Historically, the concept of empathy in its modern articulation is rooted in aesthetic theory (specifically nineteenth-century psychological aesthetics). Its current iteration is, at least in part, an attempt to translate an aesthetic hypothesis into a quantifiable scientific fact. While contemporary proponents of empathy overwhelmingly appeal to brain science, they interpret it as having inconsistent implications. In application, the results have been mixed. The ways that the term “empathy” has been deployed have tended to vary in wide and sometimes incompatible ways, from those that rely on its more mundane, moral-medical inflection (understanding the experience of the other) to those that are more philosophically rigorous and, in some respects, counter-intuitive.
Although many of the terms used by the various disciplines drawn upon in discussions of empathy may be the same, the meaning they take on tends to be local and sometimes irreconcilable. Evolutionary biologists do not generally understand empathy the way neurologists or psychoanalysts do. There is a significant distance between understanding the term as “feeling in” [Einfühlung] and understanding it in more strictly bio-mechanical terms as a brain function, between understanding it as contagious or exchanged, or as a form of resonance (whether through imaginative reflection/projection or non-conscious mutuality).
The basic arguments for the merit of this model tend to come down to something like this: “experience” happens in your brain, so if you want to understand what is happening in experience, you need to understand how your brain is working. In practice, this usually means studying localized brain activity. However, even this is extremely problematic since it also purports to involve things outside the brain where a raft of other epistemic issues crop up fast and are usually ignored (or taken for granted) by more enthusiastic exponents of the empathy hypothesis.
From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth-century, philosophers of aesthetics such as Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Robert Vischer, Theodor Lipps, Karl Groos, Johannes Volkelt, Violet Paget, Wilhelm Worringer, and Max Dessoir developed one another’s speculations on the topic. As with most things in aesthetic theory, this was largely declared dead and exhausted within a few decades before being revived a few decades later. Although psychoanalytically inclined interpretations of art always leaned on comparable notions (taken in radically different directions), it was not until the 1990s that a more “scientific” inflection was given to these concerns thanks to new modeling available from the neurosciences.
Those who embraced these new models tended to bring to the fore the issue of inter-subjectivity. The previous “divide” between seemingly different fields within the sciences and humanities was increasingly broached to close the gap. Empathy, and related refurbished notions like imagination, simulation, and imitation, were easily brought back into humanities discourses because they still seemed to share many of their canonical concerns and could be appropriated to further the scope of hermeneutic approaches and add a more scientific sheen to them. This, labeled variously the “emotional turn,” the “neurological turn,” “neuroaesthetics,” etc., typically credited in its origins in the 1990s, became an institutional trend very rapidly.
As part of a shift away from the dominance of linguistic models of interpretation, the turn to empathy has stressed that emotional interrelations are largely predicated on the visual as the primary space of articulation (much of empathy theory relies on a hermeneutic of kinaesthesia). This also suggests that art history (and theory) has some significant stake in this. It should be recognized that empathy is one of the discipline’s bastards coming home.
Some cognates of empathy have been central to debates about child psychology for more than a century, largely in reference to the problem of when children develop a capacity for self-other differentiation. If empathy is precognitive, this could not be a matter of recognition. It remains unclear what actually happens here, in no small part because psychology is infamous for its extreme representational naivety (to put it generously), something that makes any attempt to discern “relations” highly dubious. Even the most basic claim of current empathy theory makes the ambiguity that comes from this quite evident.
