitive. spiritual struggles to attain self-knowledge and personal fulfillment.
However, Migrant Aesthetic responds: You have now got the point. Drive out empathy to let justice and a small set of related responses come forth. It doesn’t work. Migrant Aesthetics “forecloses” (rejects) empathy, then immediately lets it back in, because empathy is indispensable.
Carpio (p. 8): “[…] [T]he writers I examine reject empathy as the main mode of rationality, opting instead for what Hannah Arendt called “representative thinking” that is, they urge reader to think, as themselves, from the position of another person and thus to call into question their own preconceptions and actions” [italics added]. Thus, Migrant Aesthetics rejects empathy while calling out and requiring including “the position of another person,” which is precisely the folk definition of empathy.
Arendt’s reference here is of course to a single line in Kant’s Third Critique (1791/93 (AA 158)) about “enlarged thinking” [erweiterten…Denkungart] that is, to think from the perspective of the Other. Sounds like the folk definition of empathy to me. This cipher of “enlarged thinking”, which remains unintegrated in Kant, became the inspiration for Arendt’s incomplete third volume of the life of the mind on political judgment. Once again, it is the folk definition of empathy.
The fan out is challenging at this point. This single quote from Arendt plays such a significant role in Migrant Aestheticsthat there is no avoiding a dive into Arendt scholarship. By invoking the formidable name and work of Hannah Arendt, who was herself a migrant refugee (note well!), a Jewish person fleeing from the Nazis, a whole new thread is started.
Arendt rarely uses the word “empathy,” though “animal pity” gets called out in the context of Himmler’s fake empathy (Arendt 1971: 105–106; Agosta 2010: 73). Arendt is not thought of as an advocate for empathy, though, in its own Kantian way, her work is rich in empathic understanding. In one of her few uses of the word “empathy” itself, the otherwise astute Arendt claims that “empathy” requires becoming the Other in a kind of merger, which, of course, is the breakdown of empathy into emotional contagion. Other than this terminological slip up, Arendt’s analysis is an incisive application of empathy to politics in “Truth and Politics” in Between Past and Future (1968: 9):
I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions… The very process of opinion formation is determined by those in whose places somebody thinks and uses his own mind, and the only condition for this exertion of the imagination is disinterestedness, the liberation from one’s own private interests (Arendt 1968: 9; italics added).
The word “empathy” is in principle dispensable here, and Arendt’s lovely phrase “one trains one’s imagination to go visiting [the Other]” is an exact description of empathic understanding, though not empathic receptivity of the Other’s feelings/emotions. One does not blindly adopt the Other’s point of view—one takes off one’s own shoes before trying on the Other’s. Even in a thoughtless moment, more thinking occurs in Arendt’s casual, throw-away use of a word, than in most people’s entire dictionaries. If necessary, Arendt may be read against herself, for the simple introduction of the distinction “vicarious experience” of an Other’s experience is sufficient to contain all the puzzling cases about being or becoming someone else. As a good Kantian, Arendt would align in a universalizing moment with Kant’s sensus communus [“common sense” as an instrument of judgment]. Kant’s “enlarged thinking,” taking the points of view of many Others, is what enables people to judge by means of feelings as well as concepts. This is not loss of one’s self in projection and merger, but rather a thoughtful shifting of perspective and appreciation of what shows up as one does so. It is a false splitting to force a choice between feeling and thinking—both are required to have a complete experience of the Other.
Regarding Arendt’s use of the word “empathy” [Einfühlung] itself, it is likely she encountered it in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927: H125 [pagination of the German Niemeyer edition]), which she studied carefully. There Heidegger undercuts Max Scheler’s use of the term in criticizing Theodor LIpps, who uses of the term in his (Lipps’) Aesthetics (1903; see also Lipps 1909), in which Lipps defines empathy [Einfühlung] as a kind of aesthetic projection of the subject’s feelings onto art and nature (and the Other). The original definition of “empathy” in Lipps’ aesthetics is hard to distinguish from projective empathy. (The matter is a tangle, which I disentangle in Agosta (2014).) The examples of an angry storm at sea or the melancholy weeping willow trees or the smiling clouds and cheerful sunrise come to mind.
