A Taxonomy of Empathy

Abstract

‘A Taxonomy of Empathy’ presents a new systematisation for the phenomenon of empathy, based on the difference between what the author calls low-level empathy and high-level empathy. The first one is a form of direct, unmediated, conceptually poor, and intuitive kind of empathy which does not require the use of imagination and is akin to the concept of empathy supported by many phenomenologists, the second one is instead based on the use of imagination, mental simulations, and narratives. Narrative empathy is here represented as a subcategory of high-level empathy. The idea of the author is to overcome the rigid separation between advocates of empathy as perspective-taking and proponents of empathy as an unreflective phenomenon.

1 Low-Level Empathy

Offering at the very beginning of this work the definition of empathy that will be used coherently in the following pages has hopefully helped to better highlight some important characteristics of this phenomenon. Nevertheless, not all that matters has of yet received due attention. Simply asserting that empathy is a way to understand and feel the mental states of others will not take us far in the analysis, as there are many different modes available to attain this: we can do it by contagion, by intuition, by talking to another, by simulation, and more. Do all of these mechanisms constitute different forms of empathy? Is it correct to speak of different ‘kinds’ of empathy? In this section I am going to address those questions by describing which phenomena are to be considered as empathic and by outlining a taxonomy of the different existing types of empathy. Let us begin with the first issue: what counts as empathy and what not.

The concept of empathy I am examining is sufficiently large to entail all the cases in which the empathiser has come to understand and feel the mental states of the targeted individual by reasoning, imagining, or by simply being receptive towards the other.¹ What I am going to argue here is rather that empathy is a uniform and clearly identifiable phenomenon, but that there are various methods we can use to empathise with others, and these methods can be applied to categorise the multifaceted psychological mechanism of empathy. In other words, it is on the bases of these several different approaches, which are used to arrive at the same condition (an empathic condition), that the taxonomy outlined in the following pages is built. I will start my analysis with the most rudimentary forms of empathy and then gradually move towards to the more sophisticated ones.

Let us again take into account the example of the angry individual, but this time try to substantiate it with more details and give it a specific context. Think of this situation: a man—call him Paul—is driving on a road on the outskirts of town. He sees the traffic lights in front of him turning yellow and then red and he consequently stops the car. Paul sighs heavily: it was a hard day at work, his back hurts a bit, but he is glad he can finally arrive home, have a warm shower, and chill on the couch watching his favourite TV-series. He absent-mindedly looks at the surroundings through the windows of his car, then takes a look in the rear-view mirror. A car is approaching at a remarkably high speed considering the light is red. As the car gets nearer, Paul notices that the driver is typing on his mobile without watching the road. He sounds the horn, but it is too late. All of a sudden, there is an impact: Paul feels a strong bump from the back, which moves his car forward, and then hears the sound of broken glass and the crunching of metal. He feverishly unfastens the seat belt and gets out of the car. For a moment, he looks in disbelief at the dent in the rear of his car, then he hears a stammering voice: ‘I am so sorry about that, sir! My fault. I was… I’m sorry.’ Paul feels a gush of blood go to his head and nearly all the muscles of his body (starting from those of the neck and shoulders) tensing up. He clenches his fists, looks back at the man talking to him, and confronts him aggressively, yelling with rage.

Now, imagine having attended this scene from the sidewalk and having observed the entire incident from the very beginning. What are you doing if you feel, in some sense, ‘the same anger’ that Paul feels? Or, suppose that you were not present at the scene, but that you are Paul’s brother and that Paul told you everything that happened when he eventually came back home. Once again, you find yourself sharing in Paul’s anger. Or else, suppose that I am the teacher of a psychology course while you are one of my students and, after having described this fictional example, I ask you to envisage what kind of emotions might Paul be experiencing in such a circumstance. I would anticipate that your answer, in each of these cases, would be, not surprisingly: ‘Well, if I were him, I would certainly feel angry!’

What ties all of these different cases together are two conditions:

• 1. In all three cases, your attention is directed towards Paul’s mental states, that is, what he might be thinking or feeling.

• 2. In all three cases, you manage to understand and feel (to a certain degree) the same mental states that Paul has.