It is not simply that empathy seems to throw the definition of self and other into question, it questions the reality claims of this ontological structure. The experience of the work of art is central to this questioning. Discussions of being “moved” by art are hardly new. Alberti stressed the “movements of the soul” inspired by those of the depicted body when encountering works of art. [Freedberg, 142] Einfühlung (translated to “empathy” when it crossed to America) stands as the involuntary human transferral of “feelings” onto space, an imaginative act that may involve shapes, objects, landscapes, animals, people, etc. and imbues them with a “vital” or “animating” force. (A phenomenologically-inflected variety of animism runs through a significant amount of these discourses, which tend to mourn the “disenchantment” of the world and long for what members of previous generations glossed as a lost primitivism, now rebranded with more vaguely therapeutic language). This was taken to imply a kind of mirroring of the passions of the viewer decades before “mirror neurons” became a fashionable thing to talk about. Seeing the world is taken to be a form of embodied simulation, one which may have been conscious or unconscious. People could be said to have a “poetic faith” in this imaginary phenomenon. [Weigel, 13]
The influential work of the Vischers was a response to more than a hundred years of aesthetic theory that stressed the role of “sympathy.” Generically, by empathy, people tend to suggest something roughly equivalent to “sympathy,” an invention of moral philosophy and one of the canonical passions thought to define human nature. It played an essential part of the affective dramaturgy in the “primal scene” of the fantasy of sociability in the eighteenth-century. [Weigel, 5] However, as Scheler pointed out, fellow-feeling (or sympathy or resonance) does not necessarily contain any moral attributes, or even indicate a self-other relation. [Weigel, 15] Instead, it seems to me at least, to be something more along the lines of Wille. Other theorists of sympathy clearly rooted it in Christian theology (adapted and transformed from pagan notions of pity and compassion). It was, to put it non-theologically, a kind of symptom of divine love. So it is no surprise that the injunction to “feel” when looking at an image “as if” you were having that experience or seeing it for real before your eyes was central to Christian pathos, notably in Loyola. [Freedberg,141]
Almost everything that the various fields of science that have approached the notion of empathy deal with is simulations based on “as if” scenarios and post hoc recollections. There is almost no sound evidence (and it may be impossible to collect any) for the existence of empathy outside of carefully constructed lab fantasies. [Weigel, 10] Even the minimal empirical evidence for empathy is already a hyper-aestheticized artifact. Most testing suggests no substantial difference in empathic experience between images that are “real” and those that are clearly fake. [Freedberg, 145] This is, in part, why humanities researchers have leaped on it and why there is a presumption that something productive could come from an interdisciplinary exchange.
Some neurobiologists describe empathy as an “affect machine” common to different forms of sentient life. [Weigel, 7] But far more attention tends to be placed on its allegedly uniquely human aspects, usually detected in “embodied simulations” and various imitative behaviours. This claim has been part of a general shift away from a computer-based model of the brain to one dominated by less clearly conscious cognitive “processes” that could be “loaded” with a host of social and moral meanings (ex. attachment, care, altruism, pro-social behaviour). [Weigel, 8]
As an aside, it merits noting that discussions of empathy rarely evoke comedy or humour, in part because the notion of empathy is so rooted in the bias for pathos and its variations (compassion, commissitario, etc., and tests for things like fear) and comedy, while clearly no less mimetic, complicates the attempt to moralize sensation and make is pro-social. The suffering and torture of slapstick and the dehumanization of satire are no less mimetic or empathic, but they suggest something very different about relationality.
For some, “intercorporeality” comes to replace, or at least mingle with, intersubjectivity since it is assumed that mirror mechanisms suggest shared representations recognizable as basic emotions. If you accept that speculation, at that point, you can import notions of “intentionally meaningful sensorimotor behaviors.” [Gallese, 186] This can be grafted onto concepts of the “haptic” and “presence” and a stress on pre-hermeneutic experience. The “bodily” or “embodied vision” can then serve as a staging ground for semiotic-hermeneutic operations.
By contrast, one of the more stringent writers on art and empathy, David Freedberg, identifies empathy with automaticity (rather than “cognitive appraisal”) and stresses it as a form of “motor identification.” [Freedberg, 158-161] This, to a degree, removes empathy from being reliant on notions of shared representations, concentrating rather on a “felt engagement,” or an identification with rather than of the body of the “other.” [Freedberg, 172] It is visual rather than imaginative. Empathy is not a matter of narrative, but the involuntary reaction to stimulus.
