Sarah Vernallis is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation develops an ethics of empathy. More broadly, her work intersects with ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics.
A post by Sarah Vernallis
Empathy is an imaginative activity. When we succeed in empathizing, we come to understand what it is like for another person. But what role, exactly, does the imagination play in empathizing? Is there just one imaginative move made in empathizing or do we invoke a varied set of imaginative strategies? On the standard story, the role of imagination in empathy is restricted to reconstructing the other’s situation, leaving the work of getting an affective response to one’s psychological dispositions. We have Adam Smith to thank for this conception:
By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments in his situation, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike him. (Smith, (1982[1759]: I.I.i.2)
On this Smithian traditional story, imagination is at play in recreating the situation of the other person, which then triggers an affective response in the empathizer. This story has been taken up by many contemporary philosophers of empathy, from Goldman (2006) to Currie and Ravenscroft (2002). It seems to me that the roles of imagination in empathy are more varied than this standard story permits, given the diverse strategies we use in empathizing with others. Here, I explore just one such strategy, which is the inverse of this traditional account: affective selection.
What is the imaginative strategy of affective selection? It’s important to be clear here about the difference between an affective state and an emotion. When we empathize, another’s emotion is our target of inquiry. Understanding another’s emotion, beyond just their sensory feelings, involves seeing how things in the world seem to call for that emotion. I take an affective state to include some features of an emotion, such as certain bodily responses and psychological dispositions, but to lack an emotion’s intentionality. The strategy of affective selection involves first selecting and entering an affective state, then using the distinctive orientation of that affective state to interpret the situation, thereby gaining an understanding of the other person’s emotion, with both its affective dimension and situational aboutness.
Why think that understanding the other’s perspective on a situation might first require having a feeling? Here’s one example of the difference this makes: the feeling of being in love gets described via the (tired) metaphor of looking through rose-colored glasses. The lover is teased for always seeing the good in their partner and experiencing the world as full of opportunities. Being in love changes what they notice (only the positive things) and how they’re disposed to react (warmly, trustingly). To enter into the lover’s admittedly selective perspective, the empathizer may need to put on their own rose-colored glasses. Without them, the empathizer will focus on the wrong things, such as the early signs of incompatibility. The truth in this old metaphor is that the emotion someone is feeling affects their experience–their patterns of thought and their interpretation of their surroundings.
Imaginative choices are involved throughout the strategy of affective selection, both in triggering an affective state and in capturing some of the ways in which an emotion changes one’s perspective. To see how this strategy might work, consider the choices and work of the method actor. Method actors treat emotions as “part of our toolkit. Far from being caught in them, we conduct them at our will and remain conscious that we are doing so.” (Rushe, 128). The method actor makes an initial judgment about what emotion the character is feeling or is perhaps guided by the director, and then needs to find ways to imaginatively draw up the feelings of that emotion directly.
The ‘movement’ technique of method acting helps actors access an emotional register that will then guide authentic expressions. For the actor, accessing this affective state helps illuminate the situational details that the character would notice, their bodily stance and facial expressions, and the cadence of their speech. What’s distinctive about the ‘movement’ school popularized by Michael Chekhov and interpreted by instructors like Sinead Rushe (2019), is its focus on harnessing bodily movements as cues for accessing and re-entering a character’s emotional state.
It takes creative, imaginative work to select the right physical gesture to help one enter an emotion. For instance, to access the general feeling of ‘rising’ which forms the basis of many positive emotions, Rushe directs as follows:
Grip your arms very tightly by your sides for about a minute. Then suddenly release them, allowing your arms to float freely up in the air, ‘like a cork,’ in Petit’s words, ‘that’s been put down…incredibly deep at the bottom of the ocean…and keep[s] floating up (MCT, 309). Hold the arms in the air, as if they are continuing to rise… Begin to execute everyday activities under the influence of this sensation. (Rushe, 171).
The imaginative work involved here is more varied than that of trying to imaginatively reconstruct a situation. Creative choices are involved both in selecting the right basis for the movement and in imagining how to embody it. The image of a cork is distant from the human form and yet can be fruitfully tapped as a cue. Imaginative work is involved in visualizing oneself as a cork and thinking through in what ways one’s body can be instructed to evoke this image. Rushe’s emphasis on a first step of restriction that is then followed by release is a stroke of genius. A less effective evocation of the cork could involve mimicking the shape of a cork while jumping up. There is room for choice about the right basis for the movement and the right steps for the movement itself. The dynamic that the movement school exploits here, namely that there is a manipulatable connection between physical movement and affective state is supported by a number of psychology studies (See e.g. Strack et al. (1988); Stepper and Strack (1993); Philippot et al. (2002)).
Here’s an example of the difference this strategy of affective selection makes to empathy’s imaginative work. Angry, my friend fixates on some details in an email from her boss. She finds them condescending. Focusing on the situation, I might over-emphasize the trust she has formerly expressed for her boss, dismissing the email’s apparent tone of curtness as mere haste. Turning aside from my initial judgment, I try to inhabit her feeling of anger with a movement cue. I’m trying to conjure anger’s affective readiness to lash out, picturing a bear beset by bees. I move by body as if buffeted, wheeling around to fight back. My physical state triggers a coiled readiness to respond, to jump to conclusions. I then reconsider the email, shifting my focus to diction. My new alertness to insult and fine-grained focus helps me to see each small detail blaze forth with a kind of revealed pattern of disrespect. It’s in returning my attention to the other’s situation that my affective understanding is transformed into the felt understanding of an emotion with its aboutness that is required by empathy. The empathizer’s imaginative work here wasn’t restricted to recreating the other’s situation, but included creative visualization of some angry state and the imaginative translation of that state into a physical gesture.
This imaginative strategy of affective selection suggests that there are more roles for imagination in empathizing than have been previously thought. When is this affective selection strategy needed in addition to the standard ‘imagine the situation’ approach? It may be that when I try to imagine how the other would feel in their situation, I can’t seem to get an affective response that matches their self-report or behavior. Given a recognizable discrepancy between my empathetic understanding and another’s described feeling, it can make sense to start with the tool that I’m sure about–her actual affective state–and use this for a richer felt understanding of the emotion or experience proper. Choosing an affective state will be easier the more the empathizer knows about what the other person is feeling. But that knowledge need not be propositional in form. An intuitive sense of what the empathizer might be feeling can be enough for the empathizer to start with and then revise upon based on verbal and behavioral feedback.
If empathizing involves skilled choices about how and when to deploy a particular imaginative strategy, then we get an important upshot: we can be responsible for our successes and failures in empathizing. If choices about how to empathize are within our control, then we can do a better job of explaining our actual practices of blaming others for failures in empathizing. Such criticism only really makes sense if empathy is something that we do, an activity over which we have agential control and at which we can improve. If we deploy a varied set of imaginative tools in empathizing, then we are exerting the kind of agential control for which we can be held responsible.
References
Currie, G., & Ravenscroft, I. (2002). Recreative minds: Imagination in philosophy and psychology. OUP Oxford.
Goldman, A. I. (2006). “Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives on Mentalizing” in Simulating minds: The philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of mindreading. Oxford University Press.
Rushe, S. (2019). Michael Chekhov’s acting technique: A practitioner’s guide. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Smith, A. (1982). The Theory of Moral Sentiments (D. D. Raphael & A. L. Macfie, Eds.). Liberty Fund. (Original work published 1759). I.i.4.7).
Stepper, S. and F. Strack. (1993) Proprioceptive determinants of affective and nonaffective feelings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64: 211-20.
Strack, F., Martin, L. L., & Stepper, S. (1988). Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human smile: A nonobtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5), 768–777.