Olivia Bailey is an assistant professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, specializing in early modern and contemporary moral psychology. She is particularly interested in the epistemic and ethical significance of emotionally-charged imagination and understanding.
This week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Epistemic Uses of Imagination, a recently published volume edited by Chris Badura and Amy Kind (Routledge 2021). See here for an introduction from Chris and Amy. Commentaries will appear Tuesday through Friday.
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We generally think that self-knowledge is special. Our grasp of our own experiential and intentional states is at least more complete, more immediate, and/or more secure than is our handle on others’ corresponding states. Most of us also accept, though, that other people’s inner lives are not a complete mystery to us. One way of thinking about the relation between self-knowledge and other-oriented knowledge is that imagination forms a bridge by which we move from the former to the latter. As Amy Coplan memorably puts it: empathy, or the imaginative simulation of another person’s psychological states, “promises to rescue us from the island” of a lonely “Robinson-Crusoe”-like inner life (2011; 18).
The first three chapters in this section, from Amy Kind, Julia Langkau, and Luke Roelofs, give us resources to resist some skeptical arguments (or assertions) to the effect that imagination can’t perform this sort of epistemic bridging task, while the last chapter, from Nick Wiltsher and Bence Nanay, considers how an imaginative bridge to others’ perspectives might actually work in the opposite sense, as a means of securing a different and better appreciation of one’s self.
One pessimistic position concerning imaginative bridging, most forcefully voiced by Peter Goldie (2011), is that while imagining being oneself in another’s position is possible, imagining being someone else is not. Many of us optimists have thought that we attain some important sorts of other-oriented knowledge via that latter imaginative activity, knowledge that we can’t get via the shallower activity of mere imaginative “self-relocation.” According to Goldie, though, imagining being someone else is impossible because other people have different psychological profiles than we do. We as empathizers cannot effectively shift our perspective to accommodate those differences except by consciously holding the other’s relevant psychological traits in view. And when we hold those traits in view, we fail to accurately simulate the other’s unselfconscious, non-alienated relation to their own psychological profile.
Roelofs argues that in accepting that there is a single, binary contrast, imagining-self vs. imagining-other, both pessimists like Goldie and the optimists he opposes make two mistakes. First, they run together several contrasts that ought to be kept separate. Most crucially, whether I am imagining myself or imagining someone else (a matter of identity) is different from whether I am attempting any imaginative accommodation of the other’s psychological difference (a matter of “adjustment”). And second, optimists and pessimists alike have seen rigid dichotomy where they ought not to. With regard to the matter of identity, Roelofs suggests that just the same imaginative object or “model” (an imagined burst of resentment, say) can be flexibly interpreted either as a representation of how I would feel in your situation or as a representation of how you feel, without thereby shifting that representation’s contents. Given that manifest flexibility, it is a mistake to think that imagining myself will have a categorically different modal or epistemic status than will imagining being another. Roelofs urges that matters are not black-and-white when it comes to psychological adjustment, either: “it is clear that more or less adjustment may be made: there are a hundred ways in which any two people differ” (290). That observation seems right. The question is what lesson we should draw from it. Roelofs claims that neither the identity distinction nor the psychological distinction is “sharp,” but the distinctions do at least fail to be sharp in different ways (285). Presumably, making adjustments to accommodate the other’s different psychological profile will involve a change to the imaginative model we conjure up. So, if we want to defuse the claim that unadjusted imagining and adjusted imagining will have a categorically different modal or epistemic status (the claim that I think Goldie meant to be making) we can’t just redeploy the same argumentative route we might pursue vis-à-vis the putative imagine-self/imagine-other contrast. In a way, Roelofs’ good point that imaginative accommodation of psychological difference can come in many degrees could be grist to Goldie’s pessimistic mill; he could just insist that there is still a sharp difference between no accommodation and some accommodation, and that as soon as we at all slide into the latter, we fall into error.
Amy Kind and Julia Langkau offer allied responses to those who think we cannot in our imaginative empathetic efforts accommodate differences in psychological profile and/or differences in what Kind calls “experiential perspectives.” Contra Goldie (Langkau argues) consciously referring to the other’s different traits won’t entail that our imaginative recreation of their perspective will be hopelessly distorted, incapable of affording any access to what it is like to be the other person. True, the empathizer’s total mental state will include some elements (that conscious awareness) that do not mirror the others’ total mental state, but that’s no reason to think that we can’t learn anything at all. And contra folks like Laurie Paul and Elizabeth Spelman, Kind argues that we are not compelled to accept that some experiential gaps, including those that separate the oppressed and the privileged, are in-principle imaginatively unbridgeable.
