A reference of course to William Blake...
This is the last section before the conclusion. I think.
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Section III
The process which I believe could build a foundation for relationships based on epistemic trust is what I will call ‘compassionate attention’. While this is a skill, which develops with practice, it is not esoteric or complicated and can be explained using familiar ideas and concepts. As I am introducing the concept, however, I will build it from the foundations, as it were, which, I hope, will clarify my meaning.
In this section, I will begin by focusing on a particular understanding of empathy, developed by Dan Zahavi. Those interested in the phenomenological discussions that led to this conceptualisation may wish to read Zahavi (Murdoch 2012). I have found his arguments convincing and his analysis dovetails with the forthcoming discussion of attention, which will comprise the latter part of this section.
Zahavi considers empathy as the ability, through direct bodily awareness, to sense the subject’s phenomenological and emotional experience. This is not the same as emotional contagion as the agent does not experience the other’s state as her own: she is conscious that this experience which she senses is that of the subject. Zahavi stresses that ‘The empathized experiences are given as belonging to another; they are given as lived through first-personally by that other’ (Zahavi 2016).
However, his view does not necessitate the understanding of empathy employed by Paul Bloom in Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. In Bloom’s conception, empathy – or rather ‘emotional empathy’ – can be defined in the following way: ‘If your suffering makes me suffer, if I feel what you feel, that’s empathy in the sense that I’m interested in here’ (Bloom 2017). Bloom is against empathy, in his conception, because it leads to biased, parochial and unreasoning action. He also considers ‘cognitive empathy’, which he regards as understanding what the other feels without feeling it oneself. This, he says, is amoral as it can be used as much by the bully and psychopath as by the therapist and friend. A similar view is stated by De Sousa. He considers empathy (cognitive or emotional) primarily an epistemic tool, which has a positive moral impetus only if the agent already cares about the subject CITE.
Zahavi’s empathy is subtly but crucially different to both Bloom’s ‘emotional empathy’ and ‘cognitive empathy’. Firstly, Zahavi does state that the agent feels what the other is feeling, but is fully cognizant that the experience ‘belongs to’ the other (Zahavi 2016). It is a ‘felt experience’: ‘we experience bodily and behavioural expressions as expressive of an experiential life that transcends the expressions. There is, so to speak, necessarily more to the mind of the other than what we are grasping, but this doesn’t make our understanding non-experiential’.
Importantly, in Zahavi’s account, the experience is not an imaginative simulation developed by interpreting the other’s actions, facial gestures, vocalisations and the like and building a representation; nor is it a projection. It is a way of sensing: an experience of another’s consciousness, albeit less intense due to the awareness that the experience differs from the first-person acquaintance with one’s own psychological states. He stresses the limitations of this kind of knowledge, insisting that it does not ‘entail infallibility or exhaustiveness. Another person’s mind is never exposed in such a way that we immediately, effortlessly, and infallibly have complete access to its innermost thoughts and feelings’.
What is critical, in Zahavi’s conception is that empathy plays a vital role in asserting to us the fact of the other’s subjectivity. Although to more fully understand another person requires more resources than empathy – notably the larger social, cultural, and historical context as well as the individual’s experiences and history – it is upon this ‘fundamental sensitivity to animacy, agency, and emotional expressivity’ that interpersonal understanding is founded.
I stress this because when a clinician or family member retains her sensitivity to the patient’s animacy, agency and emotional expressivity she is prevented from considering the patient as a type (depressed, schizophrenic, borderline and so on) and will instead prioritise responding to the patient as an experiencing individual with his own unique perspective and his own particular combination of symptoms (see Section II).
Zahavi’s empathy then does assert a minimal moral thrust – that the agent does not objectify the subject, but it still has the potential to be applied well or badly. In addition, a further limitation can be seen in that it does rely on a direct, embodied resonance to the affective and psychological state of the other and consequently the ability to empathize in this way may not be readily or equally distributed among the population of clinicians or family members.
