Eric Michael Johnson posted an essay on empathy at the Scientific American website: We Contain Multitudes: Walt Whitman, Charles Darwin, and the Song of Empathy. In this essay, he notes the confusion which followed the publication of On the Origin of Species when “critics claimed that Darwin’s theory divided moral sentiments from divinity and pitted science against humanity,” but the poet Walt Whitman claimed “the world of erudition, both moral and physical, cannot but be eventually better’d and broaden’d in its speculations.” From this, Johnson notes that “Whitman’s vision of empathy was one that embraced a Darwinian nature.”
I would endorse claims that Darwinian insights on evolution (both what Darwin got right and the open questions to which he directed our attention) brings us closer to the truth; this is almost a tautological statement since those Darwinian insights are drawn directly from empirical observations. Whatever is true at the larger scale or in the more abstract realms of created being, it has to agree with concrete reality. The entire truth is greater than what we can know from empirical observations unmediated by the proper speculations, but it can’t be different. The traditional Christian way of expressing the underlying truth about being which corresponds to knowledge is: grace completes and perfects nature, grace doesn’t destroy or replace nature. Metaphysicians and theologians, as well as historians and educators, need to accept the truths of this concrete realm before going on to realms of moral purpose or realms of abstract being from which I claim our concrete world is shaped.
Accordingly, I’d strongly endorse claims that our understanding of empathy has to be grounded in concrete reality so that it can be coherently discussed and explained in the complex narrative of life on earth.
My problem with many discussions of empathy is of another sort. (Mr Johnson’s discussion in his essay is a pointer of sorts to a talk he was to give and was not presented as a complete discussion of his speculations on the nature of empathy and I’m not criticizing him for the necessary blank spots in his expressed thoughts.)
Evolutionary researchers, in the North Dakota badlands and in the quiet study in Cambridge, have developed serious skills in seeing how important traits or bodily structures can arise for one purpose and `suddenly’ be used for another purpose as well—in fact, this sometimes has to be a matter of speculation in the face of, for example, specialized organs or brain regions which would have been useless for their `ultimate’ purpose until fully shaped by evolution. It seems to me that empathy is likely to be a problem which can be dealt with in such a way, developing a coherent narrative understanding if not a cause-and-effect relationship which would be satisfying to a dedicated physical determinist.
How do we feel pain? How do we feel happiness, in our hearts or in our feet? How do we feel ourselves to be a certain `me’? How do we feel the oneness with a surgical scalpel or with a scroll saw or with a cast-iron frying pan?
Modern brain-scientists have discovered the rather remarkable fact that we don’t inhabit our bodies directly. We inhabit our bodies by way of maps built up in our brains. Human beings, chimpanzees to a lesser extent, have a far more sophisticated map in their brains than any other known animals. Our maps, and those of our chimp cousins, can generate at least something of a sense of `me’. Some human beings seem to barely have a sense of `me’ and others seem to live full and rich lives, even to indulge the most selfish of pleasures, without being aware of being a `self’ with a history and a future—I don’t know if chimps have a sense of a future self and many human beings seem to be bereft of that trait or at least a bit thin.
We also know that barbarians, especially during particularly harsh times, were notably bereft of empathy—at least most of the time—but also notably indifferent to their own sufferings. Do our `parts’ tend strongly to become harsh in unison? As we become hardened by acceptance of suffering during famine and wars, do we also grow hard toward the suffering of others? This is hardly a new suggestion nor an implausible one.
It would seem likely to me that empathy is some sort of new-use of the feelings we have for our own bodies and for tools or prosthetics which become as part of our own bodies. It would be a weaker mapping, less intense than the mappings resulting from various signals of nerve irritation, destruction of flesh, disruption of sexual or other relationships tied so strongly to our various glands. It would be a virtual pain, arising in the brain based upon visual or auditory nerve signals.
I published an essay on empathy in April of 2013, The Embodied but Constructed Self , in which I claimed, “We are, in some reductionistic but legitimate sense, mappings in our brains, mappings which include both our individual and communal selves.” I referred to my book, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being, where I wrote:
In the December, 2007 edition of Brain in the News published by Dana Foundation, there was a reprint of an article I Feel Your Pain which was published at Salon. It seems that specific brain-cells have been found which respond to distress on the part of a nearby creature. True pain can be felt when we see others suffering.
Why not? The destruction by fire of cells on the tips of our fingers doesn’t magically lead to pain felt in our brains or in parts of the nervous system between finger and brain. There is no magical, nor metaphysical, foundation to the processes of pain in our bodies. It’s a result of biological selection processes which favored nervous systems which registered damage in such ways as to force the organism to react strongly. There is something real about pain but that reality is mediated by way of nervous system interactions more the result of tinkering than of design of the sort possible to modern engineers.
It seems quite reasonable that we would be made so that those brain-cells registering pain might well react to the pain of others, especially others who might be members of our communities. It’s this simple: if we build drones or other robotic devices to monitor forests for fires, then any reaction tied to direct detection of a fire can also be activated if the robot sees another robot acting as if it detected a fire. In a human being, or another social animal, we can merely add a mapping `module’ in the brain to put ourselves in the place of another and that reaction is experienced as something akin to the pain we would feel if we were actually in that situation ourselves.
Tentatively, we can say that empathy is the response of certain brain-cells to certain sorts of stimuli. That stimuli can be directly provided by the surrounding environment or it can be provided by signaling of various sorts.
Is that really empathy? Is that what ties us together during times of distress and trouble? Is that what motivates some to take in orphans and others to go off to serve in regions just hit by natural disasters? Is that what leads Joe to feel sorry for a man who just lost his beloved wife even when he’s the jerk who cheated Joe out of a promotion? We seem to have a need for some sort of higher explanation, something that would raise our emotions—loves and hates—into a realm more pure than our world of flesh and blood, dirt and rocks. There’s no reason to expect such an explanation exists. Though the entities of this concrete realm be shaped from more abstract stuff, neither concrete entities of this world nor their complex aspects are to be found in some realm of ethereal being and beings.
That leads to the question: What selective advantage is there in empathy? After all, empathy can be disturbing and sometimes in such a way that any plausible response, other than hardening ourselves or fleeing out of the sight or sound of someone embarrassed or in great pain, might endanger our own survival or that of some in our family-line.
Empathy might simply be associated with community formation and strengthening of human bonds in general. If so, it might be possible to test for strength of an empathetic feeling or tendency to act in response to another’s distress and relate it to various sorts of proxies for nearness of genetic relationship, such as being raised in the same household/village or physical resemblance or similarity to an infant. Some sort of empathy would likely come from even baby eyes, present in so many mammal young.
If I’m right in speculating that empathy is an offshoot, of sorts, of our sense of personal and individual self, then we could see empathy as an important part of communal being of the sort hinted at in the Biblical concepts of the People of Israel and the Body of Christ. By way of such mappings of the individual beings of others, especially those in our tighter-knit communities, we might even come to some understanding of how it is that we can shape each other by way of love of a true Christian sort and by acts of corporal charity and prayer.