Both Kind and Langkau suggest that even major differences– in character, cognitive style, or experience– can be overcome through what Kind has named imaginative scaffolding, which involves “perform[ing] various kinds of transformations on [the] material” provided by our own experience (Kind, 244). We can “add,” “subtract,” or “otherwise modify” those materials to assemble a representation sufficiently close to the other’s experience that we can count as knowing “what it’s like” for them (ibid.). Kind and Langkau both identify as hard cases those where one’s past experience might not furnish sufficient material. But it may also be worth thinking about a different sort of hard case, one where the problem is not so much that one lacks material, but rather that the material one does have resists transformation and/or crowds out imaginative alternatives. This problem might especially arise in cases where another’s emotional or evaluative outlook differs from mine. If you love Donald Judd’s minimalism, can I really get to what that’s like for you by taking my own aesthetic enthusiasm (which happens to be for Rococo excess), transmogrifying and welding it to a representation of Judd’s austere boxes? Or will those elements resist being so conjoined, given that my aesthetic sensibility is essentially anti-minimalist? Will there be something about your aesthetic outlook that will remain unintelligible to me, at least until I manage to modify my actual sensibility? A full defense of imaginative scaffolding should, I think, engage with the possibility of what we might call interpersonal imaginative resistance.
Kind and Langkau’s contributions also invite questions about the relation between testimony and imagination. Kind rightly points out that we do not have to choose between listening to people about their experiences and imaginatively engaging with their perspectives. Langkau draws attention to some evidence (from studies of fiction-reading) that being directly informed about others’ mental states may actually hamper our empathetic abilities or inclinations. Two things to wonder about, then: (1) does the evidence Langkau cites at all spell trouble for Kind’s optimism that listening and imaginatively engaging are natural allies, rather than alternatives? (2) Is the epistemic situation of one who both hears and imagines how it is for the other person better than the epistemic situation of one who merely listens very well, in any respect that is worth caring about? What is the ultimate value (epistemic, moral, and/or political) of the additional insight imagination, but not testimony, can get us? Kind cautiously touches on the possibility that our imaginative engagement sometimes provides a salutary check on credulity, but it seems to me that there is still more to be said here.
Wiltsher and Nanay draw on the writer Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet to develop a really interesting thesis: “[O]ur reality limits what we can imagine. The more one is certain about one’s own reality, the less well one is able to imagine beyond it” (303). At first glance, that claim looks strange; I am quite sure that I am a junior professor and not a deep-sea diver, but my beginning to doubt that doesn’t seem like it will at all help me to imagine a life under the waves. Another formulation, though, helps to make the proposal more palatable: “if you consider yourself to have certain essential properties, you will not be able to imagine being any self that lacks those properties” (306). That suggests one potentially promising way of analyzing my Rococo-lover’s imaginative struggles with minimalism. Perhaps imaginative resistance arises in such a case not or not just because the imaginer’s experiential stock isn’t amenable to the requisite imaginative recombination, but because she has particular higher-order beliefs about how her sensibilities relate to her identity.
One delicate matter, here, is the relationship between taking oneself seriously (thinking of oneself as having essential properties) and making something serious of oneself (making oneself into a being with essential properties). Wiltsher and Nanay move between phrases that seem to invoke one or the other of these apparently different senses of self-conception. We could, if we are good Sartreans, simply deny that the latter matters at all to our imaginative abilities, on the grounds that we cannot actually be thus concretized. But I think there may be ways we do cause ourselves to become more “fixed,” and thereby reduce our imaginative powers, even without taking ourselves to be thus fixed. Someone who always carries on in just the same way may think of themselves as a “man without qualities,” even as their narrow habits do constrict their imagination.
Wiltsher and Nanay also extract from Pessoa’s work the intriguing suggestion that while imaginatively adopting others’ perspectives on ourselves can lead us to an essentialized picture of ourselves, it need not: “[O]ne must adopt perspectives of (imagined) others on oneself; indeed, imaginative proliferation of other’s perspectives is almost automatic. But one can use one’s imagination to adopt, own, those perspectives. If one succeeds in so inhabiting them, one can force them to adopt the same view of one’s essential nothingness that one has oneself” (314). We might wonder why “inhabiting,” “adopting,” or “owning” (are those all the same?) imagined perspectives means that one can “force” them, and also whether thus “forcing” them comprises their usefulness in other respects. Wiltsher and Nanay propose that we rely on imagined outside perspectives to get more kaleidoscopic, distanced (but non-essentializing!) views of ourselves, but if those outside perspectives are under our immediate control, does that not at all diminish their revelatory power? I also wonder why it is important to force one’s own self-conception onto these imagined perspectives. Why not think (contra Sartre) that we can cheerfully maintain a non-essentialized self-conception by resolutely holding multiple essentialized but mutually incongruent external perspectives in mind?
I will stop there, but there is plenty more to ask about these clever, careful, and insightful chapters. They challenge claims and frames that have been taken for granted in a lot of recent theorizing, and I am excited to see how they influence ongoing conversations about self- and other-oriented understanding.
References
Coplan, A. (2011). Understanding empathy. In Amy Coplan & Peter Goldie (eds.), Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford University Press. pp. 3--18.
Goldie, Peter (2011). Anti-empathy. In Amy Coplan & Peter Goldie (eds.), Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford University Press. pp. 302.