The controversy continues to fan out as Migrant Aesthetics marshals the authority of Namwali Serpall’s “The Banality of Empathy” (2019). Nice title. This is a reference to Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1971), about which it is hard to say just a little. I shall try. One of Arendt’s recurring themes is that evil is a consequence of thoughtlessness. She above on “enlarged thinking” and integrating many diverse points of view. According to Arendt, Eichmann was a simpleton, a “Hans Wurst” from the folktale, who did not think and just followed orders. The wanted-dead-or-alive poster for Thoughlessness has Eichmann’s photo on it. The result of thoughtlessness was catastrophe. Indeed. Of course, Eichmann had many “fellow travelers” in genocide.
If one empathizes thoughtlessly, the banality of empathy of Serpall’s title, then one is at risk of empathy misfiring as projection, emotional contagion, conformity, and so on. Just so. A rigorous and critical empathy is required to guard against these risks, and Arendt, no advocate for sloppy anything, much less sloppy empathy, is halfway, but not all-the-way, there with her invocation of Kant’s rigorous and critical method. The above-cited quotation from Arendt and my analysis of terms must count towards a clarification of the nuances of the matter of empathy.
Serpall’s article then raises the question about narrative art “If witnessing suffering firsthand doesn’t spark good deeds, why do we think art about suffering will?” Though this may have been intended as a rhetorical question, the answer requires an empirical, fact-based inquiry. Some witnessing of suffering does indeed spark good deeds. The standard Samaritan becomes the Good Samaritan when he stops to help the survivor of the robbery thereby creating neighborliness and community; whereas the Levite and Priest succumb to empathic distress and cross the road, thereby expanding indifference and alienation. These events get “narrativized” in the Parable of the same name, which, in turn, inspires some to good deeds, though others are left paralyzed by empathic distress.
As Suzanne Keen (2007; see also 2022) points out, some stories such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin have an outsized effect on positive politics, rallying people to the cause of the abolition of slavery; whereas other novels such as The Turner Diaries may arguably have given comfort to white supremacy and provided bomb-making instructions to domestic terrorists. The answer to Serpall’s (or the editor’s) question is direct: we think art will inspire good deeds because we find examples of art’s doing so, albeit with conditions and qualifications. The evidence: that is what happened. The more important but unaddressed issue is to distinguish how art can transfigure the pain and suffering of the migrant (and suffering humanity at large), overcoming trauma, or how such attempts risk devolving into what is sometimes called “trauma porn,” engaging the graphical description of trauma without the “disinterestedness of art,” resulting in a kind of indulgent “orgasm” of aggressive violent fantasies. (As a benchmark, and acknowledging that reasonable people may disagree, an example of trauma porn (other than snuff videos on the dark web) would be Mel Gibson’s film (2004), The Passion of the Christ.)
Arendt is sometimes accused, I believe unfairly, of being tin-eared in her statements about US race relations and desegregation, especially in Little Rock, AK in 1957. When the 13-year-old Arendt was subjected to antisemitic comments by her teacher at school in Königsberg, Germany,1919, her mother withdrew her under protocol and protest and home-schooled Hannah, before sending her off to Berlin for a secondary education. You have to get the picture here: the young Hannah reading the leather-bound Kantian First Critique in her late father’s vast library. Seemingly following the recommendation that Migrant Aesthetics (pp. 8, 13, 201) attributes to Arendt, she adopts a position, not a person, regarding US race relations (circa 1957!). “Positions not persons” is a fine slogan. It doesn’t work. Another false choice? The young black children in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 needed to get into the classroom to actually get books from the school library as some black families did not own a single book other than the bible (which, in a pinch, is an excellent choice, nevertheless…). That Arendt’s empathy misfires no more means that she lacks empathy or that empathy is invalid than that a driver who forgets to use her turn signal does not know how to drive (though she may get a citation!).