However, there is also another important element that is present in the last two cases and absent in the first one: the use of imagination. In fact, in the second case you did not personally witness the scene and in the third one you have to construe the whole situation in your mind: in both instances imagination is needed.²

We know from our previous definition of empathy that the first two conditions, that is, the intentionality/other-directedness and the consonance³ of mental states between empathiser and empathised are both necessary conditions of the empathic phenomenon. I will argue in what follows that although imagination can be very useful to carry out an empathic process (almost all the contemporary researchers on empathy, with the exception of the representatives of the ‘modern’ phenomenological tradition⁴ agree in this regard), it should not be taken as an integral part of it. Imagination is a fundamental component of what I call High-level empathy, but there exists another, more basic and unmediated form of empathy: Low-level empathy.⁵ The differences between these two forms of empathy can be detected at a phenomenological level, but they are also traceable in experiments conducted in the fields of psychology and of the neurosciences. Let us go step by step and begin with phenomenology: what happens when we empathise in a ‘low-level’ way? Suppose you are the passer-by on the sidewalk, observing the rear-end collision in which Paul was involved, or—if we want to change the example and add an extra-layer of interaction on your part—suppose you are in the company of a friend who has just been left by his beloved partner. In both cases you do not have to construct any story: you are part of the story, part of the narrative, you are in the situation and able to interact with it and with its protagonists. The crucial feature in both these circumstances is that you directly experience what the others do and say: their gestures, mimicry, facial expressions, and of course their words and acts. To put it simply, you are able to experience their behaviour. This layer of perceivable interaction that subjects have with the world and with others is what modern-day phenomenologists call embodied-being-in-the-world.⁶ Our mind—so the position of the phenomenologists—has an original, natural tendency to express itself in (embodied) behaviour. The mind (and its states) must not be thought of as something hidden from the world and locked in our heads, but as continuously revealing itself to the world. That is the reason why imagination is not involved in what I call low-level empathy; what we need is rather the direct observation of the target of our empathy and some general knowledge of the context (after all, behaviour always expresses itself in a shared context of experience): once we have all these elements, empathy will follow automatically.⁷ Take the example of your friend left by his partner. You do not need any kind of simulation or of imaginative enactment to understand and (granted that you are ‘open’⁸ enough) to also feel his sadness: his emotions are already clear to you. They arise from the tears in his eyes, from the sound of his voice breaking while telling you what happened, and from the way in which he sighs.

This primitive, basic, and ‘conceptually poor’⁹ form of empathy has a long history. The first to analyse it in a systematic way was David Hume. He described ‘sympathy’ (what we would nowadays call ‘empathy’) as a kind of mirroring of feelings: ‘The human countenance’, asserts Hume, quoting from Horace,¹⁰ ‘borrows smile or tears from the human countenance’. ‘Reduce a person to solitude, and he loses all enjoyment […] because the movements of his heart are not forwarded by correspondent movements in his fellow creatures.’¹¹ Empathy seems to him to be a phenomenon in which an emotional state is transmitted from the target to the observer: ‘a propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to, our own’.¹²

Now, almost every scholar with an interest in empathy has begun their research either by saying that the concept of empathy they endorse is the direct heir of that of Hume (or a development of it) or by asserting that they will criticise the Humean argumentation to support something completely different. Both the methodologies have their raison d’être, but I will not adhere to either of them. Rather, the claim I am trying to defend is the following: philosophers have, for a very long time, identified and described with similar emphasis, a phenomenon where it is possible for a subject to understand and feel the mental states of another subject in a direct, unmediated, and conceptually poor way. This phenomenon can—so I claim—be correctly characterised with the help of the classic and modern phenomenological tradition and takes the aforementioned name of ‘low-level empathy’.¹³

The fundamental assumption of phenomenology, in this regard, is a clear rejection of any form of Cartesian solipsism, according to which the mental states of a subject remain substantially ‘hidden’ and cannot be directly experienced by others. Following this Cartesian idea, we have to postulate that which I have referred to elsewhere as an ‘inner world’ made of mental states accessible uniquely to the person who is having those states and an ‘external world’ made of perceptual inputs and which is accessible to anyone. This being the case, the only method we have in order to understand the mental states of others is first by perceiving their bodily behaviour to then pass, thanks to an inference¹⁴ or simulation,¹⁵ to the hypothesising of some kind of cognitive and emotional content. However, not all occurrences of empathy are conceptually rich and need inferences or simulations. We saw with the example of Paul, and with that of the friend left by his partner, that we are able to empathise in a direct and unmediated fashion. We experience incidences of LLE every day. Actually, I would go so far as to claim that LLE is not only the most basic form of empathy, but also the most usually employed form. Normally, we switch to more complex and conceptually richer kinds of empathy only if LLE fails or if—for some reason—it is not enough.

However, in order to point out that LLE is not just a mere postulation, a petitio principii, we need to give it a solid conceptual foundation, in other words we have to show how and why it works. Therefore, over the next few pages I am going to defend my position at both a phenomenological and a psychological level. Nonetheless, before moving on, a brief explanation is needed. In the following arguments regarding LLE, I will frequently use the expression ‘understand the other’s feelings/emotions/mental states’ or something similar, whereas I will not refer a great deal to ‘feeling the other’s feelings/emotions’. There is a reason for this. In fact, except for individuals who have specific impairments (take the case of those with autism and Aspergers), understanding the emotions of another person is usually easier than feeling them. Feeling what another feels implies more than just a receptive attitude towards the other; in particular, I claim that the following elements must be taken into account:

• 1. the characters of the two subjects (empathiser and target);

• 2. the presence (or absence) of a common history between the two;

• 3. the relationship they share (or not);

• 4. the mental states of the observer at the moment of empathising;

• 5. the correct identification of the context on the part of the observer;

• 6. the information the observer has about the target.

