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Show Chapter VI. Moral Interiority 256 engender correspondingly deep practical problems when the effort to understand another is committed, persistent and sincere. And of course that we cannot know with certainty how accurate our empathic responses are does not imply that there is no fact of the matter about this; nor, therefore, that we cannot approximate empathic accuracy to varying degrees whether we know with certainty that we are doing so or not. We achieve veridical empathy - as well as foresight, clairvoyance, and what is often misdescribed as "extra-sensory perception" - through a capacity of mind that, in Kant's taxonomy, resists the very possibility of independent systematic research, namely intuition. For Kant, intuition is the capacity by which we are brought into unmediated relation with an object. This unmediated relation is a precondition of our organizing it in space and time, and of our recognizing it conceptually - and so a precondition of our interpretation of the object as independent of ourselves. But since intuition of another's inner state does not constitute knowledge of it, we may experience what is in fact a veridically empathic response to another's inner state without being able to know, in the strict sense, that we do. I say more about Kant's concept of intuition elsewhere. For present purposes in what follows, I shall often speak of an (accurate) empathic understanding of or insight into another's inner state, as though such a thing is possible. This reflects my Kantian conviction that veridical empathy is not only possible but often actual, even if we cannot know that it is, or how it is. 4.2. Sympathy and Empathy By contrast with empathy, to sympathize with another is to be affected by one's visceral comprehension of the other's inner state with a similar or corresponding state of one's own, and also to take a pro-attitude toward both if the state is positive, and a con-attitude towards them if it is negative. In order to feel sympathy for another's condition, one must first viscerally comprehend what that condition is. Therefore, sympathy presupposes at least a partial capacity for empathy. But once one has achieved an empathic interpretation of the other's behavior, sympathy is of course not the only possible response. I may interpret your behavior as murderous rage, or incestuous lust with the help of my empathic experience of it, and react with even greater revulsion against it for that reason. Whereas sympathy implies one's emotional accord with the other's inner state, empathy implies only one's visceral comprehension of it. That an interpretation of another's inner state requires an empathic imaginative involvement with it does not mean it requires one's concordant reaction to it as well. An empathic imaginative involvement with another's inner states treats those states as depth rather than surface objects of imagination. It is an application of modal imagination to a particular kind of imaginative object, namely a human subject; and to a particular quality of that kind of object, © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
