Further thoughts on what empathy does and doesn’t do.
A Tale of Two Kinds of Empathy
Last time, we began by observing that empathy has high currency in many accounts of how the moral world works. We see the assumptions that, for moral action to really work, that it has to involve a shared feeling, in many places: in the resurgence of Lectio Divina practices, in presidential appeals, in proposals for how to address global suffering. The logic here is not just that reason alone doesn’t move us to action, but that reason alone will mislead us by making us act in ways which are deficient.
I described empathy as “feeling the pain of another, as one’s own”. This isn’t an idiosyncratic definition, but one which you can readily find in psychology literature. Both halves of the definition are important, but I want to signal that there are real problems with the proposal.
First: full-blown empathy on display. If my son is crying about how he’s upset at how he performed in the baseball game, then empathy would say that the way forward here is not just to offer rational instruction, but to feel the grief that my son is feeling about striking out for the second time that game1. The appropriate response wouldn’t be something like, “Hey son, I need you to take a deep breath”, but to just give him a hug, enter into his pain as he feels it, and to say “I’m sorry”.
Reasonable enough, right? For the record, I lead with “I’m sorry”, as I think we should: my child is in pain. But when we follow the definition of empathy, two problems emerge here:
I have no way of knowing what’s going on in my son’s mind, but only the manifestation of the behavior. I should definitely not worry about being embarrassed, for him or for me, because my son is hurting. However, the root of his hurt is a little obscure to me. Is he sad because he’s a perfectionist? Is he sad because he feels like a bad teammate? Is he sad because he wants to win? Maybe all of the above? But the specficity of emotions matters. You don’t need to have seen Inside Out to know that emotions are complex, and that the same action can be from multiple different reasons, but what is on the surface, manifest as pain, isn’t the same thing as what’s going on in his feelings. I can feel grief that my son is grieving, but that’s different than feeling his grief.
It’s not possible to feel his grief as my own grief for other reasons. As suggested above, it’s hard to suss out what he’s feeling, in part because he’s 10! He’s getting to know his own emotional register, but it’s very much a work in progress2. But even if he was the most emotionally intelligent 10 year old on the planet, me feeling his specific grief isn’t possible because, as a 40-something year old man, I think that this particular game is just a game. Call me an heartless adult, but failing to hit a 9 year-old’s fastball is low stakes, existentially speaking. I can’t unthink that without also calling into question about which goods are worth more in the world, and as much as I love baseball, there’s no argument that anyone can make that would say that baseball is more important than other goods like love.
Extrapolating outward: for empathy to be the appropriate response to my son’s tears, I would have to say that it’s a general rule that no one is capable of making reasonable judgments about the things that another person’s pain is about, and that reason has no place in being present to my son’s frustration. What I need is to simply listen, and to try to feel his frustration to be properly moved to action.
This seems to be an impossible bar, as I’ve laid out above. But, beyond that, this isn’t what my son’s pain is asking for: he’s articulating his frustration, not so that I might feel it with him, but that he might present himself to me, that I might be present not as him, but as his dad. He didn’t want to feel this frustration to begin with, and as such, wants to find a way through it. He knows that I don’t feel his particular sadness: I wasn’t up to bat, and I can feel sad for him, but it remains my kind of sadness, as that of a parent who wants his child to avoid pain.
The divide present—which is just part of me not being another person—gives way to a deeper problem: that emotions move around, and thus, don’t have a good basis for us to enter into them. Emotions, as we best understand them, are states of experience3: they don’t persist or remain indefinitely, but are indexed to particular events. Over time, they can become characteristic patterns of behavior and all that, but as emotions, they persist only for moments.
The grand upshot, however, is this: if empathy-first is correct, there cannot be rules for engaging human behavior apart from what is presented in the moment, behavior which I am at very best guessing about and which I cannot possibly hope to replicate in myself. For if emotions are 1) transitory states, and 2) indexed to the particulars of a person, then empathy as “feeling another person’s pain as one’s own” is always a matter of projection at best, approximated by me, and colonization at worst, making vast assumptions on a complex experience I am assuming match my own sensibilities.
Does this mean we jettison empathy altogether? Not so fast. It just means that there’s a difference between intellectual empathy and this. Intellectual empathy involves humility and seeking understanding: my son is upset and I want to understand what he’s feeling, let it slow me down while simultaneously acknowledging that entering into his particular pain is literally impossible.
Intellectual empathy both acknowledges the limits of getting inside another person’s pain, while simultaneously slowing down whatever judgments or words I might have by seeking understanding and presence first. But these are the things which empathy, as “feeling the pain of another” simply cannot do. The same thing would go for feeling another person’s joy, I think4: to try to identify with another person’s joy would be to reduce their ecstasy.
The Stakes of Empathy
What’s at stake here, beyond whether or not I’m a good dad, is whether or not reason has to be set aside to connect with another person’s joy or pain. My inclination is no, not because I want to go with some algorithmic account of how to respond to pain, but because I think when we respond to others, we are always responding on the basis of what we think is reasonable for us to do.
When we respond to another person, we’re responding on the basis of who we are. Now, we may respond in radically sacrificial ways, but not because we have somehow felt their feeling, but because we think that it’s completely what we should do: we count the cost and then commit to it. Some might think that the costs are unreasonable, but then, we’re just having an argument over whether or not someone is just being silly about how to value something like their vacation time or sleep over being present to a suffering friend.
My point here is that reason doesn’t take a vacation: it is inflected, slowed down, punctuated by the pain of another, but it’s not evacuated, nor is it stalled out. When we make a judgment that the best way forward is to listen to the stories of another, that’s not entering into another person’s pain as ours, as this would be to diminish the person in front of you, assuming that I can parachute in and know their pain without having gone through it. We remain outsiders to one another, mediated by that which we convey to one another, whether through suffering which we cannot yet name, by words which aim toward clarity, or presence which just waits5.
What’s an alternative? We’ll get to that.
It is 100% a true anecdote.
There are many grown adults who have no idea what to do with their emotions.
For a good primer on what I mean by this, see this, which more or less sums up how psychologists describe what an emotion is.
This is an objection that the great
made, writing that “feeling that pain as my own is important but understanding why it makes him sad and mad and unsure of himself is important if I’m to have a sustained change of heart about getting out the door on time. I connect with that as I remember I liked to get to the locker room 30 mins before everyone else to crank Metallica and get amped before kickoff. Second, the quick definition only covers pain, but empathy can cover all the emotions - except excitement over any sport that’s so slow it has to have a pitch clock.” I’ll let the baseball slight stand, but I still think that the specific joy of Metallica cranked up before kickoff still works differently for others as well. Our emotional responses have resonance, but not identity, mostly because I think a very specific range of Metallica stuff rules, but can’t hear it now apart from seeing Lars as a total goof.Here, I want to signal that we’re not done yet. As
responded, there’s a better way than empathy or rationalism. I don’t know that I agree fully that compassion is it, but we’ll see.