Every single one of these features has an influence on the consonance condition. Notice, also, that not one of them is—taken per se—necessary or sufficient for the emotional consonance, but each one of them can tip the balance towards or away from it. Some simple and concise examples will help to illustrate this point. My aim is to show how affective empathy can be impeded or improved, depending on the presence or absence of each one of these elements.

Take the first element: character. The proud person would typically find more difficulty in empathising with the emotion of sadness on the part of a person by whom they believe they have been offended or humiliated in the past.¹⁶ Or, to choose another example, a person who has not experienced jealousy at all will find it hard to empathise with the emotion of jealousy felt intensively by another subject.

As for the second element, think of the empathy that may exist between an older couple after decades of happy marriage (the meaningful glances that say it all without the need for words, the perfect knowledge of the partner’s gestures, expressions, tones of voice, and so on, that permit an almost perfect ‘synchrony of feelings’, so to say) versus the often odd and awkward situation of having to reassure someone one barely knows, without having the slightest idea of what one should say. Empathy will come very easily in the first kind of situation, not so much in the second one.

The concept of a shared relationship seems at a first glance to be strictly connected with that of a common history, and in part it does. However, by using the term ‘relationship’ I want to imply something different¹⁷: as Aristoteles would say, we are ‘social animals’ and in our lives we share various kinds of relationships with each other: romantic relationships, working relationships, and so on. These relationships inevitably have an impact on our capacity to empathise. For instance: how much empathy would a man show to his now ex-wife when dealing with the children’s custody after having to make monthly payments to her? How much empathy would the young female boss have for the elder male worker who she knows wanted that job as badly as she did and now finds himself in the uncomfortable position of being her subordinate? As you can see, the kind of relationship one shares with another has a huge impact on one’s capability for empathy.

The influence of mental states at the moment of empathising is perhaps most immediately comprehensible among these elements: most likely we all are aware of the fact that certain emotions, especially when felt very strongly, can hinder empathy, that is, stress, shame, grief, self-pity. So, for example, the usually friendly and empathic high-school teacher will not be able to empathise as usual with his weaker students if he is worried about the health of his only beloved daughter suffering from Crohn’s disease.

Another central element is the correct identification of the context. Empathy never happens, so to say, in an ‘empty space’; rather the opposite, it is always contextual, and contexts have to be interpreted. Suppose I see from afar two men fighting. As I come nearer to the scene, I notice that one of the two men (the taller one) seems to shake and suffocate the other from behind. At this point in time (call it ‘moment A’) I imagine that the man has probably attacked the other from behind and wants in some way to hurt him. Worried, I get even closer and suddenly I see (call it ‘moment B’) that the shorter man spits a piece of food out of his mouth and takes a huge gasp. ‘Oh, now I see!’ I tell to myself, ‘The shorter man was suffocating and the taller one was only trying to save him, using the Heimlich manoeuvre!’ It is clear enough that if I had tried to empathise with the shorter man at ‘moment A’ I would have totally failed to identify the emotions he might have been having, not because of an error in my sensory perception or because of a deficit in empathy, but because of my mistaken interpretation of the context.

The sixth element might appear as another formulation of the second, but actually it is not. In fact, the information we possess about another person does not have to come from the sharing of certain tranches de vie, but they can stem from various sources: I can gather information about person A thanks to the reports of another person who knows them well, or thanks to an autobiography they might have written, or (in the case where they are a public figure) thanks to the news, and so on. The more extensive and precise the information is, the more the empathising process will be facilitated.¹⁸

After this excursus about the conditioners of empathy, it is now time to go back to our previous questions regarding the psychological and phenomenological foundation of LLE.

The phenomenon that I have named ‘Low-level empathy’ should be considered as opposed to any philosophical and psychological position which sees empathy essentially as an indirect and conceptually rich mechanism, involving a two-stage process in which firstly the bodily behaviour of another person is observed and then is followed by an interpretation of it based on either a theoretical inference (and it is the case of Theory-theory) or a simulation (and it is the case of Simulation-theory). On the contrary, as already mentioned previously, LLE is traceable in the work made by various phenomenologists on empathy. LLE is also a direct and conceptually poor mechanism. In Low-level empathy, that is, we experience the other individual as an intentional being and their bodily behaviour (expressions, gestures, actions, and more) as immediately expressive of their mental states. The subjectivity of the other is present (and presented) to us, thanks to empathy, from a first-person perspective. This is a position which can be deduced from the work of Max Scheler.

