Art, Zen, and Insurrection: Finding Personal and Social Change In The Art of Life Part II.1

PART II: The Use of Art: Emotional Expression for the Artist and the Community

Now that I have finished explicating Collingwood’s analysis of art proper I would like to explore the pragmatics of artistic work. What is this art business good for? What does it do for us or our for our community? How is this imaginative expression in anyway useful? How could the expression of a single individual have any benefit in society at large? Especially given that art is defined as a form of language, how does this linguistic definition mean that art relates to society? What is the role of language in society in general?

In order to answer these questions I have this part divided into two sections. First, in the section ‘Art as Empathic, Social, and Historical’ I’ll explore questions about how individual expression relates to society at large, and how it can be useful in some ways. In the second section ‘Art and Status Functions’ I’ll be trying to grapple with the relationship between art, language, and society. In particular, I’m going to be using John Searle’s work to talk about how language constitutes social reality. Seeing as how art is a form of language, Searle’s work on the role of language in constituting social reality should have some interesting implications.

Here is a table of contents for Part II.1:

II.1. Art as Empathic, Social, and Historical

1. Art, Experience, and Empathy

2. The Artist and The Community: How Does Individual Expression Relate to Collective Experience?

3. The Artist's Empathy With Society: Expressing The Quality of Contemporary Experience

4. The Audience’s Empathy and Collaboration With the Artist

5. Knowledge of Self and Knowledge of Others: That Artist's Universal Expression as Enabling Empathy and Creativity

6. Art and the Attitude of Modernity

II.1. Art as Empathic, Social, and Historical

So in this first section I’ll be addressing the way that art is useful. I’ll be focusing on the way art relates to three things: emotions, society, and history. The first thing that needs to be clarified is the relationship between art and empathy. Because if art is fundamentally about emotions and their expression, then I suspect art has some kind of fundamental connection with empathy. After that I’ll try to explain how art and its connection with empathy functions on a larger level of society. I’ll try to explain how it is that the artist and the audience engage in something reciprocal forms of empathy, with the artist empathizing with his audience, and the audience empathizing with the artist. Finally I’ll try to wrap it up this section by bringing Foucault into the picture. In particular, I’ll be bringing up his idea of modernity as an attitude of concern for the self in relation to history. The way Collingwood talks about his thought and about art makes me think that he implicitly embraced this idea of an attitude of modernity. He didn’t call it by those names, but I think it makes sense to say that Collingwood was ‘modern’ and believe that art needed to be ‘modern’ in the Foucauldian sense. Onward.

1. Art, Experience, And Empathy

So the first thing that I need to do in order to explicate the relationship between art, emotions, society, and history, is to discuss three other things: art, experience, and empathy. Mainly because art, according to Collingwood, is about expressing certain experiences, and because, as my discussion of Goldman should have made clear, engaging in the social world is about sharing other people’s experiences via empathy. So I need to tease out these connections between art, experience, and empathy. I really think that empathy must play a crucial role in the issues of art and language. But first let me talk about experience so that I can then talk about empathy.

There are two ways that experience plays a role in Collingwood’s analysis of aesthetics. First, experience is the general criteria by which things must be evaluated. Collingwood says that “all knowledge is derived from experience; and whatever claims to be knowledge must appeal to experience for its credentials and verification” (167). So, in general, experience is to be regarded as the supreme epistemological standard. An interesting claim, on that lines up with Clausewitz. But experience also plays a special role in the creation of art. According to Collingwood the artist is always grappling with experience. It is our experience in the social world, in the political world, in the mental and intellectual world, that provides the fodder for artistic expression. And this is so because experience is the thing that prompts our emotions and gives us fodder for our emotions, and art is all about expressing our emotions. I don’t have tons of evidence for this idea that experience is the crucial factor, but the point should be more or less self-evident. Where else would our emotions come from if not our experiences? For Collingwood, experience is therefore the crucial factor in all knowledge and in the creation of powerful emotions that art requires. He argues that “an artist who is not furnished, independently of being an artist, with deep and powerful emotions will never produce anything except shallow and frivolous works of art” (279).