Empathy is the ultimate knee-jerk reaction. But reactivity, whether conditioned or unconditioned, does not necessarily (or even convincingly) betoken a credible epistemic claim. There is an enormous gulf between endorsing the plausibility of much of perception as embodied simulation and the existence of a credible link or substantive relation to other minds, bodies, a social world, or culture.
So empathy might imply an inter-subjective understanding of deep emotional resonance, but it is far more like involuntarily feeling the need to urinate when you encounter a water feature in a garden. You do not need neuroscience to make any of these claims about automaticity. As Freedberg shows at length, such claims long preceded it in art theory. Besides, the experiments that set out to prove it, generally, do not prove much.
Recognizing that the affective/sensual realm is one of the most mechanical things in the world is not new. It took on almost parodistically “Germanic” characteristics in (early) psychoanalysis and extremely “Anglo-American” characteristics in things like behaviourism. In both instances, this supplied humanists with a lot to get anxious about. Psychoanalysis was, and remains, much more romantic in its rhetoric (something key to its surprising financial success in North America). The swampy atmosphere it tends to conjure seems to have been far more ingratiating with those out to redeem art as a spiritual/cultural expression (even if the “spirit” was in an automaton).
Baron-Cohen's work, like that of most of his medico-ethical colleagues, is not overly sophisticated philosophically speaking. As he puts it, “My definition of truth is neither mystical nor divine, nor is it obscured by unnecessary philosophical complexity. Truth is (pure and simply) repeatable, verifiable patterns.” [Baron-Cohen, 109] It is assumed that such patterns will have the virtue of explanation. Empathy involves patterns. It follows basic aesthetic forms. Most of what he discusses are aesthetic categories: mimicry, synthesis, and systemization. The author relates this using a string of images. So, we are told that “Empathy occurs when we suspend our single-minded focus of attention and instead adopt a double-minded focus of attention.” [Baron-Cohen, 15-16]
Those without empathy are “imprisoned” within a different focus or, to use his metaphor, “spotlight.” [Baron-Cohen, 18] Spotlighting things allows for forms of recognition, this applies to behavior and the interpretation of the intentionality behind it. Once an appropriate interpretation is selected, a suitable response can be provided. This sort of pattern echoing, call and response is how he defines understanding and communication. [Baron-Cohen, 16-18] Not only does this allow you to read the “four ‘basic’ emotions (happy, sad, angry, and disgusted)” [Baron-Cohen, 32], it also helps you gain self-awareness, defined as seeing yourself from another person's vantage, something only made possible by empathy. [Baron-Cohen, 22] It is notable that for Baron-Cohen, hermeneutics is a necessary aspect of empathy. Indeed, unlike with the aesthetic theorists of empathy discussed above, one gets the impression that outside of the use of a specific application of interpretive codes, not a lot of empathy is at play. Repeating patterns is not enough in itself. Indeed, with him, empathy seems more about codification than mimetism.
Considering “other minds” primarily involves the same brain activity as considering your own. [Baron-Cohen, 40] At the same time, much of what is taken to be empathy may be unconscious, such as a mother opening her mouth when feeding a child or other instances of the “chameleon effect.” Likewise, affects may be caught in the manner of a virus, such as in models of “social contagion.” [Baron-Cohen, 38] Complicating things even more, much of the evidence for empathy (beyond observable pattern-miming) relies on self-reporting, which tends to be intrinsically problematic. People with little to no empathy seem to be the most incapable of recognizing this. [Baron-Cohen, 22] A person with little to no markers for empathic capability is highly likely to claim they have a great deal of empathy. In other words, there is little strong evidence that “feelings” of empathy actually correlate to experiencing empathy. This problem should likely throw a greater shadow onto Baron-Cohen’s claims than it does. After all, if “[e]mpathy is our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion” [Baron-Cohen, 16] this hardly bars the way for sociopathic mimetism. In fact, the notion of empathy seems to enable this.