Following Scheler, the point is that the consciousness of the Mitwelt, of the ‘world of others’ is not a secondary phenomenon, but an original one. Every person before and independently from a pragmatic experience of the other has a transcendental structure of their own personality and that we could call ‘sociality’, through which they can intentionally interrelate with others. Using a term of a famous American philosopher, John Searle, we could say that there is a kind of transcendental ‘background’ of potential relations prior to any attempt of empathising with others. This immediately presents the others to us as independent Ich or Ichindividuen, different from our Ich, and, ipso facto, precisely because of their separateness and independence from us—for the fact of being Ich different from my Ich—capable of intentional relations with us.¹⁹ Modern-day phenomenologists like Dan Zahavi, Søren Overgaard, but also Shaun Gallagher or Daniel Ratcliffe often use the concept of ‘intersubjectivity’. We could say that this concept is the grandchild of a much older concept, the Schelerian concept of ‘sociability’. For Scheler, sociability has an a priori connotation, meaning that it is internally (innerlich) present in every person. The person is part of the society, and, in turn, the society is part of the person. Like the Ich is part of the Wir, so the Wir is part of the Ich. With a literary analogy, we could say that Robinson Crusoe, while he is alone in the desert island and before his encounter with Man Friday, has already in himself the potentiality (of which he is fully aware) to become a member of a society. That is to say, that even the individual who does not actually live in the society nevertheless lives in it intentionally, even those who have never had a direct experience of community would however participate in it through the Mangelbewusstsein and through the Nichterfüllungbewusstsein, that is, thanks to the ‘consciousness of the lack’ of it and to the resulting feeling of ‘dissatisfaction’.²⁰

Long before Lévinas, Scheler wrote that the perception of the other always precedes the perception of the Ich. Our most basic and primary form of knowledge is, for Scheler, always a knowledge of expressive phenomena. That is why, anticipating, in addition to Lévinas, even Sartre, he could assert that we see the fury, the sadness, the hostility, the love, the shame, or whatever other emotion is in the gaze of others, long before we can specify the colour or the size of their eyes.²¹ Max Scheler is, in my perspective, the putative father of LLE. Following his concept, we are not only able to experience the other’s mind from a first-person standpoint and in a perceptual (or perception-like) way, but this experience of others is primary, original, and even prior to the experience of ourselves.²² We cannot understand ourselves as Ich, before having understood the other as Ich. Using the German words employed by Scheler, we could say that we never live in a simple Welt, that is, in a world in which I am the only ‘minded’ inhabitant, for the reason that I am the only subject provided with a mind that I am able to know, whereas the existence of others, and in particular of other minds, must necessarily be in some way inferred. On the contrary, I always find myself in a Mitwelt (literally, a ‘with-world’), namely, a world in which I am an Ich among other Ichs. As Heidegger once noticed, the Ich has never to come out from itself, to break out, since it is already outside, nor does it have to get into others, into their minds, for the good reason that it already encounters the others outside.²³ Quoting from Gallagher and Zahavi (2012, p. 207) we could affirm: ‘No inference to a hidden set of mental states is necessary. Expressive behaviour is saturated with the meaning of the mind; it reveals the mind to us’ and also:

Before we are in a position to theorize, simulate, explain, or predict mental states in others, we are already interacting with them and understanding them in terms of their expressions, gestures, intentions and emotions, and how they act towards us and others. Importantly, primary intersubjectivity is not primary simply in developmental terms. Rather, it remains primary throughout the life span, across all face-to-face intersubjective experiences, and it underpins those developmentally later practices that may involve explaining or predicting mental states in others.²⁴

This last quote is very important, as it highlights the special role of LLE. Low-level empathy is not just the primary empathic mechanism we develop, but it remains the fundamental one even once we have developed the faculty to utilise HLE, which means to say that: (1) even when performing HLE, LLE usually occurs before it; (2) consequently, LLE informs HLE by providing it with the epistemic basis it needs (a basis that can later be discarded, but that nevertheless constitutes its first foundation).

All this said, one might wonder what we need HLE for if we primarily rely on LLE for our empathic attempts? The answer is twofold: on the one hand, there are circumstances in which we simply cannot use LLE, for example, when I try to empathise with a person I do not know or who is not present at that moment. Indeed, LLE works at its best as a hic et nunc mechanism, which means that the other person must be present and share with me a given context of experience. On the other hand, LLE works immediately and directly as a kind of intuition; through LLE we grasp what the other might be thinking and feeling, and we know by experience that we are often not happy with a simple intuition: we want to understand the (psychological) reasons for the subject doing this action, and we want to really know ‘how it feels’ to be that way. Sometimes we want, in a sense, to stay with the other, to dwell in their thoughts and emotions, to let them flow in us, in order to better empathise with them.²⁵ However, this issue will be explored more extensively later in the book.

