Heidi L. Maibom (c.phil Copenhagen, PhD London) is Distinguished Professor at the University of the Basque Country, Professor of Philosophy at University of Cincinnati, and the President of the European Society for the Study of Emotion (EPSSE). She has explored empathy in articles and in The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (Oxford 2022), Empathy (Routledge 2020), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (Routledge 2017), and Empathy and Morality (Oxford 2014). She also has research interests in emotions, responsibility, wellbeing, and psychopathy.
This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Heidi Maibom’s recent book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (OUP 2022). Today we begin with an introduction from Heidi. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Friday.
What do we mean when we say “take my (his/her/their) perspective?” In The Space Between, I set out to explore this question. Whereas it is often assumed that a person’s perspective reflects their comprehensive way of seeing the world as a result of their unique backgrounds and personalities, I argue that a first-person perspective represents a relatively invariant way of seeing the world common to all people and other organisms. It is, if you like, the form of our perspectives which, of course, also have contents (though those contents are themselves affected by their form). Such a perspective involves a distinctive way of seeing the world in relation to ourselves, and as a reflection of our interests as the beings that we are. This means that our pre-reflective way of seeing others is, in fact, in terms of the significance those people—their thoughts, feelings, and actions—have to us. Following the literature in psychology, I call our pre-reflective way of experiencing and thinking about the world, an ‘agent perspective’ and our pre-reflective way of experiencing and thinking about others, when we are not directly interacting with them, an ‘observer perspective.’ The empirical literature shows that there are subtle, but significant, differences between the way we think of ourselves and “our” world (from an agent perspective) and how we think of others and their world (from an observer perspective). The philosophical literature, particularly that grounded in the phenomenological tradition, gives us further reasons to believe that we are situated in the world, not primarily as epistemological consumers—or thinkers, to put it more simply—but as actors. I focus mainly on agent and observer perspectives because a) they are the best documented in the empirical literature and my aim is to provide an empirically adequate account, and b) they are the most relevant when it comes to perspective taking. It should not be ignored, however, that when we interact with others, we do not do so as observers, nor do we do so from a pure agent-perspective because their very presence affects our own perspective. I discuss this phenomenon, but acknowledge here that much more work needs to be done in this area.
It follows from my account that there are two ways in which we can take perspectives. First, we can take an agent perspective on another person, thereby inverting our pre-reflective way of thinking about them (as observers). Second, we can take an observer perspective on ourselves, thereby inverting our pre-reflective way of thinking about ourselves. Both are of immense value, I argue. The first allows us, among other things, to understand other people better and to recognize different ways of relating to the world in terms of one’s situatedness. I include emotional empathy under agent perspective taking because when we experience an emotion, we represent the world in relation to us. Replicating another’s emotion is, therefore, a way of representing the world in relation to us that mirrors the way the other person represents the world in relation to themselves. Emotionally empathizing with someone is a particularly easy and rich way of taking their perspective because an emotion is a complex psychological event with relevance not only for our way of representing the world, but also for our motivation, attention, being motivated, focusing our attention, and so on. The second way of taking another perspective is equally valuable. This helps us to see ourselves as others might see us, and in particular, it helps us see ourselves as we would see us were we not ourselves. Let me explain. We tend to regard ourselves, our motives, etc. more benevolently than we do those of others; we also often see through our actions to our goals and therefore have an impoverished understanding of the larger reality of what it is we do. Seeing ourselves, our motives, or our actions as we would see another, their motivations, or actions, is a way of correcting our own biases and coming to a clearer view of our actions. This capacity, I suggest, is central to being a responsible agent.
What makes perspective taking possible, and powerful, on the view I’m expounding in The Space Between is what I sometimes call ‘the formal features’ of perspective, which represent ways of experiencing and thinking about the world that is common to all agents, in virtue of their representing the world in relation to them. But one cannot get around the fact that perspective taking involves more than the shifting of one’s ego-centric coordinates; it essentially involves the imagination. Perspective taking is, therefore, hostage to a person’s ability to imagine, recollect, and recombine and also to their breadth of experience. It is limited how well we can imagine visceral affect and we tend to imagine events in a de-contextualized way (also known as “focalizing”), which affects the fidelity of what is imagined. We can, and should, compensate for such limitations by honing our skills, I argue. Empathy is better regarded as a skill than a set-in-stone ability that you either have or not.
The book works up to addressing the moral value of empathy, regarding which there has been endless debate, particularly during the last couple of decades. Since my focus is less on the affective side of empathy and more on the understanding it yields, it is this that is central in my account of its moral relevance. Empathy, I argue, is essential to impartiality, and it is therefore also essential to morality to the extent impartiality is central to morality. Why? As Nietzsche points out in a quote with which the book begins
[t]here is only a seeing from a perspective, only a ‘knowing’ from a perspective, and the more emotions we express over a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we train on the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘idea’ of that thing, our ‘objectivity.’ (The Genealogy of Morals, III, 12).
In the early parts of the book, I am at pains to explain why the way we see the world can be understood on the model of the visual metaphor of ‘perspective.’ Such a perspective, we know, is always partial. Good visual representations, therefore, require integrating information from different visual perspectives. The situation is no different, in its essentials, when it comes to psychological perspectives. To understand the world more objectively or impartially, we must adopt more perspectives on it. And so it turns out that empathy makes us less, not more, biased, contrary to recent arguments. It follows from this position that if the moral point of view is an impartial view, it is thereby an empathic point of view. Of course, it is not a point of view at all, but an amalgam of many points of view. Instead of relying on the view of an Impartial Spectator, as another proponent of the moral value of empathy did, namely Adam Smith, we must instead rely on the combination of many different points of view for the very simple reason that the idea of an Impartial Spectator, namely one that has access to all relevant information, for instance, is an impossibility. There can be no such all-encompassing point of view, and even if there were, we would be unable to take it.