Empathy and Art

Empathy is a key constituent of any meaningful human relationship. The author of the article on empathy for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Lou Agosta, writes:

“Individuals [in contemporary culture] strive to bandage over the pervasive feelings of inner emptiness and feelings of being a fake in spite of the external trappings of material success. The resulting image is a Nietzschian one – everywhere fragments of persons and no-where a complete, whole human being, capable of engaging life with integrity (wholeness). The antidote is empathy. Empathy functions as an on-going process of distinguishing, sustaining, and strengthening the structure of the self. Empathy heals the self, and a well-integrated self is one able to sustain the commitments required to keep one’s word, avoid cheating and self-medication with alcohol and recreational drugs, productively engage in satisfying activities and relatedness to others, and contribute to the community. Empathy is a form of receptivity to the other; it is also a form of understanding. In the latter case, one puts oneself in the place of the other conceptually. In the former, one is open experientially to the affects, sensations, emotions that the other experiences.”

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While the writer no doubt over-states the case for the role of empathy in healing the many ills of modern culture, he is no doubt correct in recognizing that the capacity to see into the emotional life of another is both a means of improving social relations between people, and, is also a means for healing the ruptures and wounds of our own individual self.

 

The origin of the word ‘empathy’ is that of a conjunction of the Greek em (‘in’) + pathos (‘feeling’). The history of the word pathos in western culture is curious. On the one hand, it figures significantly in discussions of sickness as in the suffix –pathology. On the other hand, it is also the root of our common word for emotion, passion. The one word then seems to signify both sickness and emotion. The reason for this unusual situation is that the ancient Greeks thought that to be governed purely by ones emotions was indeed to be mentally ill. The philosophic tradition since the time of Plato has that of emphasising the important of reason in governing the emotions.

Empathy also plays an important role in the appreciation of art. If empathy is defined as the seeing into another person’s emotional life, then aesthetic empathy is seeing into the emotional life of a work of art. This might take many forms – music, drama, literature, painting, etc – but the fundamental point would be the same: we appreciate art when we enter into the emotional life of the work of art.

However this should not be confused with subjectivism in aesthetics – the view that beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder. If that view were true, then there would be no beauty independent of the subjective perceiver which would imply that beauty really doesn’t exist at all.

Such a world would be a very dull one.

(Discussion summary of Tuesday morning group at Burleigh Heads 20th Sept 2016.)

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