Let us now go back to our concept of LLE. We said that this mechanism is grounded on a behavioural and contextual understanding, thanks to which we can grasp in a rather ‘sketchy way’ the other’s mental states. It is not a deep understanding of them, but a superficial one. Nevertheless, it constitutes our basic compass for intersubjective understanding. Resorting to HLE all the time would be exhausting, whereas LLE occupies our intellectual and emotional faculties only for a small percentage of the time. Think, for instance, of the situation when you see two teenagers interacting from a distance: the boy offers the girl a bunch of flowers, and, although you are not able to hear what they say, you grasp the embarrassment and the shyness of the boy, thanks to his facial expression and to his blushing, and the joy of the girl, thanks to her smile and the movement of her hands. Think, too, of two men on the street, talking in a language you cannot speak but who—you understand—are clearly arguing about something. Consider all the situations you will probably face while simply strolling around in a big city. You could not possibly empathise at a high level with all these different subjects, but LLE offers you a useful basic intersubjective and interrelational orientation, a psychological compass.

Some authors, like those already cited representatives of the phenomenological tradition, would call what I have labelled ‘Low-level empathy’ as empathy plain and simple and would deny the existence of other forms. However, a whole series of scholars, simply too long to be listed extensively, as well as our normal everyday experience, teach us that there are other ways of empathising. In what follows, I will offer a brief list of the different forms of ‘High-level empathy’ and thereby complete the taxonomy of empathy I will make use of in this work.²⁶

2 High-Level Empathy

The first form of High-level empathy implies putting ourselves in the shoes of another subject and thereby imagining being in this subject’s situation. This phenomenon has various names,²⁷ but in order to define it unambiguously we can employ the useful terminology of Amy Coplan, who brands it Self-Oriented Perspective-Taking. Similar to this is another kind of phenomenon, which must, however, be sharply distinguished from the first: Other-Oriented Perspective-Taking. An example will help to shed light on the difference between the two phenomena. Imagine that I meet with a friend of mine—call him Mark—who is usually in a cheerful, sunny mood almost every single day, but this time something is different: his face seems clouded, his voice does not have the same energy, his smile is gone. I ask him what is wrong and he tells me that he has broken up with his girlfriend. Now, suppose that I hated his girlfriend, and that I had found her bad-tempered, arrogant, tactless, and simply unfitting for my friend. It is quite easy to understand that a part of me is glad to hear news of the break-up. I may very well think: ‘Finally he is free from the bad influence of that witch!’ or something of the kind. Nonetheless, I know that I would not be a good friend if I simply tried to cheer up Mark by feeding him banalities such as ‘Life goes on’; ‘There’s plenty more fish in the sea’, or something similar. And of course, I cannot tell him what I really think about his ex-girlfriend; not that day and not in that way, certainly. On the contrary, I know that my task as a friend is to be there for him, not simply to say: ‘I know how you feel’, but to really mean it. Therefore, I try to take his perspective on the matter, to walk in his shoes. I try to imagine what it feels like when someone whom you care about, someone you even love with all your heart comes to leave you. I ask him to tell me how it happened, looking for details which not only help me to understand the story, but to experience it imaginatively. My goal is to provoke in myself feelings which resemble those that Mark might be having at the moment, something that—to cite Smith—‘though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them’.²⁸

Already from this simple example it is possible to point out an intrinsic difficulty of the self-oriented perspective-taking, and it is the issue of what we can call ‘egocentric biases’. Self-oriented perspective-taking is intrinsically biased because, on closer look, it is not really the perspective of the other that we take into account, but ours in appreciation of hers. We just consider the situation in which the other is, but we never contemplate the other as a subject with their own peculiarities and characterisations, with their particular personality, with their ideas and values. We simply project on the target what we would think or feel if we found ourselves in their circumstances. For that reason, if this mechanism surely tells me what I would feel in certain situations, it cannot always help me to understand what the other might feel in these same situations. This approach can only work well when both the empathiser and the person empathised with are very similar, however, if there are some significant differences between the two of them, then it becomes very unreliable.

The other-oriented perspective-taking seems on the contrary a much more reliable method. Here, the empathiser does not only imagine what is like to be in the other’s situation, instead, they also try to imagine being the other.²⁹ The answer that the other-perspective taker poses to themselves is not: ‘What would I feel if I were in Christy’s situation?’, but ‘What would I do if I were Christy and I were in her situation?’ Formulating the question in that way permits a higher level of accuracy, thereby overcoming the egocentric biases. However, another kind of issue should soon become evident: the preciseness of the conclusions about the other’s mental states reached, thanks to this mechanism, depends on the information the empathiser has about this other subject and about the context.³⁰ The more exact the information, the more precise the outcome of the perspective-taking will be.³¹

