Prepared by Staff for Why War?
Introduction
Since returning from the West Bank a year ago I've been documenting, through translation into philosophical discourse, the state of being such an experience evokes. I have come to use the term radical empathy in an attempt to conjure up visualizations of the politization of a moral virtue. A movement united behind the force of a living-empathy, an obligatory solidarity with the colonized world. For the largely white academic of America and Europe the echoes of this movement have been brought about through postcolonial studies and other interdisciplinary fields that are nurturing the purest form of leftist social criticism. This same developing morality has result in the creation of NGO organizations whose members are diverse but unitary in their commitment in an empathetic solidarity lived through action.
Having lived the experience of the ISM, I feel as if there is something unique, but articulatable, about the experience of this movement's conception of both solidarity and empathy.
This document will not provide answers so much as it will indicate directions I believe the movement should investigate when exploring the nature of empathy and solidarity. By strategically depolying memes that offer as their justification a life-commitment to empathy and solidarity, the movement will greatly increase its force.
Thus far the only way to have the time to conduct my research has been to write the significance of empathy/solidarity into various discourses. After providing excerpts to larger papers that I've already written I will provide other pieces that I have yet to form into coherence.
Philosophy: Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Poststructuralism
Abstract
Empathy is, perhaps surprisingly, a relatively recent English word whose origin can be traced back to early 20th century German philosophy. Originally Einfühlung, which means feeling-into in German and is translated as empathy in English, was used by Theodore Lipps in his work on Aesthetic philosophy. Empathy gained significance as it was taken up by Husserl and became the grounding of Phenomenology's defense against solipsism. Drawing upon the work of one of Husserl's students who wrote her dissertation on empathy, Edith Stein, I will trace the importance of empathy through Husserl's defense against solipsism, Heidegger's notion of the they-self, and Irigaray's project of representing sexual difference.
The Domain of Inquiry
It seems clear that philosophical ontology will always need to address the question of the "not-I". Through their pursuit of the question of Being, each of the philosophers that we read this semesteri has had to address a type of lived-experience that we commonly refer to as "empathy" - which is, in the words of Husserl, "experiencing someone else". Yet, each of them has given the theory of empathy a particular place in their philosophy - a place that although grounding their philosophy fails to draw upon the full meaning of empathy.
Significantly, even the origin of empathy is unclear. Some say that "empathy" was introduced as a concept into English in a 1912 publication of essays on Aesthetic philosophy written by Vernon Lee. Others write that it was with Theodore Lipps in 1903. However, what is certain is that "empathy" was a topic of intense discussion in the years surrounding the birth of phenomenology. This gives added significance to the fact that in 1917, Edith Stein a student of Edmund Husserl wrote her dissertation On The Problem of Empathy and liberated the concept from the constrictions of Aesthetic philosophy from which it originated in both Lipps and Lee.
Stein's work is significant for taking as its sole subject empathy and doing so within the phenomenological tradition. Most importantly, because it treats empathy as a specific phenomenon that can be analyzed, described, then represented phenomenologically it reveals otherwise unarticulated meanings of empathy only briefly alluded to in the other philosophers we have read. One reason for this is, as Edith Stein writes while trying to describe the "essence of acts of empathy":
Philosophical investigation has already often come to grips with the problem of foreign consciousness. But its question of how we experience foreign consciousness has usually taken the turn of how in one psycho-physical individual the experience of another such individual occurs.
Maintaining the approach of taking empathy as a full concept, this paper will treat as its topic the question of how three different philosophers have approached empathy partially. To do this we will leave aside the question of how each philosopher represents the act of empathy within their respective discourse, or to borrow from Stein, how they describe how "in one psycho-physical individual the experience of another such individual occurs."
Visual Anthropology: Empathetic Ethnography
In freeing ethnography from its documentary pretext, Night Cries relies on another kind of knowledge, beyond the rationalizations of anthropological cinema.Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography, pg. 44
Tracey Moffatt's Night Cries works on a level far different from the realist and traditional ethnographies that we have watched thus far in the semester. It is a film that I would call empathetic ethnography because it documents a specific mode, or state, of being not by indulging in anthropological allegory but through the transfer of a sensation, or precisely a lived-experience, to the spectator. The feelings of frustration, ambivalence and displacement rooted in aboriginal identity are evoked within the audience through the use of multi-genre film conventions. Night Cries is a film that works by evoking a sensation in the audience and not through the transmission of a particular narrative, ideology, truth, or allegory. In this way, I argue that Night Cries is a positive example of the potential uses of ethnography to facilitate cross-cultural understanding - or to use the language of postmodernism, Night Cries demonstrates the possibility for a positive encounter of the other by transferring an analogous experience of existence in the spectator. In this way, I agree with Russell's assessment of Night Cries as allowing "for a dimension of 'affect'" but believe that she did not deeply explore this potential use of empathy within experimental ethnography.
