Abstract
In the above extract from JM Coetzee’s novel Elisabeth Costello, the title character of the book expresses the popular view by which empathy — in Costello’s words, the capacity to imagine oneself as someone else, to think oneself into the place of the victims — is perceived as a virtue: a moral or ethical good intimately related, if not essential, to altruism.2 In most ‘pre-theoretical’ understandings of the term, then, empathy is understood either as a motivator for pro-social action, or simply as part of what allows us to feel genuine care and concern for others, whether we act upon that concern or not. Conversely, a lack of empathy is perceived as a moral deficit that makes it possible for human beings to mistreat, abuse, or remain indifferent to the suffering of others. This ethical reading of empathy has not only been central to philosophical reflections about how or why such terrible crimes as the Holocaust — to invoke Costello’s historical reference — could occur; it has also played a role in the conceptualisation of cultural memory practices dealing with limit events. In line with the rhetoric of emotional or empathic persuasion more commonly seen in humanitarian campaigns, memorials and museums that address traumatic pasts are increasingly designed and constructed in such a way as to maximise the possibility of identification and empathic response in their interlocutors, for example through the use of personal stories or props to facilitate identification with victims.
The particular horror of the camps, the horror that convinces us that what went on there was a crime against humanity, is not that despite a humanity shared with their victims, the killers treated them like lice. That is too abstract. The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else. They said, ‘It is they in those cattle cars rattling past’. They did not say, ‘How would it be if I were in that cattle car?’1
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Notes
J. M. Coetzee (2003) Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (London: Secker & Warburg), p. 79.
Note that Costello in fact refers to this capacity with the term’ sympathy’. The two terms are frequently confused, particularly where the pro-social or ethical dimensions of empathy are emphasised. Historically, of course, both David Hume and Adam Smith used the term sympathy to describe what we now commonly call empathy. According to Stanley Cohen, ‘empathy’ is defined as feeling what the suffering of others must be like to them, while’ sympathy’ suggests that one feels sorry for victims, without experiencing any suffering oneself. See S. Cohen (2000) States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge, UK: Polity), p. 216.
Hoffmann (2011) ‘Empathy, Justice and the Law’ in A. Coplan and P. Goldie (eds) Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 231.
Stephanie Preston and Frans de Waal offer just such a broad definition of empathy, which they describe as ‘any process where the attended perception of the object generates a state in the subject that is more applicable to the object’s state or situation than to the subject’s own prior state or situation’. See S. D. Preston and F. B. M. de-Waal (2002) ‘Empathy: lts Ultimate and Proximate Bases’, Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 25, p. 4. Martin Hoffman takes as a general category ‘empathy defined as an affective response more appropriate to another’s situation than one’s own’. See
Hoffmann (2000) Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 4. The disadvantages of adopting such generalised approaches are discussed by Amy Coplan in her article A. Coplan (2011) ‘Understanding Empathy: its Features and Effects’ in
See A. Coplan (2011) ‘Understanding Empathy’, pp. 8–9. Already in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith placed an emphasis on imagination as the mechanism by which ‘we place ourselves in [the other’s] situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments […] and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something […] not altogether unlike them’. See A. Smith (2009) The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Norderstedt: GRIN), p. 8.
D. LaCapra (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press), p. 78.
E. A. Kaplan (2008) ‘Global Trauma and Public Feelings: Viewing Images of Catastrophe’, Consumption Markets and Culture, 11 (1), pp. 3–24
E. A. Kaplan (2011) ‘Empathy and Trauma Culture: Imaging Catastrophe’ in A. Coplan and P. Goldie (eds) Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 255–76.
H. D. Battaly (2011) ‘Is Empathy a Virtue?’ in A. Coplan and P. Goldie (eds) Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 285.
J. Prinz (2011) ‘Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?’ in A. Coplan and P. Goldie (eds) Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 213.
A. Morton (2011) ‘Empathy for the Devil’ in A. Coplan and P. Goldie (eds) Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 321.
M. Boler (1997) ‘The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism’s Gaze’, Cultural Studies, 11 (2), p. 4.
R. J. Pelias (1991) ‘Empathy and the Ethics of Entitlement’, Theatre Research International, 16(2), p. 142.
C. J. Dean (2004) The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.; London: Cornell University Press), p. 26.
M. L. Hoffman (1991) ‘Is Empathy Altruistic?’, Psychological Inquiry, 2(2), pp. 131–3.
K. Nance (2001) ‘Disarming Testimony: Speakers’ Resistance to Readers’ Defenses in Latin American Testimonio’, Biography, 24 (3), pp. 570–88
K. A. Nance (2006) Can Literature Promote Justice?: Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press).
M. M. Bakhtin, M. Holquist, Michael and V. Liapunov (1990) Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press), p. 26.
K. Nance (2004) ‘Let us Say that there is a Human Being before Me Who Is Suffering: Empathy, Exotopy and Ethics in the Reception of Latin American Collaborative Testimonio’ in V. Z. Nollan (ed.) Bakhtin: Ethics and Mechanics (Illinois: Northwestern University Press), p. 64.
I. Kliger (2008) ‘Heroic Aesthetics and Modernist Critique: Extrapolations from Bakhtin’s Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’, Slavic Review, 67(3), p. 556.
S. Çalişkan (2006) ‘Ethical Aesthetics/Aesthetic Ethics: The Case of Bakhtin’, Cançaya University Journal of Arts and Sciences, 5, p. 6.
According to the well-known psychotherapist Carl Rogers’s model, for example, in order to be a ‘confident companion’ to the client the therapist must be’ secure enough in his or her own identity to enter the other’s world without fear of getting lost in what may turn out to be bizarre or even frightening terrain’. See B. Thorne (1992) Carl Rogers (London: Sage Publications), p. 39.
A. Gross (2006) ‘Holocaust Tourism in Berlin: Global Memory, Trauma and the “Negative Sublime”’, Journeys, 7(2), p. 76.
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Oliver, S. (2016). The Aesth- ethics of Empathy: Bakhtin and the Return to Self as Ethical Act. In: Assmann, A., Detmers, I. (eds) Empathy and its Limits. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137552372_10
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