2.1 A Special Case of High-Level Empathy: Narrative Empathy

The great majority of the authors tend to identify these two mechanisms as the only forms of perspective-taking. Nevertheless, my claim is that there is another approach that can be used to take the perspective of another subject, which has been too often overlooked in the literature on empathy and that we can call narrative perspective-taking. This method is usually employed when we do not personally know the person whose perspective we want to take. Nonetheless, it can be used (and it is often used) in conjunction with the other two methods, as well.³² Given the importance of this method, it is quite surprisingly to notice the extent to which it seems to have been overlooked in the traditional literature on empathy. The amount of work done analysing the connection between narratives and empathy does not, in fact, get even close to the efforts made in developing the two most famous forms of perspective-taking, namely, simulation-theory and theory-theory. It is not my aim here to follow a precise view on the phenomenon which I have called ‘narrative perspective-taking’ and to defend the theory of a certain philosopher against the opposite views of others. On the contrary, my purpose is to briefly describe how narrative empathy can function and why it should be taken into account when talking about empathy and perspective-taking.

I mentioned above that narrative empathy is often employed when we want to empathise with people we do know little about (since we normally do not need to resort to narratives when the target of our empathy is a person we know very well). One of the typical cases is empathy felt for fictional characters, such as figures in a film or a novel.³³ In these cases, in fact, I have to completely rely on the information given, respectively, by the director or the novelist, in order to empathise with a character. Indeed, much of the skill of the novelist consists typically in offering an accurate and realistic depiction of the characters of his or her story, and the same applies to a film director.³⁴ With regard to the latter, the role of the actors in providing psychological depth to the figures they are impersonating is as crucial as that of the director. When we read a novel or watch a film, it is very common to get involved in empathic and empathy-related mechanisms with the characters represented: we feel with a character, we try to anticipate his or her future actions or intentions, and we imagine what we would feel in their situation. For this reason, it is not surprising that many of the studies about narrative empathy were conducted, in addition to psychology, in the fields of aesthetics and literary critique.³⁵ In the case of fictional characters, indeed, all we have as a basis for our empathy is precisely the narrative information that is offered to us from the author of the story (be it a written novel, a film, or something similar).

Take, for example, one of the most paradigmatic scenes of a universally acclaimed film shot by a director who is famous for the extraordinary psychological introspection of his characters. The film referred to is The Godfather by Francis Ford Coppola, and the scene under scrutiny is that in which Michael Corleone (interpreted by Al Pacino) pays a visit to Carlo Rizzi, together with some of his men (among them his trusted counsellor Tom Hagen). At this point in the film we have a substantial amount of information about each character in the scene: some is in regard to the psychology of the various characters, other details are in relation to family ties, trust, and the internal rules of a criminal organisation like the Italian-American mob that we get to know during the movie. Despite the volume and the complexity of the information at hand, the spectator does not find any difficulty in complying it into a narrative that makes sense (also thanks to the ability of the director) and in empathising with the various characters. Indeed, it is exactly the capability of the viewer to carry out this empathic process that ultimately constitutes the profound emotional tension in this scene. Let us deconstruct it, in order to identify the various elements that build up the Spannung.

At this point, Michael Corleone has radically changed from the beginning of the film. The recent, terrible happenings that have befallen his family have led him to embrace the destiny of a Mafia-Boss, transforming his psychology in a profound way. Once an honest man, Michael is now a cold-blooded murderer and a clever, cunning plotter. His beloved brother, Santino ‘Sonny’ Corleone, was viciously killed in an ambush by a rival clan: the Barrese, and Michael knows that Carlo was the one who betrayed Sonny. Carlo is not the kind of man who elicits the sympathy of the viewer: at this point we already know that he is a violent drunkard, who beats his wife (who happens to be Michael’s sister) and now reveals himself as a traitor, too. On top of that, we also know how much Michael loves his sister and loved his brother, and how serious the violation of the trust between mobsters made by Carlo Rizzi is. That is why, already after the very first greeting given by Michael, we expect something bad to happen. Those words: ‘Hello, Carlo!’, sound like an epitaph. The look in the eyes of Michael Corleone/Al Pacino appears as an irrevocable condemnation. As spectators, we are certain: Carlo is already a dead man, he just does not know it yet. But then, surprisingly enough, Michael does not make a violent move. He reassures Carlo (who is understandably terrified, as it clearly appears from the look on his face) and makes him sit down on an armchair. He even offers Carlo a drink and tells him that he is not going to hurt him. He just wants the name of the clan who killed his brother, then he will send him to Las Vegas in eternal exile as a punishment for having betrayed the family. Carlo, after some hesitations and visibly upset, finally confesses. Michael seems to be satisfied and lets Carlo get in the car, which should take him to Las Vegas. For a moment, we almost think that Michael has found unexpected (and perhaps undeserved) mercy for Carlo. Then, the camera shifts to Carlo sitting in the car, and behind him, in the back seat, we see none other than Peter Clemenza, Michael’s right-hand man and, more importantly, Sonny’s godfather. It is at this moment that the temporary illusion breaks and we know that the writing is on the wall for Carlo. He is indeed about to die, strangled in the car by Clemenza.