Travelogue Genre: Empathy in the Middle East
Well, I've been here a week, established a routine and begun preliminary analysis of the situation. Today was the first day that I awoke at a normal time, and last night was the first night that I went to sleep at a normal hour. But, unfortunately, a proper amount of sleep didn't seem to do my body good and I've found myself with a slight cold. Nothing serious, but enough to decide that I should take a day of rest. So I went to the internet cafe and wrote Olivia and Isabel each an email. On the way back I noticed that there is an appropriately named "Keep Walking" liquor store up the street from my hotel. Alcohol consumption is frowned upon by Islam but I've found there to be ample simple - maybe to satisfy Westerners or the country's Christian population or the less pious Muslims. I also stopped by a small grocery store and bought crackers, water, and pineapple juice (.950JD).
Those who know me, likely know that at various times I've been obsessed with what I term self-analysis. When I first came to college this manifested in constant discussions about how I appeared to others and how this differed from how I saw myself - the likely result of my time in high school. But the self-analysis also played out in a focus on trying to as closely as possible catalogue my interior and show it to the world (or at least my friends). A process of public evisceration, if you will. And that was the original intention behind this journal: the public exhibition of my thoughts while I traveled. Having spent nearly a year of my life constantly studying the "war on terrorism" or more precisely "Bush's war", I naturally predicted that many of my thoughts would be political. But I have other thoughts as well, and as I head into my second week of journaling in Jordan I'm forced to come to grips with knowing that people are reading this journal and that I even know some of those people. An uncomfortable situation when you realize that many of your thoughts will continue to circle around existential crises of sorts while trying to figure out my role here. At times I think it's unfortunate that I'm aware there is an audience for this journal. Ideally pure magic would transport this, my personal journal, online without my knowledge that anyone was reading it. This is the only real way that I'd be able to completely resist acts of self-censorship - which are really just acts of image production and construction.
I've begun to realize that many of the questions I came here with weren't valid. If I were now forced to answer some of what I would have a week ago considered my most basic questions I would have to preface each answer with an acknowledgement that that question carries untrue or naive assumptions. But this has left me with a relatively profound lack of direction. To be frank, I'm unsure of what I'm doing here. What do I expect to learn? What experience is going to give me the life-changing epiphany that I'm looking for? But as I have now been here a week it's clear that there will never be such an epiphany. There will only be a series of small realizations - people shake hands more warmly here and sometimes it feels like the predominate sound in the city is the conversations being had between strangers and friends alike. The problem with such small realizations is that they only slowly begin to change your perceptions, and they often times go unnoticed.
When planning this trip I did three things intentionally: 1) I made relatively no effort to make contacts in Jordan 2) I made the trip as long as possible and planned to spend as little as possible and 3) I made very few plans as to what I would do once in Jordan. The reason for these decisions was in large part that I saw this trip as my opportunity to forcefully severe myself from anything known to me. I wanted to be birthed into the Middle East (perhaps as a physical manifestation of the way in which 9/11 forced the region in to America's consciousness). But now I have to determine where my first steps will take me.
Grant Proposal: Solidarity an Etymological Ethnography
Oddly, the word solidarity has one of the shortest lineages I've encountered while studying this new-movement. Introduced into the English language in the mid-1800s, its current meaning is the result of the rather drastic global uprising of the 60s, 70s, and even 80s for much of the world. It is simultaneously a symbol of the former power of the left as a social force that moved even language, and our defeat: the contemporary rise of neo-fascism.
Significantly, it is a word deployed by both sides of this conflict. It is an integral part of The White House's rhetoric. Solidarity is present on roughly 96 distinct pages on the White House website. Further, Bush employed the word three times on the day he publicly set America to war with Iraq. That same day an American citizen died in Gaza living another vision of solidarity."
