Empathy as an Understanding of Others

One of the key aspects of empathy is the ability of the empathizing person to distinguish between their own and the feelings of others, with whom they empathize, while at the same time showing an emotional reaction to the discomfort or suffering that others are undergoing. Thus empathy requires a degree of maturity in understanding our own feelings and those of others. It differs from merely ‘taking on’ the feelings of others, or succumbing to what is sometimes called ‘emotional infection’. In mass psychology, strong leaders’ personalities are able to induce feelings to the mass of followers: people who gather at such meetings often start to feel the emotions that emanate from the speakers; they believe that the revolt, enthusiasm or revolutionary drive are their own, while in fact they are merely ‘caught’ from those who infect the entire group with their own emotions, ambitions and resentments. While most people are susceptible, to some degree, to emotional infection, empathy is only possible where there is no emotional infection. Feeling the emotions of others automatically rules out the possibility of empathy with others. Empathy is thus a more independent reaction to the suffering of others which recognizes others as distinct individuals and posits certain commonalities between ourselves and them which make it easy for us to feel for them in their pain (not to share in their pain, though the two are frequently confused). This interpretation, which was initially developed by Max Scheler, is far more discriminating than the Humean interpretation of empathy as ‘emotional contagion’. While Hume sees empathy as another’s emotion that invades the observer, Scheler makes it very clear that emotional infection and identification with another occur throughout the natural world with no empathy involved whatsoever, and discusses our capacity for emotional contagion as biological rather than psychological or moral. He thus insists on distinctions between the categories of emotional identification, emotional infection, sympathy (or ‘fellow-feeling’), which is closest to empathy, and a variety of other ways to share in one another’s emotions (Scheler, 1954: 8‒37). Even Michael Slote, a key modern sentimentalist ethicist, appears to miss Scheler’s distinction when he insists on the normative ethical capacity of the Humean understanding of empathy as contagion (Slote, 2009: 15). He realizes that there is something important in the distinction between emotional contagion, or taking over of another’s feelings, and feeling for others because they are undergoing suffering with which we can cognitively identify and which we feel we ‘understand’, though we are aware that it is not our emotion. However, Slote for some reason ascribes the confusion to Hume: he says that Hume erroneously used the concept of ‘sympathy’ to refer both to empathy and what ‘we could consider’ sympathy today (Ibid.). He attempts to devise a sentimentalist ethics by resorting to the concept of ‘moral goodness’ which is explained in terms of caring for others: thus any action that is motivated by caring for others and empathizing with them is morally good and conversely, actions which arise from disregard of the well-being of others are morally bad. While I do not wish to criticize Slote here I do wish to point to the conceptual juncture where he missed Scheler, because I think this is key juncture which tells us a lot about the normative potential of relational emotions and their cognitive role. Scheler goes to the other extreme by insisting that an ethics of sympathy is impossible, though at first sight it might seem natural, because it does not allow for a proper conceptualization of duty. In order to understand the moral obligation a clear distance must exist between the identity of the moral actor and that of another person towards whom there is a moral obligation. Any fusion of the identities, feelings and cognitions obscures this distance and, while some ‘moraly good’ things can be done in such an emotional overlapping of identities, no clear moral duty is possible. Although he wants to explain emotions in largely biologistic terms and classify them comprehensively Scheler is essentially a German tradition duty-ethicist, and is thus reluctant to allow any room for proper ethics in his account of sympathy, though he is undoubtedly aware of the social dimensions of all of the phenomena which he discusses largely in abstract. Slote, following Hume, on the other hand, suggests a blurred standard of ‘moral goodness’ without specifying the nature of the moral obligation that such goodness involves, and argues that such goodness is capable from arising in situations of identity-overlap created by emotional contagion, which he considers as proper empathy. He argues that any type of altruism as morally desirable behavior involves the capacity for empathy, and claims that this is so a priori ‘for anyone with a developed sense of empathy’: ‘(…) it is a priori, I think, that morality depends on altruism, and I shall be arguing that anyone well-acquainted with empathy in their own case and that of others can also see a priori that altruism and morality involve empathy (among other things) (Michael Slote). While I generally agree with Slote’s general direction of argument that empathy is crucial to morality conceived as altruism, and that developing people’s morality involves systematically developing their capacity for empathy, I do think that his argument is too blurred and does not pay sufficient attention to relevant distinctions between the ideas of moral obligation and an overly generalized view of ‘moral goodness’. In fact, it is often unclear what Slote means by moral goodness other than that it is generally morally desirable for people to act altruistically with regard to each other.