All the emotional load of this scene is based on the narrative empathy we feel towards all these figures. For some moments, they stop being fictional characters and assume a real ontic consistency. We feel as if we knew these people and we were able to foresee what they would think and do; and we do not do so by simply guessing, but by empathic processes grounded on the information we have on them provided by the narrative. We empathise with Carlo’s fear, with the profound indignation, the contempt, and the rage Michael feels, with the lust for vengeance by Clemenza. We make sense of the whole scene, not by imagining what we would think, feel, or do in this situation (even if we could ask ourselves this question, too), but by empathically knowing and feeling what the characters would think, feel, or do.

This kind of empathy is frequently employed in other contexts as well, for example, when we try to empathise with historical figures. Of course, depending on the instance at hand, the narrative empathy will take the form of a mere speculation, of a direct connection. In fact, whereas with films or novels we often have detailed description of the personalities and the temperament of the various characters, this is not always the case in the historical field. As a consequence, empathising with a modern historical figure like, say, Martin Luther King will be easier than doing the same with Attila. In the first case, we possess documentation from, among other things, videos, recordings, witnesses of people who met him personally. The image we can build from these sources is consequently much richer and more fine-grained than the one we can recreate about a Hun warlord who lived about 1500 years ago. Hence, to stress the concept once again, our empathy is always dependent (in addition to our empathic skills) on our knowledge from the information we have about both the context and the target of our empathy. Put in another way, we could affirm that empathy is directly proportional to our epistemic access to both subjects and contexts of experience.

However, there is another element which is imperative to highlight. I said above that narrative empathy is used, in particular, in relation to fictional and historical contexts, for the good reason that the information we have about these frameworks is typically expressed in a narrative form. Nonetheless, the field of application is potentially much wider than that. My claim is that narrative empathy can be applied in all cases of empathy, thereby exploring new horizons and enriching our empathic process. Human beings are, in other words, wonderful storytellers: they tell stories to explain almost everything they believe and much of what they feel. Ask a person, for example, why they have fallen in love with a person, why they believe in God, how they have come to study what they are studying or have the job they occupy. You will always receive a story in response. Indeed, telling (as far as possible) coherent and consistent stories is the way human beings have to make sense of the various beliefs, decisions, and feelings that are the foundation of their lives.³⁶ This same capability human beings have in assembling and telling narratives can work in tandem with empathy and, although the outcome of the empathic process will depend, as I have said more than once, on different sets of information, narratives always tend to constitute the bedrock on which the pillars of our empathy lie.³⁷

What is more, the possibility of constructing a reasonable and detailed narrative about one individual helps the empathiser to overcome the sense of difference, of distance, of estrangement one can feel towards an unknown person. This person ceases to be alien to us and starts, instead, to be a part of the world out of which we can make sense, a part of our world. Of course, granted that with this process we wish to gain access to the inner world of this person (we want to know them, to understand them, to feel what they feel), this process should be, as far as possible, free from previous biases we might have in relation to this person.³⁸ It is imperative to keep in mind that this act of epoché (with the meaning of ‘suspension of judgment’ that the Pyrrhonists and the Academic Skepticism developed) should be preliminary to all our empathic acts, otherwise we run the risk of imposing our world on the Other, instead of accommodating the Other’s world in ours. In other words, when engaging in an empathic process, we should resist both the temptation to apply our personality, our character, our way of thinking, and feeling on the Other, making them just another copy of ourselves (thereby abolishing them qua ‘Other’) and that to forcibly pigeonhole them in a category we are already familiar with, in a sort of cliché we can dominate.³⁹ What stands between the imposition of our psychology on the Other and the reduction of the rich interiority of an-Other to a stereotype is empathy.

But how is it possible to do that? Here is where the special function played by narratives becomes central. Every occurrence of high-level empathy must be embedded in a certain narrative. Narratives form the framework in which events and emotional episodes take place, in which the character and personality of a subject can become apparent, in which the context of experience can be explained. Without narratives, we are bound to the present moment in which a certain emotion arises in that facial expression, that bodily reaction, that context of experience. With narratives, on the contrary, we are able to imagine a past and a future for what we envision, we can embed the rising of that emotion in a story that provides it with meaning and that suggests a possible future development. To be more concrete, without narratives, the happiness of a girl who has finished law school is just that: an emotion of joy embodied in her smile, her laughter, and her tears. With narratives, that same emotion becomes something more and my empathy for the girl can be more accurate and richer. That happiness can become the happiness of a girl who accomplished law school although a certain high-school teacher never trusted in her (‘you are not fit to be a lawyer’) and thereby be mixed with a sense of revenge; it can be accompanied by gratitude towards her parents and towards their friends who were always there for her, each time she lost her courage; it can be hope at the thought of the bright future that awaits her, a future she has chosen. Hence, when I empathise using narratives, I do not empathise with the sheer token-feeling of joy, but with that precise and complex feeling of joy, a joy regarding all those elements; a joy, in one word, that is feeling towards (as Goldie would say) many different things. And it is exactly the concept of narrative developed by Peter Goldie that I have in mind here. Hence, it will benefit to cite a meaningful quote from him at this stage:

