The Gift of Active Empathy: Scheler, Bakhtin, and Dostoevsky available in Paperback
The Gift of Active Empathy: Scheler, Bakhtin, and Dostoevsky
- ISBN-10:
- 0810133369
- ISBN-13:
- 9780810133365
- Pub. Date:
- 06/15/2016
- Publisher:
- Northwestern University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0810133369
- ISBN-13:
- 9780810133365
- Pub. Date:
- 06/15/2016
- Publisher:
- Northwestern University Press
The Gift of Active Empathy: Scheler, Bakhtin, and Dostoevsky
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810133365 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2016 |
| Series: | Studies in Russian Literature and Theory |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 344 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
The Gift of Active Empathy
Scheler, Bakhtin, and Dostoevsky
By Alina Wyman
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2016 Northwestern University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3337-2
CHAPTER 1
Bakhtin and Scheler: Toward a Theory of Active Empathy
* * *
Nam ne dano predugadat',
Kak slovo nashe otzovetsia,
I nam sochuvstvie daetsia,
Kak nam daetsia blagodat'.
We have no power to foretell
How our word will resonate with others.
And precious sympathy is granted to us,
As grace is granted to us.
— Feodor Tiutchev
* * *
The Folly of Passive Empathy
In the field of twentieth-century ethical philosophy the connection between two seminal thinkers, two passionate crusaders for the sovereignty of the unique and uniquely perceived Person in the human sciences, deserves greater scholarly attention. Max Scheler and Mikhail Bakhtin stand out sharply among their philosophical contemporaries, distinguished not only by the sheer power and longevity of their ideas but also by the extraordinary intellectual affinity with each other, which exceeds the bounds of simple influence.
In their search for the appropriately dynamic definition of an acting spiritual being within the sphere of traditional philosophy, the two phenomenologists faced the paradoxical task of creating a philosophical system for formulating an essentially anti-systematic concept of human individuality, and both the intriguing achievements and the equally remarkable shortcomings of their theories are linked with the challenges of rising to this Herculean task. Both were drawn to religious themes and took a special interest in the concept of Incarnation, offering original, often thoroughly unorthodox interpretations of biblical events from the standpoint of traditional theology. However, what joins the two original, at times eccentric thinkers in the most powerful way is not the similarity in specific philosophical themes but the impressive, perhaps even hubristic magnitude of their inquiry: each boldly attempted to solve the most essential metaphysical problems, be it the question of man's position in Being that had occupied Scheler throughout his life or the ambitious task of formulating "a first philosophy," as was the goal of Bakhtin's early writings.
In this context, the philosophers' interest in the problem of interpersonal understanding, in defining the essential means of communication between spiritual selves is an example of this ever-present concern with the central questions of Being, for in both Scheler and Bakhtin, the nature of Being is personal. How can one bridge the enormous chasm between one's own private self and the other's elusive, externally perceived inner world? Can a self transgress its psychic boundaries and enter another self in order to reach authentic understanding of another's inner life without objectifying this life in the process? What is the most personal way (a) of relating to God as ultimate Other and (b) of making an ethically meaningful connection between my love for God and my regard for fellow human beings? These and other central questions, essential to understanding the social context of personhood, are raised by Bakhtin and Scheler in their efforts to situate the human subject among its all-important others, both in the human and in the divine sphere. They lead the philosophers to develop the notion of ideal interpersonal communication, which, without becoming a reified norm or an abstractly conceived "standard" of ethical conduct, would best represent their commitment to preserving human individuality.
Both thinkers advocate an active understanding of one's fellow men and women as the most productive way of "entering" other selves. As an alternative to the purely empathetic, duplicating understanding resulting from a passive merging with another's psyche, recommended by many of their philosophical contemporaries, the two thinkers propose a creative approach to another consciousness. Such an approach is grounded in the empathizer's sovereignty as an active subject, whose unique individuality is not dissolved in the process of empathizing. "In what way would it enrich the event if I merged with the other, and instead of two there would be only one?" Bakhtin asks emphatically in "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity":
And what would I myself gain by the other's merging with me? If he did, he would see and know no more than what I see and know myself; he would merely repeat in himself that want of any issue out of itself which characterizes my own life. Let him rather remain outside of me, for in that position he can see and know what I myself do not see and do not know from my own place, and he can essentially enrich the event of my own life. If all I do is merge with the other's life, I only intensify the want of any issue from within itself that characterizes his own life, and I only duplicate his life numerically. ("Author and Hero," 8; hereafter "AH"; here and throughout, italics added unless otherwise indicated)
Bakhtin rejects passive co-experiencing of another's suffering, however intense, on the grounds of its ethical inefficacy. Not only is losing one's unique place outside the sufferer during the process of empathizing ineffective from the standpoint of practical action, it is ethically irresponsible, for the moral subject, no longer possessing an individual "address" in Being, cannot be located to assume personal responsibility. We find the same intolerance of the identification ethics in Scheler, who deems complete fusion of selves pathological, claiming that such a depersonalizing view of another's suffering is incompatible with true empathy.
