...the transformative force of a particular flavour of empathy.
I want to say that Iris Murdoch's loving and just attention bears many commonalities with a certain view of empathy that has been developed by phenomenologists.
Let's have a look at what each is all about.
Firstly, the loving and just attention. When IM talks of paying attention, she does not simply mean 'seeing more detail'. She does talk about seeing the truth of something, which might make you believe that she is recommending a particularly granular and all-encompassing knowledge. But it is not the case that more knowledge necessarily has the ethical impact that she wishes to suggest arises from paying loving and just attention. The process is about more than seeing clearly or seeing deeply.
By just, I think she is getting at the idea that the agent must neutralize her prejudices and preconceptions; by loving, I think she means not rosy-tinted spectacles so much as with generosity and with openness. The openness is important: the agent must be willing to be affected or moved by the other, must be true and accepting, must be willing to be transformed.
The idea of sight is also too limited. Attending involves receptivity to more than the externals, but also to the context and the motivations, the emotions and the otherness of the other. The other is not the agent's representation, but its own unique self. The agent attends to the depth and difference of the other, rather than drawing analogies to the self to attain connection. The agent 'lets the other be'.
This allows the full appreciation of the other as whatever she/he is. This is respect in its most profound form. It acknowledges an essentially equality of value... the value of the other for itself is equal to the value of the agent to herself.
So, to empathy. This idea is developed in detail by Dan Zahavi but also by Elise Aatola. It has its roots in Husserl, Stein and Merleau-Ponty. The short version is that in this form of empathy one experiences the reality of the other as other. One does not feel their feelings as one's own, nor fully inhabit their experience... it's more like one takes a dip into the other and becomes a paler version of them which one experiences as the experience of the other from their perspective... there is a sense of the other not through imaginative projection or cognitive simulation, but through an openness to their experience. It is embodied and emotional, rather than a matter of mentalizing; but nor is it emotional contagion or boundary-lessness. The other's experience remains entirely theirs.
In both the IM attention and this kind of empathy, there is an aspect of selflessness - in IM because of the suspension of preconceptions and projections; in empathy because the other's experience remains uncontaminated by the agent's own self. In both cases, the other stays other - ultimately unknowable - but is brought into the affective domain of the agent. By this I mean that the experience of the other matters to the agent, but matters for its own sake.
And this, I think, is where the transformation comes in. The agent comes to a critical understanding that there is as much of value, of intrinsic worth, of mattering in that other self as in their own self. Moral, as opposed to prudential reasons, become as motivating. Or rather, reasons to benefit the other are seen as as powerful as reasons to benefit the self.
I think this is what I am thinking about....
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