Making Reconstructive Empathy Reliable

Without empathising, but with the information about Omar’s

situation and physical state, we could justifiably ascribe to Omar the state of fear. However, when Avon empathises with Omar he ascribes not the type of state he experiences to Omar, but the quality of that experience. At the conclusion of Avon’s empathic project, he will not necessarily be in a position to say that Omar feels angry, but rather that Omar feels like this. The goal of empathising is to be able to make this kind of demonstrative ascription; to arrive at an

understanding of what it is like to be the target in their current state. How is that kind of ascription justified by an empathic imagining? One might think that the justification lay in some tacitly accepted principle of analogy; whereby if I imagine feeling as you do in your situation, the quality of my feeling can be judged to be reliably similar by virtue of the fact that we operate with relevantly similar

psychological mechanisms. This can’t be the whole story. It is a common thought among empathy theorists that reconstructive

empathy requires what is known as a ‘self-other distinction’.69 _{That is,}

if Avon is to gain some kind of understanding of Omar by empathising with him, he find some way of quarantining his own psychology from the imagined stimulus and response of Omar’s situation. If we recall once again the variation of Avon’s story where he is not typically afraid of bears, we can see why this must be the case. Avon is not generally afraid of bears or bear-facing situations, so if he imagines from the inside the experience of a bear and the experience of being afraid of a bear there would be something incongruous, possibly even incoherent, about this imagining. Just as Elizabeth Anscombe and others have observed the difficulty inherent in imagining desiring a saucer of mud if there is nothing about mud that I find desirable; by the same token it seems difficult to conceive of imagining being afraid of bears if one did not find anything about bears fearful.70

It is important to consider the end goal of such imaginings. The empathic imagining is intended to produce understanding, to solve a mental puzzle that will lead us to knowledge of the experiences of others. The imagination of the saucer of mud, likewise, may be intended to lead me to an understanding of what it might be like to eat it. Both kinds of imagining plausibly involve measures of aesthetic sensitivity, but in the case of empathy that aesthetic sensitivity is

69 _{Coplan (2009, 2011), Goldie (1999) and (2000)} 70 _{Anscome (1958), Goldie (2006)}

tuned to determining how ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘pleasing’ or ‘not pleasing’, ‘congruous’ and ‘incongruous’ are a given combination of a feeling- with, doing-with and being-with. Although there are ways that we can appeal on a cognitive basis to the fittingness of our proto-empathic imaginings (such as whether a fear of bears is consistent with being unafraid of a bear), we can also judge the level of harmony between the various elements of an imagined experience by exercising our aesthetic sensibilities.

For these reasons, I am tempted to understand empathic incongruity as an aesthetic sensitivity to the consistency of a set of proto-empathic imaginings. I believe that, conceived this way, empathic incongruity will turn out to be familiar to us from at least two excellent sources. The first of these is John Dewey, for whom aesthetic sensibility plays a crucial role in unifying ‘experience’ (of sounds, images, feelings etc.) into ‘experiences’; that raw experience wrought into some narrative form through which we can understand it as a unified event. Dewey’s experiences are typified by “internal integration and fulfilment

reached through ordered and organised movement”.71 _{Indeed, for}

Dewey this aesthetic character, exemplified by ‘integration’ and ‘organisation’, pervades all experience, and has a special place in intellectual inquiry. It is the aesthetic sense of tension that exists when there is a problem to be solved, that motivates the drives and directions one takes towards the solution, and it is the aesthetic sense of resolution that brings that problem solving experience to a close. It is the aesthetic, for Dewey, that drives the sense of progression

through any inquiry or the solving of any puzzle, which will certainly include the empathic puzzles that are our concern here. If, in the end, we were to say that empathic ascriptions are justified by virtue of their aesthetic qualities, we would be keeping them in good company.

71 _{Dewey (1934)}

The second source is Immanual Kant, who writes in his discussion of humour in the third Critique:

“In everything that is to excite a lively convulsive laugh there must be something absurd (in which the understanding, therefore, can find no

satisfaction). Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing. This transformation, which is certainly not enjoyable to the understanding, yet indirectly gives it very active enjoyment for a moment. Therefore, its cause must consist in the influence of the representation upon the body,

and the reflex effect of this upon the mind.”72

In this passage Kant is endorsing something like the still popular incongruity theory of humour, according to which something is funny when it creates and then resolves a tension in understanding.

Although he does not use the term, I think the notion of the incongruous as ‘that in which the understanding can find no satisfaction’ is an illuminating one to apply to the case at hand. Compare again imaginative resistance, where our imagination strains against our will, with a feeling felt-with alongside an incongruous character trait in the imaginer, such that the empathiser would not usually feel that feeling. In the latter case, the imagining seems to get off the ground easily enough, but there is something in tension, something ‘unsatisfying’ about holding it in mind. If empathy were a joke this tension, this unsatisfying element in the experience, would collapse in on itself, leaving only laughter. Empathy is, perhaps obviously, more profitably compared to a conventional puzzle than a joke. Empathy is, as we have described it, a route to understanding, or even a mode of inquiry. We have a question to be answered (‘what is it like to be Omar at this moment’, for instance) a set of tools and a method to follow. We have puzzle pieces (the imagined experiences), a puzzle box (the empathiser’s imagination), and there are only a very

few correct ways to arrange the pieces in the box. Our sense of

empathic incongruity is analogous to feeling the pressure as one slides a piece in the wrong slot, or seeing the inelegant pattern that results; the tension it detects is the disharmony of ill combined proto-

empathies. This disharmony, ‘unsatisfying to the understanding’ as it is, motivates us to alter our imaginings until a satisfyingly harmonious experience is the result.

This kind of incongruity in imagining, or rather the lack of it, is what serve to justify the demonstrative ascription of the empathiser’s experience to their target. If Avon were generally afraid of bears, then the attempt to imagine experiencing being afraid in response to a bear would not be accompanied by that sense of incongruity. This is

because there would not be any relevant difference between Avon and Omar’s character (which I take to be something like the mental

dispositions that, among other things, constrain their reactions to any given situation73). This in turn means that the quality of Avon’s imagined experience of the bear is likely to closely resemble that of Omar’s. This justificatory power of the congruity of proto-empathies can itself be justified simply by considering how difficult it would be to have congruous proto-empathic imaginings that could not be truthfully ascribed to their target. Here is where an inference from analogy comes into play: while we cannot take for granted that Avon and Omar’s psychologies function in analogous ways when it comes to predicting whether they will react in the same way to the same

situation, we can take for granted that people, in general, do not have such incongruous inner lives.

Now, in the case of Avon, Omar and the bear it could be wondered whether the possible understanding Avon will gain from this project will be worth his effort. If Avon understands that Omar is feeling ‘like this’, where ‘like this’ refers to Avon’s imagined fear towards the

imagined bear, and it is no different to how Avon himself would react in that situation, what has Avon learned? He has learned that Omar has responded in much the same way as Avon himself would in the same situation, which could be useful to know, but probably not very surprising to learn. Perhaps this is not the most interesting of

empathic projects, but it is hardly a typical case; one would generally not need to embark on a difficult imaginative project in order to understand what it would be like to be afraid of a wild bear. However, if we take, for a final time, the scenario in which Avon is not typically afraid of bears, what must Avon accomplish in order to rid his

imagining of the incongruity that blocks his justifiably ascribing that state to Omar?