Bakhtin's reference to the "numeric duplication" of another's inwardly hopeless emotional image in the event of passive understanding evokes Scheler's concern with the purely mechanical reproduction of the sufferer's experience, wrongly identified with empathy. In The Nature of Sympathy, a work carefully examined by Bakhtin, Scheler responds to the Nietzschean evaluation of pity, the "instinct" that results in "multiplying misery quite as much as in preserving all that is miserable" by infecting the sympathizer's consciousness with the sufferer's emotional state (quoted in Scheler, Gesammelte Werke [hereafter GW], 7:28). Taking this criticism very seriously, Scheler begins his defense of empathy by revealing the legitimacy of Nietzsche's disapproval of infectious pity, adding the charge of ethical irrelevance to Nietzsche's accusations of hypocritical passivity. He then proceeds to separate himself from his mentor's point of view by questioning the final conclusions of Nietzsche's otherwise lucid analysis. According to Scheler, Nietzsche is entirely correct in his penetrative evaluation of emotional infection as a symptom of psychological pathology, but not in his ultimate diagnosis, which identifies this moral malady with empathy. While recognizing Nietzsche as an effective critic of passive understanding, whose investigative work he vigilantly continues, Scheler identifies the problematic behavior not with empathy but rather with instances of its perversion (The Nature of Sympathy, hereafter Sympathy,GW, 7:28; see also Ressentiment,GW, 3:70, 75). Scheler's rehabilitation of empathy, based on the fact that authentic, active fellow-feeling respects the sovereignty of the other's suffering and thus prevents rather than spreads emotional infection, is echoed by Bakhtin, who emphasizes the importance of experiencing the other's suffering "precisely as his — in the category of the other" ("AH," 26).
Besides Nietzsche, Scheler was facing a group of perhaps less formidable but newly authoritative intellectual opponents among the contemporary philosophical community. His polemics with the "projective theories" of empathy, depicting the phenomenon as a mere transfer of intellectual and emotional content between subjects, reveal the absurdly circular, utterly unproductive movement of passive understanding. According to such prominent advocates of the projective approach as Theodor Lipps and Gustav Störring, the act of empathizing consists in the reproduction of the other's feeling, or rather in the evocation of a similar feeling within the empathizer's own emotional realm (either immediately so or by means of imitating the sufferer's expressive gestures), followed by a mental projection of this artificially manufactured feeling into the other's psyche (Sympathy, GW, 7:56–57). If this is indeed the operative strategy behind empathetic understanding, then at the moment of actual co-experiencing I encounter nothing more than my very own emotions, previously ascribed to the other and now "returning" to me in the guise of his true feelings, Scheler argues (Sympathy, GW, 7:58).
Scheler's analysis foregrounds the thoroughly solipsistic nature of projective empathy, revealing its profound impotence and ultimate inability to break through the vicious circle of inauthentic, endlessly "recycled" feelings to the real other, whose equally real, unassuaged suffering remains beyond its grasp. The philosopher contends that those reproductive theories of understanding that do not rely on the projection technique but nevertheless make the "numeric duplication" of one subject's emotional state an essential component of empathy are no closer to capturing its moral and ethical significance. For Scheler, only the recognition of the empathizer and the empathized as two sovereign subjects, which, in turn, leads to the recognition of two distinctly separate emotional functions, the empathized feeling and empathy itself, results in a truly intentional, morally significant attitude toward the other. Indeed,
any theory that does not acknowledge the phenomenologically posited distinctiveness of the two processes: that of co-suffering and of the other's suffering as well as the intentional directedness of the former toward the latter is wrong, and ... every such theory misjudges the ethical value of empathy. (Sympathy,GW, 7:50)
Those who identify empathy with passive, duplicating understanding impoverish its value by denying its ethical productivity, for, as Scheler notes, a mere reproduction of another's feeling is not yet a morally relevant act (see, for example, Sympathy, GW, 7:20).
Revealing the covert similarity between contemporary reproductive ethical theories and Nietzsche's concept of pity, Scheler argues that what reproductive theories explain is not the workings of empathy but rather the psychological mechanics of mere emotional infection, brought about by the residual herd instincts (Sympathy, GW, 7:23). Those who experience fellow-feeling only as emotional infection are motivated not by loving regard for their suffering neighbor but by the squeamish fear of contamination: they may help the sufferer only to be rid of his suffering, to extinguish the menacing source of contagion. Such "help" is hardly an example of a spontaneous existential attitude from Nietzsche's point of view, nor is it an ethically significant gesture from the standpoint of Scheler's value system.