Given its necessarily mimetic dimension, there is a lot of “monkey-see, monkey-do” in the attempt to make empathy seem like a serious scientific concept. This extends beyond favoured research methods like attaching electrodes to simians. Researchers have a penchant for having psychotics watch trauma porn to see if they can be aroused by it (the material substance of empathy is mostly “autonomic arousal”). This is not to suggest anything against the scientific method, understood as rigorous experiment, unrelenting skepticism and doubt, the rejection of appeals to authority, and the insistence on empirically verifiable and repeatable results. That is probably the least awful epistemological model we have. But empathy tends to take on unintentionally hilarious qualities under these conditions.
As Baron-Cohen observes, those with little actual empathy (although they may be skilled at performative empathy), not only mimic codified behaviours, but do so rigorously. People with empathy generally cannot distinguish between real and fake empathy any more than they can between real and fake images. People with low or no empathy, like those diagnosed with certain forms of autism and psychopaths, tend to treat the world very much as scientists do, only totally and thoroughly rather than within narrow professional confines and protocols. The distinction he draws between these two forms of mimicry only becomes evident on the level of social functionality (and even there, barely). “Empathy avoids any risk of misunderstandings or miscommunication, by figuring out what the other person might have intended.” [Baron-Cohen, 18] Yet, against Baron-Cohen, one can point out that mimetics and pattern-recognition do not clearly shore up any actual “communication,” just a form of circulation. This may put one in mind of Olivier Roy’s arguments about what happens once culture has disappeared. According to him, in the deculturalized era that we supposedly live in, it is the autists who fare the best thanks to their mimetic and pattern-based lives which are perfectly suited to spheres of rigid codification and the erasure of ambiguity.
If, for Roy, empathy (or culture) is eroding or disappearing, for others, empathy seems to have been a product of this process rather than what it has undermined. For instance, moral fantasies about what empathy research potentially suggests are raised to a kind of delirium in books like Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (2009), where the accelerating evolution and spread of empathy juxtaposes with that of entropy and the two seem to be on a paradoxical collision course that is as likely to doom or save sentient existence. For Rifkin (in a sort of updated pseudo-scientific Hegelianism), sentience reaches its highest point in recognition and reconciliation. The possibility of both of these sentiments only seems to become dominant at the moment that they may no longer have a future. Even if you do not find the narrative arc he constructs overly convincing, it is a remarkably broad and fairly creative one.
More relevantly, empathy has also been a significant issue within the foundational arguments justifying notions like culture. The idea that it is possible to have shared feelings or experiences, even if only in a highly localized way, generally relies on an appeal to empathy or one of its cognates. Most notions of the social or the cultural rely on some variation of this premise. The limited evidence that supports such a contention largely evolved from historicism, a nineteenth-century Prussian reaction against French rationalism. This was, in part, the response of a professional class against the erosion of their authority (as appeals to cultural identity or knowledge often are) and another aspect of general paranoia about the perceived diminishment of human exceptionality.
Empathy (or some close variant of it) was considered a necessary component of understanding. This was far more than simply putting yourself “in the place of” the other. Localization, primarily in terms of traditions, but also the tangential development of the socio-cultural sphere which was taken to be the precondition (or a priori) of the mental states of those involved. “Culture” or the “social” are things that a subject is immersed in and which can only be seen through the empathic recovery of their alleged mental states or, at least, the “horizon” that would have likely delimited them. History was not something that could be understood in the “autistic” forms of broadly mathetic patterns (the sublime) but had to be understood as the concrete expression of the lived experience of the a priori, the performance of which could only be properly understood by “feeling in.” While this has taken a variety of distinct forms in the last two hundred years, from the various stripes of historicism, to heremeneutics, to social and culture history (or new material history), they share in common a concern with the recovery of Geisteswissenschaften from the erosion of its pristine image by the passage of time. The idea that it is possible to have a (non-cynical) social or cultural identity is generally a symptomatic variation of this empathic fantasy.