Our lives have a narrative structure—roughly speaking, they comprise an unfolding, structured sequence of actions, events, thoughts, and feelings, related from the individual’s point of view. A narrative, of course, can be recounted in vastly varying degrees of detail: I can summarize my whole life in ten minutes; or I can take an hour to tell you what happened to me in the last twenty-four hours. […] To make sense of one’s emotional life, including its surprises, it is thus necessary to see it as part of a larger unfolding narrative, not merely as a series of discrete episodes taken out of, and considered in abstraction from, the narrative in which they are embedded. A true narrative, as I understand it, is not simply an interpretive framework, placed, so to speak, over a person’s life; it is, rather, what that life is.⁴⁰

Hence, empathising using narrative empathy permits the uncovering of more complexities pertaining to the state of mind of another subject. In particular, narratives are especially appropriate to disclose the (often very intricate) intentionality of emotions, and that is what emotions are about. And this takes us to another major point: if emotions are always about something, then in order to empathise with another it cannot be enough to share in the mere phenomenology of that emotion (i.e. to feel like the target does), one has to share in the intentionality, too. Thus, considering again the example of the girl who completed law school, there are various stages of what our empathy for her may reach: we can simply feel her happiness (and this is the first stage, in which only the same phenomenology is present); we can feel her happiness towards the same things she feels happiness for (and this is the second stage, in which also the intentionality is present); finally, we can feel her happiness towards the same things she feels happiness for, and for the same motives (and this is the third stage, in which phenomenology, intentionality, and also the cause of the emotion, or its trigger, is acknowledged and ‘felt’ from the inside). In other words, it is one thing to feel a generic feeling of happiness, devoid of content and outside of context, and another thing to feel happiness towards something, and because of a particular motive.

However, we need to clarify a crucial matter, or we run the risk of not only requiring from empathy more emotional and contextual information than it can provide, but of even perverting what empathy essentially is. We have already mentioned that the phenomenology of the empathised emotion does not have to be the same (which would be impossible), but must be consonant. Now we shall add that the intentionality and the acknowledgement of the emotional trigger also have to satisfy the requirements of a consonant condition and not of a sameness or isomorphic condition. So, concretely, it is not strictly necessary to simulate the happiness the girl might have had towards the accomplishment at law school to empathise with her (although this could help your perspective-taking); you could also empathise with her happiness by thinking of an achievement of a major accomplishment (one that you have had or that you imagine you could have, for instance) and of what feelings this would involve for a girl like her. In other words, very often a specific object can be substituted within the empathic procedure with a more generic one without undermining the outcome of the process and preserving the general emotional charge.

To sum up, narratives are part of the backbone of our high-level empathic processes. The success of our empathic attempts is founded on our capacity to fashion plausible and accurate stories about the targets of our empathy. Of course, since both the plausibility and accuracy of our stories are based on the information we have, or we can get access to, about the target and about the context of experience, the reliability of our narratives will depend for the most part on the correct and careful understanding of this information. On this issue, Peter Goldie stresses the importance, together with that of narratives, of the role played by characterisation. He defines it as follows:

[I]t also necessarily involves bringing to bear in the imaginative process a characterization of the narrator, which will include facts about the narrator—not just psychological facts about him, such as his character traits, adverbial traits, emotional dispositions, and other aspects of his personality, as well as his emotions, moods, and so forth (being kind; being punctual; being irritable; loving his wife; having a phobia about dogs; being depressed), but also other not obviously psychological facts about him (being short; being a litigation lawyer; being brought up in 1960s Alabama). This characterization serves as ‘background’ to the project of imaginative enactment of the narrative in the ‘foreground’.⁴¹

Until now, I have spoken more generally about ‘information about the target’ or about the ‘target’s character and personality’, for example. For the sake of simplicity and uniformity, we can employ the helpful vocabulary of Peter Goldie and refer to all of this as ‘characterisation’. For the British philosopher, this feature and narratives are independently necessary for empathy: ‘without the former, there is no possibility of centrally imagining another; and without the latter, there is no narrative to experience—at best one might be able only to imagine what it is like to be that other person’. I agree with that statement, but I would like to add the importance of context and assert that this, together with narratives and the characterisation of the target, form the conceptual, epistemic basis of empathy.

What we have done in this first part of the thesis is to make clear the notion of empathy I will make use of in the main body of the work. This book aims to illustrate the kind of role empathy can play in the moral sphere, and in order to do that, it has been imperative to firstly give a clear characterisation of what empathy is and how it works at an epistemic level. Having done that, we can now examine what effects this faculty of ours has at the moral level.