So, then, if experience and emotions are the crucial factor in the creation of art, then what does this imply about what it takes to appreciate a great work of art? Well, I think it should be obvious that if the prior statement is true, empathy becomes a crucial factor. Because if an artist is primarily expressing his emotions that he has acquired from his experiences, it follows that other people must be able to express those emotions for themselves if they want to understand a work of art. As I said in Part I.1, art is not about representation, it is not about communication, but about expression. So the audience must be able to understand a form of expression, which can only be done by expressing for themselves.

This brings me to the relationship between experience and empathy on the side of the hearer, the empathizer. What does it take for someone to be able to understand what another person is expressing? Collingwood’s answer (and Goldman’s answer) is that the listener must have a similar experience that will allow them to properly reenact/simulate the experience being expressed by the speaker. Or, as Collingwood says, “understanding depends on the hearer’s ability to reconstruct in his own consciousness the idea expressed by the words he hears. This reconstruction is an act of imagination; and it cannot be performed unless the hearer’s experience has been such as to equip him for it.... no idea can be formed as such in consciousness except by a mind whose sensuous-emotional experience contains the corresponding impression, at least in a faint and submerged shape, at that very moment” (251). This is the same thing that Goldman refers to when he talks about ‘experience-deficient simulation’. Goldman explains how people with a damaged amygdala, who are incapable of feeling anger for themselves, are also incapable of empathizing with or understand those who express anger. If we can’t feel something for ourselves then we won’t be able to properly empathize with other people.

Goldman’s notion of experience-deficient simulation is logically implicated in Collingwood’s analysis of how language and art work: “The hearer, therefore, conscious that he is being addressed by another person like himself... takes what he hears exactly as if it were speech of his own: he speaks to himself with the words that he hears addressed to him, and thus constructs in himself the idea which those words express. At the same time, being conscious of the speaker as a person other than himself, he attributes that idea to this other person. Understanding what someone says to you is thus attributing to him the idea which his words arouse in yourself; and this implies treating them as words of your own” (250). If this is indeed the case, then the hearer’s experience is a crucial factor. In fact, Collingwood draws the full implications of his analysis and hints at the notion of experience-deficient simulation: "If words, however eloquent and well chosen, are addressed to a hearer in whose mind there is no impression corresponding to the idea they are meant to convey, he will either treat them as nonsense, or will attribute to them... a meaning derived from his own experience and forced upon them in spite of an obvious misfit" (251).

Collingwood therefore recognizes that there is a crucial relationship between art, experience, and empathy. He also says that this is what art is all about. It is all about the artist expressing his experience and thus allowing the audience to reconstruct that experience for themselves, thereby allowing the audience to express those emotions for themselves: “It is this experience... that is the heart of his poetry; it is the ‘enlargement of our experience’ by his own... that tells us he is a true poet; and however necessary it may be that a poet should have technical skill, he is a poet only in so far as this skill is not identified with art, but with something used in the service of art” (27). Here, again, Collingwood hints at how the role of craft in art is different from what art proper truly is. Art proper is the act of imaginatively expressing our emotions, and craft is a secondary process.

Now that I have established that art is about expressing your emotional experiences, and thereby allowing others to empathize with you, let me talk more explicitly about how the artist’s expression relates to the community and the audience. In short, now that I have explained how art is about emotions and empathy, I’d like to explain how art is also social.

2. The Artist and The Community: How Does Individual Expression Relate to Collective Experience?

Now what I’m about to address is one of the most seemingly paradoxical things about his definition of art as the imaginative expression of emotions. And that is the artist’s relationship to the community in which he is embedded. Towards the end of The Principles Of Art Collingwood himself presses this question. He asks, if art is simply expressive “then why does the artist take pains... to bring himself into relation with an audience?” (301). If the artist is simply dealing with his own emotions and experiences then what does it matter if other people see it? What could it possibly have to do with other people?

Well, according to Collingwood the individual artist is intimately connected to the community that he produces in. And even though the artist’s expression is highly individualized, highly personal, it is connected to the community in two ways. First, the artist is embedded in a community of artists that produced before him and that are producing alongside him. Second, the artist is connected to a larger community that influences his expression.

