Olivia Bailey is an assistant professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley. She works in moral psychology, moral epistemology, and the history of moral philosophy, and she is currently teaching a graduate seminar on imagination's moral dimensions.
A post by Olivia Bailey
My aim in this entry is to raise (or re-raise) a question about the limits of a particular imaginative activity that often travels under the name of empathy, and to voice one possible answer to that question.
Adam Smith tells us that the emotionally “live” imaginative activity at the center of his moral theory involves a kind of exchange of character: “But though sympathy is very properly said to arise from an imaginary change of situations with the person principally concerned, yet…[w]hen I condole with you for the loss of your only son, in order to enter into your grief I do not consider what I, a person of such a character and profession, should suffer, if I had a son, and if that son was unfortunately to die: but I consider what I should suffer if I was really you, and I not only change circumstances with you, but I change persons and characters” (TMS, VII.iii.1.4). Following Smith, it is common, in the literature on what is now known as empathy rather than sympathy, to distinguish between two forms of imaginative engagement with others’ perspectives: 1) imagining being oneself in the other’s position 2) imagining being the other in the other’s position, where only the latter counts as true empathy. Oftentimes, imagining being the other in the other’s position is understood to involve the imagined adoption of not just the other’s history and/or material characteristics, but also their sensibility. By “sensibility,” I mean a characteristic pattern of feeling and concern, centrally including tendencies to apprehend things in a particular evaluative light. Different people, the thought goes, have different sensibilities (he is timorous, she is bold, they are hot-headed and apt to see insult everywhere). And if we want to get a real grip on another’s experience, such that we can accurately appreciate and assess their perceptions, their choices, their actions, we need to empathize in this latter sense: we need to imaginatively view the other’s circumstances as if through the filter of their sensibility.
A “confinement” challenge
We might worry, though, that others’ sensibilities are not available for imaginative adoption in the same way that their material situations are. The problem is not, or not just, that we don’t know what it is like to be someone else, or that we haven’t had the same experiences and will therefore struggle to imaginatively recreate their position accurately. There is, some suspect, actually something confused about the very idea of “seeing through” sensibilities that are not one’s own. Peter Goldie forcefully argues that efforts at empathetic perspective taking are bound to be unsuccessful, because empathy cannot “operate with the appropriately full-blooded notion of first-personal agency that is involved in deliberation” (303). Why not? Well, our character or sensibility undoubtedly shapes our deliberation, helping to determine which possibilities show up for us as options, how careful we are in reflection, and so forth. But our deliberation does not typically invoke our character as a fact to be considered. We do not think to ourselves, “This is a situation that called for social courage, but I am a timorous person, and so I will back away.” We may sometimes reckon with our own personalities as conditions to be coped with. But a person who treats her character as a fact to be accommodated is thereby alienated from it.
The worry, for Goldie, is that we empathizers cannot effectively shift our perspective to accommodate differences in sensibility except by consciously holding the other’s character trait in view, and thus relating to it in an alienated way that is fundamentally unlike the other’s usual relation to her sensibility. If I am not naturally timorous, I will have to consciously and laboriously ask: okay, how would a timorous person choose, here? But to think in this way is just to fail to accurately simulate the other’s unselfconscious, non-alienated relation to their situation.
According to Goldie, if a sensibility is not ours, then we cannot really imaginatively inhabit it in an authentically first personal way for the purposes of deliberation. But the problem he raises seems to extend beyond deliberative contexts, too. Plausibly, it should recur for all manner of evaluative apprehensions. The timorous person naturally, immediately and vividly apprehends even a bouncing puppy as scary. If we are not ourselves timorous, then how can we hope to imaginatively represent the puppy in the same light?
It is worth taking this concern seriously. Adam Smith suggests that adopting another’s character involves effort and care. But will any amount of effort enable us to circumvent the basic problem highlighted here? Or will our efforts to “truly” empathize always be grossly distorting? How can we resist the thought that in the imaginative realm, no less than the actual one, we are in fact confined to a single native sensibility, such that we can never really do the thing Smith treats as so ordinary?
A “containment” response?
Several responses to the worry present themselves. We could simply accept that empathy in the sensibility-adopting sense is not really possible. Or, alternatively, we could turn to situationist psychology, and deny that there really are such things as distinct sensibilities– there is just the human way of looking at things. But perhaps there is another path, one that will allow us to hold on to Goldie’s insight that there are barriers to fully inhabiting a foreign sensibility without thereby surrendering the thought that we can sometimes empathize in the Smithean sense. I was struck, in this regard, by how the novelist Zadie Smith (no relation to Adam, so far as I know) describes her relation to the characters that populate her work. She writes: “I’ve always been aware… of having a lot of contradictory voices knocking around my head…I found myself feeling with these imaginary strangers: feeling with them, for them, alongside them and through them.” Zadie Smith finds something right in Whitman’s claim to contain multitudes– he, and she, are somehow multi-vocal. And she doesn’t take this to be a unique writerly trait, either. She claims: “our social and personal lives are a process of continuous fictionalization, as we internalize the other-we-are-not, dramatize them, imagine them speak for and through them.” One idea consonant with Zadie Smith’s remarks is that others are internalized in the sense that we know them; we can anticipate what they will say next not because we can see through their eyes, but because they are predictable. But it seems to me that that sort of internalization does not exhaust the extent of the polyvocality or polyperspectivity she claims.
Perhaps we actually have, in our own lives, more than one sensibility that we can access not with laborious and disfiguring triangularization, treating it at arms’ length, but truly from the inside. One possibility is that we have one “home” sensibility, but that we can and do slip into alternate sensibilities– a little reflection on the experience of moving in and out of moods might bolster this proposal. What distinguishes the home sensibility from those others? Maybe it is the sensibility we most readily endorse, or the one we most self-consciously identify with, or the one that dominates our everyday decision-making. If we can make good on the distinction between the home sensibility and alternate sensibilities, without having to give up on the thought that we have an insider’s access to all of them, that would take us some way toward a defense of the thought that it is possible to imagine being the other in the other’s position. As part of this imaginative effort, we could say, we may deploy a sensibility that is at once ours (in that it is part of our first-personal repertoire) and not ours (in that it is not our home sensibility). Not all sensibilities will be available for this sort of access – people whose outlooks are very monstrous or very saintly may be beyond the imaginative reach of most of us, for instance. But maybe I, even as an optimist, can tap into a vein of melancholy in order to empathize with a friend’s gloomy outlook.
Admittedly, one might wonder whether raising the possibility of multiple distinct native sensibilities just threatens to push Goldie’s problem deeper. Do we have to worry about the impossibility of non-distorting intrapersonal cross-perspectival understanding now, too? And there is also the problem that even if we are not confined to a single sensibility in our real and imaginative lives, switching between different sensibilities may not be something we can do at will. So, the suggestion that I find contained within Zadie Smith’s remarks may prove difficult to develop satisfactorily. But still, it seems worth a try.
References
Goldie, Peter. “Anti-Empathy.” In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Eds. P. Goldie and A. Coplan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Eds. D. D. Raphael & A. L. Macfie. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982.
Smith, Zadie. “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction.” The New York Review of Books. Oct. 24, 2019.