What is rarely noted by Arendt scholars is Arendt’s own strategic use of empathy in escaping from the Nazis. Having been arrested for Zionist “propaganda” activity by the Nazis, she builds an empathic rapport with the Gestapo prosecuting attorney, who is interviewing her in the same basement from which other Jewish people are deported to Buchenwald or Dachau. The result was not predictable. Arendt was released on her own recognizance, and, of course, she had immediately to flee across the border illegally. Now while we will never know all the nuances—in the interview (1964) Arendt makes it sound like part of her tactic to save her own life was that she bats her eyelashes at the young naïve Gestapo prosecutor, who has just been transferred from the criminal to the political division—more grim humor—but, don’t laugh, it worked. Never underestimate the power of empathy. (See Arendt’s interview with English subtitles “Hannah Arendt: Im Gespräch mit Günter Gaus” (1964).[1 Thus, never having used the word “empathy” positively even one time, the practice saves her life.
To compete the discussion of Arendt (1955/68: 153–206), she wrote a short intellectual biography of Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) in Men in Dark Times. Separately, Benjamin warned that the aestheticization of politics risks turning artistic expression into fascism. The theatrical (“artistic”) spectacle of a torch light parades at Nurnberg, Germany, (1933–1938) by masses of brown shirt Nazi storm troopers around a bonfire burning the canonical novels of western civilization is a mutilation of empathy into the emotional contagion of crowds as well as a mutilation of that civilization itself. Once again, it is hard to say just a little bit about this, nor is this review going to solve the problem of the relation between the aesthetic and the political. It is a disappointment that Arendt did not live long enough to complete more than a single sentence of her deep dive into the relation between Kant’s Critique of (Aesthetic) Judgment and politics; nor is it likely that such a project would have produced what Hegel produced when he undertook such a deep dive: The Philosophy of Right (1921), which read superficially gives the authority of The State a leading role in political life: “It is the way of God in the world, that there should be a state” according to Walter Kaufman’s translation.
Migrant aesthetics politicizes aesthetics with an anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, anti-empire-ist commitments, rhetoric (in the classical sense), and expressions, without necessarily making practical recommendations for political action. Migrant Aesthetics expels empathy from the garden of artistic achievement, because empathy does not provide a stable basis for political action. Never underestimate the relevance of Immanuel Kant, yet if one wants measurable results from political action, apply Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (1971) or analysis based on Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (1951), not Kant’s Third Critique. Hoffer calls out the mutilated logic of totalitarian thinking; and Alinsky knew quite a lot about building community, and though he did not use the word “empathy,” empathy lives in building community.
References
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Lou Agosta. (2010). Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
_________. (2010b). Heidegger’s 1924 Clearing of the Affects Using Aristotle’s Rhetoric: Book 2, Philosophy Today, Vol.54, no 4: 333–354.
_________. (2014). A Rumor of Empathy: Rewriting Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Pivot.
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__________________. (1971a). Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Viking Press.
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Lisa Blankenship. (2019). Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. Logan UT: Utah State University Press.
Paul Bloom. (2016). Against Empathy. New York: Ecco (Harper Collins).
Fritz Breithaupt. (2017). The Dark Sides of Empathy, Andrew Hamilton (tr.). Ithaca, NYY: Cornell UP.
Glenda Carpio. (2023). Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy by Glenda Carpio (New York: Columbia University Press
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Alisha Gaines. (2017). Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy by Alisha Gaines (University of North Carolina Press.
Jonathan Haber. (2020). Critical Thinking. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Martin Heidegger. (1927). Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trs.). New York: Harper and Row, 1963.
Eric Hoffer. (1951). The True Believer. New York: Random.
Suzanne Keen. (2007). Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
________________. (2022). Reading and Empathy. London: Routledge.
Heinz Kohut. (1981). On empathy. In The Search for the Self: Volume 4: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut 1978-1981, London: Karnac Books, 2011: 525–535.
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Theodor Lipps. (1903). Aesthetik. Volume I. Hamburg: Leopold Voss.
_____________. (1909). Leitfaden der Psychologie. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelman Verlag.
Namwali Serpall. (2019). The banality of empathy. The New York Review: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/03/02/the-banality-of-empathy/?lp_txn_id=1496946 [checked on 10/20/2023].
Micah Zenko. (2015). Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy. New York: Basic Books.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Categories: a rigorous and critical empathy, dark empathy, empathic responsiveness, empathy and storytelling, empathy trends, fake empathy, fiendish empathy
Empathy Lessons 