As for the community of artists, both past and present, Collingwood is skeptical of the notion of influence. He says that we typically speak of artists as influencing one another, but in reality he thinks that it is closer to collaboration. That what artists are really doing are working with one another, building on one another, collaborating with one another. “All artists,” he asserts, “have modeled their style upon that of others, used subjects that others have used, and treated them as others have treated them already. A work of art so constructed is a work of collaboration. It is partly by the man whose name it bears, partly by those from whom he has borrowed. What we call the works of Shakespeare, for example, proceed in this way not simply and solely from the individual mind of the man William Shakespeare of Stratford... but partly from that of Kyd, partly from Marlowe, and so forth” (319). The artist is therefore always in collaboration with other artists that came before him and that exist around him. It is impossible to have any form in artistic expression without implicit reference to other works of art. He is even clearer about this point when he says: “The aesthetic activity is an activity of thought in the form of consciousness, converting into imagination an experience which, apart from being so converted, is sensuous. This activity is a corporate activity belonging not to any one human being but to a community. It is performed not only by the man whom we individualistically call the artist, but partly by all the other artists of whom we speak as ‘influencing’ him, where we really mean collaborating with him” (324). Expression can never exist in a vacuum because individual minds never exist in a vacuum.

The artist also stands in intimate relation to society at large. The artist, according to Collingwood, relates to the whole of society by regarding their experiences as his own, by trying to understand what exists deep in their hearts. The artist is the person who tries to express what everyone feels but can’t quite articulate. The artist’s connection to society is what I now want to explore in the next section.

3. The Artist's Empathy With Society: Expressing The Quality of Contemporary Experience

As I’ve been saying, Collingwood’s definition of art as the imaginative expression of emotions makes it seem as if though the aesthetic activity is entirely individual, verging on solipsistic. But Collingwood is quite clear that this is far from the case. On the contrary, the artist always works in relation to the society that he comes from. The artist’s expression, if he is truly a great artist, Collingwood says, is actually expression that is aimed at speaking the heart and minds of his entire society. The artists individual expression is therefore not highly individualistic or solipsistic, but is thoroughly social and collective. In short, it is the artist’s task to express the quality of contemporary social experience. This does not mean that all art has to express something universal about society. Someone could express very personal emotions that don’t apply to many other people and it could still be called art proper. But the question is about those great artists, those artists that have managed to impress and touch the masses, to shift culture in substantial ways. What did they do? Collingwood’s answer is that the truly great artist is the one who is capable of expressing what lies in the hearts of everyone in a society; the artist expresses what everyone feels but they don’t quite know that they feel it. I think that it seems like the artist is therefore the one that is successfully able to empathize with the collective experience of his society. Let me give you some textual evidence.

So the main thing to reconcile with this idea is how it is that an individual engaged in purely individual expression is also engaged in a social action. Because it is very clear that art proper is still an individual process of expression, but this is indeed compatible with it holding a larger social meaning. Collingwood makes this clear when he says that “the poet is a man who can solve for himself the problem of expressing it, whereas the audience can express it only when the poet has shown them how. The poet is not singular either in his having that emotion or in his power of expressing it; he is singular in his ability to take the initiative in expressing what all feel, and all can express” (119). As Collingwood says, it is the artist who takes those first steps in expressing the quality of contemporary experience. Art proper is therefore simultaneously an individual and collective form of expression.