It seems to me that Hume’s treatment of sympathy and empathy as close, almost synonymous, concepts is based on good reasons. I am not at all sure that today ‘we understand’ sympathy and empathy as such different concepts as Slote argues. In Scheler’s account too ‘fellow-feeling’ (sympathy) is described as practically synonymous with empathy, namely with ‘feeling for’ another, rather than feeling the emotions that belong to another person. Once we understand that empathy (as well as sympathy) is a relational emotion with regard to the emotions we know others feel, we are able to posit moral obligation and moral duty towards another which arises from our understanding of what the others feel and our awareness that ‘moral goodness’ (which we can then freely understand as moral duty or obligation) requires us to try to remedy another’s situation if we can.

If I feel the grief of a mother who has lost her child in a terrorist bombing I am crushed by the feeling; I am both incapacitated to act and unaware of my own feelings which are pushed in the background. There is no room for perceiving a moral obligation towards the mother. However, if I empathize with the mother while being fully aware that the grief is hers, not mine, I am able to understand a moral duty to help her survive the grief: I am then able to try to comfort her, move her to a safe place, help her deal with the funeral, the social and existential aspects of the event. I am only able to be a moral actor in terms of moral obligation or duty if my identity and my feelings are clearly separate from hers. Whether this is called empathy or sympathy is not all that relevant, and this is likely the reason Hume made no effort to distinguish between the two.

This is the same distinction that Martin Hoffman makes when he discusses the emotional and cognitive development of children, who first react to the distress of others (crying) by possibly confusing it with their own distress (once one baby in a room with babies starts to cry, many other babies will automatically cry as well), but as they grow up learn that the distress of other children is not their own distress, while still showing what Hoffman calls ‘empathic disturbance’ at the distress of others. Like Scheler, Hoffman makes it very clear that developed empathy involves a clear awareness of one’s identity as distinct from that of the person empathized with.

The key difference between empathy and emotional contagion is in the responsibility that remains with the person who empathizes with others, while it disappears when one becomes emotionally infected by another. Being invaded by feelings of the grieving mother relieves me of any responsibility to relate to her pain in an active, altruistic way. I might or might not be able to assist her; what emotional infection necessarily involve is my ‘plugging into’ her pain. Empathy, on the other hand, keeps me in the position of responsibility for another: I remain aware that her feelings are crushing for her, and I am able to posit a sense of moral duty or obligation to do something altruistic for her. It is this active element of altruism that requires a sense of responsibility, and the sense of responsibility, in turn, requires a clear delineation of my feelings from those of the person I empathize with. That is a fundamental problem where an over-emphasis on largely artificial conceptual differences between empathy and sympathy, while seemingly clarifying ‘the way we talk about empathy today’, in fact obscures the moral perspective generated by empathy. The normative moral question here is: should I feel empathy to others and act accordingly (this will automatically make me an altruistic person)? If I should, then I must understand others sufficiently, I must know enough about them and the way they perceive their experiences; I must see them as similar to myself sufficiently to understand them, while at the same time keeping them at a sufficient distance in terms of identity to be able to sense a moral obligation to them as distinct personalities with experiences and circumstances which are different from mine.

The formulation of the normative statement that I should be empathetic and altruistic leads us to the question where I can happily agree with Slote’s general argument, namely the question of whether and how we can enhance empathy. One obvious way to do so is to establish the pre-requisites for learning empathy.