The trend of bringing large language models to empathy and empathic relatedness is a game changer. The question is not whether the generative AI can be empathic, but the extent to which the designers are able to distinguish responsiveness from “stroking one’s ego,” sycophancy (servile flattery), and the extent to which prospective clients decide to engage (both open questions at this date (Q1 2026)).
Caruth (1996) concisely defines trauma in terms of an experience that is registered but not experienced, a truth or reality that is not available to the survivor as a standard experience. The person (for example) was factually, objectively present when the head on collision occurred, but, even if the person has memories, and would acknowledge the event, paradoxically, the person does not presently experience it as something the person experienced in a way that a person standardly experienced the past event. The survivor experiences dissociated, repetitive nightmares, flashbacks, and depersonalization.
James’ incomparable empathy with Maisie and his penetrating and astute comprehension of human relations writ large applies empathy in the extended sense to who people are as possibilities, walking in the other’s shoes (after, of course, first taking off one’s own to avoid projection), translating communications between adults and children (and adults and adults) as well as affect-matching and mis-matching (empathy in the narrow sense).
“Beloved” is the name of a person. Toni Morrison builds on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved person, who escaped with her two children even while pregnant with a third, succeeding in reaching freedom across the Ohio River in 1854. However, shortly thereafter, slave catchers (“bounty hunters”) arrived with the local sheriff under the so-called fugitive slave act to return Margaret and her children to slavery. Rather than submit to re-enslavement, Margaret tried to kill the children, also planning then to kill herself. She succeeded in killing one, before being overpowered. The dead returns as a ghost – Beloved.
This article on Paul Ricoeur, empathy, and the hermeneutics of suspicion in literature will be engaging to students of Ricoeur and empathy alike. One can download the PDF : http://ricoeur.pitt.edu/ojs/ricoeur/article/view/628
Until Bigger Thomas (BT) committed the first murder, he was little different than the biblical Cain before he slew Abel. Human history begins at the point at which that murder, born of envy, occurs. The murder creates agency. Likewise with BT:
Review: Mutilated empathy in spite of itself in Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy by Glenda Carpio (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023, 285pp.) [This review updated to correct typos and grammatical infelicities on Dec 10, 2023.]… Read More ›
Forced to make a decision that no one should have to make; that no one can (really) make; and yet that she did make. This survivor is also a now a perpetrator. Moral trauma.
At first, empathy and rhetoric seem to be at cross purposes – yet the speaker without empathy is not likely to be effective or persuasive, no matter how much we may disagree
A significant aspect of the interest in relating empathy and the reading of fiction is to make the world a better place. Read some quality fiction; expand one’s empathy; and take action to improve the world. Wouldn’t it be nice?
Empathy Lessons 