But how does the artist do this? How does one gain access to your own feelings that are simultaneously the feelings of the masses? How do you identify and grapple with the universal quality of contemporary experience? Well, Collingwood hints that this process has something to do with empathy. If the artist is to go about expressing the hidden emotions of his society he must be able to feel them for himself: “If the artists are really to express ‘what all have felt’, they must share the emotions of all” (119). This means that the seemingly esoteric and highly individual expression of the artist should rather be regarded as a highly empathic and social act. This means that the artist must “take it as his business to express not his own private emotions, irrespectively of whether any one else feels them or not, but the emotions he shares with his audience. Instead of conceiving himself as a mystagogue, leading his audience as far as it can follow along the dark and difficult paths of his own mind, he will conceive himself as his audience’s spokesman, saying for it the things it wants to say but cannot say unaided.... he will be a humbler person, imposing upon himself the task of understanding his world, and thus enabling it to understand itself” (312). Furthermore, Collingwood believed that this act of expressing for society could have profound implications for how a society understood itself. This is why he said that art “must be prophetic. The artist must prophesy not in the sense that he foretells things to come, but in the sense that he tells his audience, at risk of their displeasure, the secrets of their own hearts. His business as an artists is to speak out, to make a clean breast. But what he has to utter is not, as the individualistic theory of art would have us think, his own secrets. As a spokesman of his community, the secrets he must utter are theirs. The reason why they need him is that no community altogether knows its own heart; and by failing in this knowledge a community deceives itself on the one subject concerning which ignorance means death” (336). The artist is thus the person who challenges himself to feel for all of society, to feel for collective experience, and to attempt an expression of this communal experience.

I think that this sounds very similar to some of the ideas presented in Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, one of the founding texts of Taoism. In the Tao Te Ching Tzu discusses the way that ‘sages’ relate to society at large. When Tzu talks about sages I think he is talking about wise individuals who are able to provide a model for existence, those who have attained a state of being in which they are happy, and which others can emulate. But interestingly, Tzu says that sages are not simply expressing their own emotions, but are rather expressing for all of society. Thomas Cleary translates section 49 as such: “Sages have no fixed mind; they make the minds of the people their mind;... The relation of sages to the world is one of concern: they cloud their minds for the world; all people pour into their ears and eyes, and sages render them innocent” (Cleary, 38). It is the task of the Taoist sage, much like the artist, to transform his mind into the audience’s mind by empathizing with them. Right here I am incorporating this example because I am hinting at the larger argument that I will be elaborating in Part III: that all of life can become an art form. If Taoist sages were not expressing themselves simply artistically, but simply through their whole lives, and they too were engaging in this process of communal empathy transformed into individual expression, then doesn’t it make it seem like they are living an aesthetic existence of sorts? And furthermore, an aesthetic existence that has social and political implications. The quotations I used above from Collingwood make it hard to deny this connection to Taoism, and I will hopefully be able to buttress this argument further in Part III. This quotation in particular bears strong resemblance to the ideas expressed by Tzu: “If [the artist] attaches any importance to the judgment of his audience, it can only be because he thinks that the emotions he has tried to express are emotions not peculiar to himself, but shared by his audience, and that the expression of them he has achieved... is as valid for the audience as it is for himself” (315). It is the artist’s ability to transform his mind into the mind’s of his community that makes him a great artist. This should remind you of my discussion of simulation theory. It is because the artist is capable of empathizing with, capable of simulating the minds of his audience, that he is able to express something deep in the hearts of the community. This is why “Whatever statement of emotion [the artist] utters is prefaced by the implicit rubric, not ‘I feel’, but ‘we feel’” (315).

Collingwood even provides a few examples of artist’s that have managed to use their individual expression to identify the quality of their society’s experience. He argues that Shakespeare, for example, was able to intellectually apprehend the quality of his era, and was then able to imaginatively express it in his plays. He claims that Romeo and Juliet is meaningful not simply because it is a love story, but because “their love is woven into the fabric of a complicated social and political situation, and is broken by the strains to which that situation subjects it. The emotion experienced by Shakespeare and expressed by him is.... an emotion arising out of his (intellectual) apprehension of the way in which passion may thus cut across and social and political conditions” (294). Another example that Collingwood uses is T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. He argues that The Wasteland is a great modern poem in the truest sense in that it expresses the weariness that many citizens of early-twentieth-century Europe were experiencing. “Mr. Eliot, in the one great English poem of this century,” Collingwood asserts. “has expressed his idea (not his alone) of the decay of our civilization, manifested outwardly as a break-down of social structures and inwardly as a drying-up of the emotional springs of life” (295).

The artist’s individual expression, as Shakespeare and Eliot exemplify, is not simply individual, but is rather social, political, and fundamentally empathic. The great artists are thus those that are capable of empathizing with the whole of their society. This means that the artists relationship with his audience is “an integral part of [the aesthetic] experience itself” (312). It is not simply an individual expressing his own emotions. It is an individual that is expressing emotions that he believes to be in the hearts of all. It is an individual empathizing with everyone, and expressing that empathy.