This is where a particular understanding of attention comes to the fore.
Here the genealogy begins with Simone Weil and passes through Iris Murdoch to the contemporary conversation. I wish to make use of it pragmatically: as a tool that can transform a gaze into an ethical gaze; transform listening into ethical listening. I want to suggest that compassionate attention is a skill, or virtue, that can be learnt and developed and which enables the conditions for epistemic trust.
Josephine Donovan quotes Weil in a paper defending the care ethics approach:
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him [or her]: ’What are you going through?’ It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled ’unfortunate,’ but as [an individual], exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him [or her] in a certain way.
This way of looking is first of all attentive.
This is suggestive, but does not make fully clear what that ‘certain way’ of looking is. Murdoch categorizes it as a ‘just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality’ (Murdoch 2012). In both cases, Weil and Murdoch are asserting that one is actively attending to the other’s ‘animacy, agency and emotional expressivity’. In The Sovereignty of Good Murdoch explicitly relates this to the refusal to objectify the other: ‘The more... [it is] seen that another... has needs and wishes as demanding as one’s own, the harder it becomes to treat a person as a thing’. So, it seems we can see a certain commonality between this attentive gaze and Zahavi’s empathy, at least in the effect it has on the perceiver, if not the means through which it is attained.
Attention, in fact, as described by both Weil and Murdoch, can provide a means through which the agent can attain the benefits of empathy (both in terms of seeing the other as a subjective, intentional being and as an ‘epistemic tool’) without relying on an intuitive ability. Further, the motivation for this attentive gaze and, as we shall see, the methodology, grant it far greater ethical force.
To start with, the motivation is inherently good: it is to enable epistemic justice.
As for the methodology, both Weil and Murdoch emphasise a certain neutralising or shrinking of the agent’s subjective concerns and personal perspective. Fricker insists that a key skill for the virtuous hearer is ‘neutralizing prejudice in one’s credibility judgements’
(Fricker 2007), Weil and Murdoch offer a more radical approach: one shrinks one’s ‘self’. ‘As Weil puts it: “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object.” […] in attention “[. . .] our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it.”’ THOMAS There is a simultaneous movement toward the other and a drawing back of the self. Murdoch describes this process as ‘unselfing’ which she depicts as a skill that is developed over time simply by paying careful attention to something outside the self, whether schoolwork, art, the natural world or the emotional state and being of the other (Murdoch 2001). She writes, ‘The direction of attention is, contrary to nature, outward, away from self which reduces all to a false unity, toward the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability to so direct attention is love’ (Murdoch 2012). Weil likewise characterises attention as love – caritas rather than eros one assumes, and if so the term ‘compassion’ might be more fitting.
Any readers familiar with Buddhism might note here the similarity between what is being described and both ‘mindfulness’ and ‘loving kindness’. Eastern traditions have long fostered versions of diminishing the self by attending to the present moment (see Jay Garfield’s discussion of attention through this lens GARFIELD) as well as a form of compassion in which the agent recognises suffering, but rather than being swept away by Bloom’s ‘emotional empathy’ is motivated to help, to be loving, to feel compassion CITE. Compassionate attention focuses the means of helping in a particular domain: giving the subject the space, granting them the respect to bear witness and allowing them to share not just their testimony but their perspective.
Here I need to refer back to Zahavi’s conception of empathy. Far from emotional contagion (emotional empathy) or the imaginative or projective conception of cognitive empathy, the agent instead holds space for the other’s subjectivity: ‘when empathically understanding the other, I so to speak go along with his or her experiences, and attend to their object’ (Zahavi and Rochat 2015).
Compassionate attention is an act of generosity and respect. The truth in enables is the truth that the other has her own perspective and that this is how she is making sense of the world. It may not be the ‘best’ or even ‘truest’ way to make sense of the world, but it is hers. And without acknowledging that and understanding that the agent can only know the other as caricature, not as person. Such a stance gives the other dignity. A failure to do so is, it seems to me, an ethical failing.
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