Solidarity was re-introduced into the English language by the Polish Solidarity Movement - a union movement banned by Poland in 1982. Arguably, it has been again reborn by the International Solidarity Movement which transformed the 80s connotation from "joint action of a community directed towards same community" into "integration within another's community to create change". It is this recent blending of Gandhi and Gene Sharp which birthed the radical empathy of Rachel Corrie."
Grant Proposal: Radical Empathy in Zambia
What is the meaning behind the concept of empathy, and how does one achieve it in action? Is the concept of total, or radical, empathy actually attainable? What would the experience of this radical, empathy feel like? How do you know when you've attained this empathetic state? How can you evoke an empathetic state in others who are not directly experiencing suffering?
These are the types of questions that I'd like to explore, for within their answers lies a critical conclusion that those of us who wish to be anti-oppression members of a nation built upon oppression must uncover in order to completely shed our emotional and mental ties to that oppression. Currently, the only widely accepted concept in the peace movement that approaches radical empathy is "solidarity". Yet often this solidarity is closer to sympathy than empathy: we care, but we don't feel. Only when we actually feel the suffering inflicted on others in the same way as when it is inflicted upon ourselves will we react with equal passion.
A clue lies in the fact that the level of empathy we feel can vary. When we suffer we have attained radical empathy in the literal sense. However, we also experience total empathy when someone close to us suffers. Therefore, it seems clear that it is not that we can only feel total empathy for ourselves because our self extends beyond our mere physical bodies into our demographical group's collective consciousness. This collective consciousness is what Heidegger would call the "they-self". This interpretation would seem to explain how we are able to empathize more fully with the innocent victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks than the innocent victims of bombing raids in Afghanistan.
But can we experience the suffering of others as suffering of self? Surely, attaining such an ideal would result in immediate cessation of conflict. After all, few could be capable of violence if they perceived every other as self. One could almost say that even the benefits of the partial attainment of this ideal are worth the attempt, even if such a task leaves us as emotional alchemists.
Instead of pure intellectual theorizing about these questions, one must attempt to answer them through experience. Conflict and suffering is the magnifying glass of life: the archetypes and emotions of humanity are exaggerated and made glaringly obvious. Consequently, if we wish to understand radical empathy, we must first undergo a process of redefinition of self. We must identify the borders of our person and then relocate those boundaries through the immersion within antithetical spaces. Increasingly widening, or altogether redefining, the self through the breaking down of these boundaries will allow us to begin to first identify with those who were previously the other. At this point we could say we've reached a minimally empathetic state: we are now able to identify with the Other in such a way that begins to dissolve their other-ness. But we must go on in order to reach a totally empathetic state. Our goal here is not simply to understand the suffering of the oppressed, but to feel that suffering as if it were happening to us. Only then would the tolerance of another's suffering forever seem irrational. And to do so we must immerse ourselves within that suffering. So the general path towards radical empathy that I would like to explore is: first an opening up of my self to redefinition then an immersion in suffering so that it is experienced directly while making the attempt to assume as closely as possible the identity and role of the oppressed.
It would be unrealistic to expect that many people would be willing to subject themselves to the worst of the worlds suffering in order to reach a state of empathy. And fortunately, I don't think that is necessary. The wider purpose of this trip will be to use my own personal emotional revolution as a catalyst for other people's. I would like to use the above premise that another's capacity for empathy increases when the person suffering is separated by fewer degrees to aid others in their own steps towards an empathetic state.
Sandbox
Incomplete thoughts, words, urls etc will be placed here. These need to be collected, email me with tips.
grok: 60s slang which incorporates empathy into its connotation - see OED etymology
From OED, usage of empathy incorporates aesthetic philosophy and articulates that empathy is a sensation or state: f. to feel into (see quots.).
1912 [see EMPATHY]. 1919 M. K. BRADBY Psycho-Analysis xviii. 239 He feels himself into the mind of the man or woman..he is studying. 1933 H. READ Art Now I. 50 We do not necessarily humanise the rising column or the graceful vase which we contemplate: we feel into their shape..and react to..its rhythmic convolution; and so we invent the word empathy
Email from Jav clarifies that solidarity even in its original meaning was revolutionary: toward the increase of your research on solidarity...i noticed that the word only appears in the north star newspaper and the frederick douglass paper - two african american papers in the 19c. and only between the years 1850-1852 in political context. see the accessible archives (a subsribed swat database):
received thus far on the philosophy paper on empathy: pg 3 - expand: "our trancendental ego", "phenomenological epoche", "the transcendental ego is taken as the subject and the thoughts of the object"?