Bakhtin, who draws a parallel between a genuinely active, creative attitude toward a fellow human being and aesthetic creation, criticizes the "impoverishing theories" of empathy and empathetic aesthetics for similar reasons. According to the Russian philosopher, such theories fail to recognize the individual nature either of the aesthetic event or of its participants, assuming that creation in general and cultural creation in particular are based on "participation in one unitary consciousness" ("AH," 88). He groups the theories of aesthetic empathy into expressive (Volkelt, Wundt, Lipps, E. von Hartmann) and impressive (Fiedler, Witasek, the Formalists) aesthetics. Both reduce the essentially interactive empathetic process to one participant: expressive aesthetics passively assumes that the (aesthetic) object's exterior is the self-sufficient expression of its inner state, neglecting the empathizer's impact on the creative process, while impressive aesthetics confines creation to the author's or empathizer's sole activity (see "AH," 61–81, 91–92).
For Bakhtin, as for Scheler, what makes sympathy ethically relevant is its profoundly active nature. "It is only from within my participation [in the act of aesthetic contemplation, as in any unitary event that links me with another subject in a responsible way] that the function of each participant can be understood," Bakhtin writes. "In the place of another, just as in my own place, I am in the same state of senselessness" ("Toward a Philosophy of the Act," 18, hereafter TPA). According to Bakhtin, "becoming" the sufferer in the process of complete merging with his ego is just as ineffective and morally unrewarding as remaining utterly unconnected with his private self, unmoved by his suffering within the impenetrable domicile of one's own all-important sensations. If my act of compassion with the other ends in assuming his position in Being, I simply trade the limitations of my own solipsistic point of view for those of another's equally unsatisfying, fragmentary outlook on the world, finding myself "in the same state of senselessness" and paralyzing helplessness that characterizes the sufferer's own existence in its unmitigated solitude. For that reason, "what should be emphasized [in describing the act of active co-experiencing] is the absolutely incremental, excessive, productive and enriching character of sympathetic understanding. ... The point is a transposition of another's experience to an entirely different axiological plane, into a new category of valuation and affirmation" ("AH," 102). Indeed, as Scheler notes, the phenomenon of true empathy, ultimately misunderstood by Nietzsche, is necessarily "additional to the other's experience, which is already grasped and understood" (Sympathy, GW, 7:19).
The "additional" element in empathy is love: only if bolstered by love does it acquire its active, value-oriented quality and its capacity for absolute affirmation (see, for example, Sympathy, GW, 7:146–47). So much so, that "the only thing that makes pity bearable is love that it betrays," Scheler states in response to Nietzsche's critique, which portrays both love and empathy as equally reactive, non-spontaneous emotions (Sympathy, GW, 7:148). When empathy is steeped in love, it does not reduce the empathized to his suffering, a gesture that would be offensive to his sense of self. Rather, love directs the empathetic emotional current beyond the co-experienced sensation of pain, toward the sufferer himself, actively affirming his entire, deeply valuable person. It is the sufferer's individual face, whose expressive wrinkles tell the unique tale of his anguish, and not the depersonalizing masks of a generalized social type, such as "the abused" or "the downtrodden," that loving empathy warmly acknowledges, while mere emotional identification would "look past" its object as an immediately present individuality, drawn only to the menacing sight of the wound.
Bakhtin, too, speaks of sympathy accompanied by love or of "love-like sympathy" as a genuinely active force and the primary source of creativity in aesthetic production ("AH," 82), emphasizing the dynamic, enriching nature of love as a movement, which is lost if love is defined in a narrowly psychological sense (TPA, 64). This careful qualification evokes Scheler's distinction between emotional functions (empathy, joint feeling), which, as such, have a receptive, passive quality and are, at least partially, subject to psychological laws, and emotional acts (love, hatred), described as entirely spontaneous, value-oriented movements independent of psychology (see, for example, Sympathy,GW, 7:156, 191; Formalism, GW, 2:266–67). Only if inspired by love can empathy become a truly dynamic emotional force capable of staying emotional infection and preventing the pathological merging of selves that Nietzsche wrongly identifies with Christian compassion, Scheler argues. For Bakhtin, too, only love allows one to apprehend the infinite diversity of Being, guarding against the dissolution of individual consciousnesses within an abstractly conceived, schematized "matrix" of the surrounding world (TPA, 64).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Gift of Active Empathy by Alina Wyman. Copyright © 2016 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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