I am speaking next week on a panel about empathy:<\/p>\n
“Generative Empathies” (Rabb Room, Lincoln Filene Hall, Tufts University,\u00a0March 30, 12 pm) with …<\/em><\/p>\n I don’t know quite what to say yet, but I am inclined to raise the following\u00a0points.<\/p>\n First, for a very long time, writers have argued that sad stories generate\u00a0empathy and improve the character. From his dismal\u00a0exile on the shore of the Black Sea, the poet Ovid addresses a soldier friend in these lines:<\/p>\n Is it true? When you heard of my misfortune Ovid presumes that his story will soften the gruff Roman’s heart, especially because it comes in the form of a poem\u00a0and the soldier is a devotee of the artes ingenuae:<\/em>\u00a0the liberal arts, or\u00a0literally, the freeborn arts. The poem will work because the reader has been habituated by many previous poems to dislike\u00a0cruelty. Apparently<\/a>,\u00a0“ingenuae<\/em>” has aristocratic\u00a0connotations, and so Ovid’s phrase for the “liberal arts” implies a higher class of people who have been civilized or humanized by the arts.<\/p>\n Here\u00a0is another classic source for the idea that writing generates empathy:<\/p>\n What was Jesus writing? One answer: something concrete about the specific Woman, which made the\u00a0scribes and Pharisees think about\u00a0her<\/em> (and about themselves) instead of applying the abstract\u00a0law.<\/p>\n For centuries in the English-speaking world, to enter the ranks of the civilized and humane meant reading\u00a0Shakespeare. One possible reason: Shakespeare’s special capacity for empathy, which is related to his refusal to push arguments of his own.\u00a0Keats found in Shakespeare the quality that he called \u201cNegative Capability<\/a>, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.\u201d Other critics have noted Shakespeare\u2019s remarkable ability not<\/em> to speak on his own behalf, from his own perspective, or in support of his own positions. Coleridge called this skill \u201cmyriad-mindedness,\u201d and Matthew Arnold said that Shakespeare was \u201cfree from our questions.\u201d Hazlitt said that the \u201cstriking peculiarity of [Shakespeare\u2019s] mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds\u2013so that it contained a universe of feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men.\u201d<\/p>\n So we have a model of the humane and sensitive educated person as one who has been habituated by the reading of moving\u00a0stories to be empathetic and thus to show mercy or otherwise depart from harsh decisions.<\/p>\n This model\u00a0conflicts with the idea that a just person knows the truth and obeys\u00a0the consequences. \u00a0St. Augustine recalls his sinful younger self enjoying the theater, where he was \u201cforced to learn I don\u2019t know what wanderings of Aeneas, oblivious to my own, and to lament the dead Dido, because she killed herself for love, while meanwhile with dry eyes I endured my miserable self dying among these things before you, God, my life. …\u00a0In the theaters I took pleasure along with the lovers when they used each other for vice, even though their behavior was just the imaginary sport of a play, and when they parted I was sad along with them, as if I were really compassionate; yet I enjoyed both parts.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>At the moment of his conversion,\u00a0Augustine hears a voice saying, \u201ctake up and read, take up and read.\u201d He understands this as a command to open the Bible at random. The first words he finds are those of Paul: \u201cBut put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof\u201d [Rom. 13:13?14]. Augustine recalls: \u201cI wanted to read no further, nor was there need\u201d (Conf<\/em>., 1.13.20;\u00a0Conf. <\/em>3.2.3.;\u00a0Conf.<\/em>, 8.12.29).<\/p>\n This is a model of the just person as one who is unmoved by inappropriate empathy and who avoids reading texts that might make him sympathize with sin. Although he is a very different\u00a0kind of person from Augustine,\u00a0Judge Richard A. Posner writes in “Against Ethical Criticism<\/a>” that “empathy is amoral.”<\/p>\n Imaginative literature can engender in its readers emotional responses to experiences that they have not had. We read King Lear<\/i> and feel<\/i> how–or some approximation to how–a failing king feels, the wicked bastard feels, the evil daughters, the good daughter, the blinded earl, the faithful retainer, the corrupt retainer, the fool, all feel. We experience simulacra of the agony of madness and the pang of early death in Hamlet<\/i>, the depths of mutual misunderstanding in The Secret Agent<\/i>, the loneliness of command in\u00a0Billy Budd<\/i>, the triumph of the will in Yeats’s late poetry. This is the empathy-inducing role of literature of which [Hilary] Putnam and [Martha] Nussbaum speak. But empathy is amoral. The mind that you work your way into, learning to see the world from its perspective, may be the mind of a Meursault [from The Stranger]<\/em>, an Edmund [from Lear<\/em>], a Lafcadio [the lion?<\/em>], a Macbeth, a Tamerlane, a torturer, a sadist, even a Hitler (Richard Hughes’s The Fox in the Attic<\/i>).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Empathy can even undermine justice. It can make the empathetic person feel more virtuous without doing anything, and it can even strengthen his position in a conflict by making him look better to third parties. This can be true of sincere empathy.\u00a0I believe<\/a>, for instance, that the median Israeli voter has achieved some empathy for Palestinians, and that feeling both blunts the urgency of justice and makes Israel look better than it should in the eyes of the world. Note the applause in this speech by\u00a0Barack Obama in\u00a0Jerusalem on March 21, 2013<\/a>:<\/p>\n I — I\u2019m going off script here for a second, but before I — before I came here, I — I met with a — a group of young Palestinians from the age of 15 to 22. And talking to them, they weren\u2019t that different from my daughters. They weren\u2019t that different from your daughters or sons.<\/p>\n I honestly believe that if — if any Israeli parent sat down with those kids, they\u2019d say, I want these kids to succeed. (Applause.) I want them to prosper. I want them to have opportunities just like my kids do. (Applause.) I believe that\u2019s what Israeli parents would want for these kids if they had a chance to listen to them and talk to them. (Cheers, applause.) I believe that. (Cheers, applause.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In sum: I don’t think empathy will suffice\u00a0on its own. It must\u00a0be connected somehow with\u00a0justice and with actually taking\u00a0just action. If you favor systematic moral theories, than you may\u00a0recommend using\u00a0one or more\u00a0general moral premises that\u00a0distinguish\u00a0good\u00a0empathy from\u00a0bad empathy. A feeling of empathy will not be a reliable guide to right action, only an urge that you must critically\u00a0assess in other terms.<\/p>\n If, like me, you are skeptical about organized moral theories and believe that empathetic responses can convey truths about the world, then you will view an empathetic response as a valid source of guidance. But not as the only kind of\u00a0valid input: relatively abstract and impersonal considerations must also apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am speaking next week on a panel about empathy: “Generative Empathies” (Rabb Room, Lincoln Filene Hall, Tufts University,\u00a0March 30, 12 pm) with … Amahl Bishara, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Tufts Doris Sommer, Ira Jewell Williams, Jr. Professor of Romance Languages and Literature and Director, Cultural Agents Initiative, Harvard University Peter Levine, Associate Dean […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notes-on-poems","category-philosophy","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15023"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15057,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15023\/revisions\/15057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\nFrom a distant land, was your heart sad?
\nYou can\u00a0hide and shrink to say it, Graecinus,
\nBut if I know you well, it was sad.
\nRevolting cruelty does not fit your type,
\nAnd even less your avocation. For
\nThe liberal arts, your highest\u00a0concern,
\nSoften the chest so that\u00a0harshness escapes.
\n— Ex Ponto, 1.6 (my trans.)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
\n