That there is an apparently hardwired mimetic or simulating aspect of the mind does not necessarily make epistemic claims of intuition or pre-cognitive insight into “the other” stronger but even more questionable. At its most rigorous, the evidence for “empathy” only suggests a capacity and propensity for irrational mimetic projection. You can be a solipsist and still accept the more rigorous materialist defense of empathy. If you have a psychoanalytical bent, you could also argue that most of what people seem to imply in the colloquial use of the term empathy would more accurately be described as narcissism. The promotion of non-cognitive models such as empathy also (at least potentially) diminishes or relativizes the claims of cognitivist and hermeneutic approaches, in part because it suggests that meaning and communication are not necessary components of art and certainly are not necessary to aesthetics. For obvious reasons, this poses a serious problem to thinking of art or aesthetics as “cultural” phenomena.
One useful thing that these arguments do demonstrate is that it is clearly aesthetics (a basically non-cultural factor) that conditions the fantasy of a socio-cultural world and not the other way around. While some neuroart historians clearly understand that this has serious methodological implications, both in terms of research and interpretation, most empathy exponents do not seem to grasp what they might be and how much they compromise the ease of the representational models they rely on.
Some empathy theorists would prefer to deal with the model of “symbolic creations” rather than “art,” since “art” has come to mean whatever people say it is at any moment in time. Art might not need symbolic creation at all. In which case, it is unclear how helpful empathy and other neuroscientific models are for understanding a great deal of art history. [Gallese, 183] Even if it is useful in showing that there is a material but not especially “meaningful” aspect to aesthetic experience, it remains that aesthetics and art are not reducible to one another. In respect to this, the appeal to empathy does not make much sense beyond an extremely historically tangential notion of art.
This is not simply a matter of the conflict between more “scientistic” and “humanistic” modes of inquiry. Even within the neurosciences and philosophy of mind, there is enormous controversy over what, if much of anything, can reasonably be extrapolated from the data and models. Using much the same research (and considerably more and better modelled adjacent research), many with a neurophilosophical bent have argued something very different, namely that most of what we can extrapolate from the data is not only the extreme dubiousness of any epistemic value in self-other perceptions, but that there are almost no sound grounds for anyone to claim knowledge of their supposed selves. This shatters the necessary privileging of introspective claims that have tended to be pivotal to psychology. [If psychologists have rarely ever had any real objects of study, it may explain a fair amount about the extraordinarily grim history of the field.] Even if one concedes that it is ontologically possible to have “personal” or “subjective” experiences, it does not follow that these alleged experiences are epistemically defensible. They could be entirely (or mostly) delirious simulations.
Obviously, when people tend to employ the term “empathy,” even when vaguely referencing the issues raised above, what they seem to be talking about is more along the lines of a projection of personalized prejudice and preference than empathy per se. At best, empathy is a way of naming an impersonal (or pre-subjective) realm of sensation and inter-subjectivity seems to necessarily involve a great deal beyond what this would entail.
If empathy largely designates movements (of the soul or body), the kinaesthetic aspect highlights the mechanics with which the fantasy of human relationships are concocted. As Sigrid Weigel asks, “In what way does empathy with objects, or the imagination of ‘dead forms as living’ … function in comparison to inter-subjectivity?” [Weigel, 14] Earlier, she stressed that what seems to be at stake in arguments around empathy is what amounts to a form of animism: “At the centre of this debate is the concept of ‘animation’, which is the idea that the empathic perception of inorganic things is the product of projecting or transferring our own feelings, our own emotional state, onto the inanimate world, even onto forms or colours.” [Weigel, 6] Empathy, in the way the term is commonly employed in art discourse, is essentially a form of pathetic fallacy, one which reaches absurd proportions when form is mistaken for structure and the relation of forms for mentality or culture. An archaeologist (whose name escapes me), once referred to this as “mystical mind dust” and it is usually what people seem to be blowing in your eyes when they talk about cultural history.