But how does the audience relate to the artist? Does it also involve empathy?

4. The Audience’s Empathy and Collaboration With the Artist

If the artist engages with his community by empathizing with them, then how does the community engage with the artist? I think that it also has something to do with the empathy. I think it would be fair to say that the audience’s engagement with the artist is also about empathizing with his experience and with his expression. Just as the artist empathizes with his community and thereby expresses the quality of their experience, the audience is supposed to use a work of art in order to gain access to the artist’s expression, and thereby becoming able to express their own experience. But it is not a direct reconstruction of the artist’s expressive experience. But rather an ongoing project in which the audience attempts to fully reconstruct the total experience of feeling, of painting, of singing, and so on. In this sense the audience is not a passive receptor of expression, but is in fact a collaborator: when they attempt to reconstruct the artistic experience in their own minds they are engaging in creative collaboration. This is true because, “The music to which we listen is not the heard sound, but that sound as amended in various ways by the listener’s imagination, and so on with the other arts” (143). It is never a perfect replication of the aesthetic experience, but an attempt to reconstruct as much of it as we possibly can. “There will be thus be something more than mere communication from artist to audience, there will be collaboration between audience and artist” (312). This imperfect reconstruction, therefore, qualifies the engagement with art as an act of collaboration.

The ultimate goal, of course, is for the audiences viewing of the painting to replicate “the richer and more highly organized experience of a person who has not only looked at it but has painted it as well” (308). But that can be very difficult. In fact, Collingwood seems to think that it would be impossible to recover an aesthetic experience in its entirety: “The audience as understander, attempting an exact reconstruction in its own mind of the artist’s imaginative experience, is engaged on an endless quest. It can carry out this reconstruction only in part” (311). The audience’s task is thus to gain access to as much of the artist’s experience as possible. This process, however, is one that requires careful attention. If we attend a concert, for example, we shouldn’t simply be there hearing it, but we should be actively listening. In other words, we shouldn’t be experiencing it as raw sensual pleasure, but as a reconstructed experience. Although “we certainly may... enjoy sensual pleasures. It would be odd if we did not.... There is a kind of person who goes to concerts mainly for the sensual pleasure he gets from the sheer sounds; his presence may be good for the box-office, but it is as bad for music as the presence of a person who went to a scientific lecture for the sensual pleasure he got out of the tones of the lecturer’s voice would be for science” (141). The audience’s task is thus a conscious and attentive empathizing with the total imaginative experience of the artist.

Collingwood believes that when the audience engages properly with a work of art they will be recreating the aesthetic experience in their own minds. And that it is not the external object that is the aesthetic experience, but only the mental thing that the audience experiences. The inward nature of the aesthetic experience is “supposed to stand in double relation to something outward or bodily. (a) For the artist, the inward experience may be externalized or converted into a perceptible object; though there is no intrinsic reason why it should be. (b) For the audience, there is a converse process: the outward experience comes first, and this is converted into that inward experience which alone is aesthetic” (301-2). The appreciation of art is this transformation of an external object into an inward aesthetic experience.

But there is no reason to stress whether this process of empathizing with the artist, the process of simulating his experience, has been done completely. For Collingwood claims that “The imaginative experience contained in a work of art is not a closed whole. There is no sense in putting the dilemma that a man either understands it... or does not. Understanding it is always a complex business, consisting of many phases, each complete in itself but each leading to the next. A determined and intelligent audience will penetrate into this complex far enough, if the work of are is a good one, to get something of value; but it need not on that account think it has extracted ‘the’ meaning of the work, for there is no such thing” (311). There is only an uncertain access to a total imaginative experience. “The doctrine of plurality of meanings, expounded for the case of holy scripture by St. Thomas Aquinas, is in principle perfectly sound: as he states it, the only trouble is that it does not go far enough. In some shape or other, it is true of all language” (311). In other words, all language is always uncertain and allows us only partial access to thoughts and experiences. What we should stress is not the full grasping of an experience, but rather the pragmatics of attempting to grasp that experience. Collingwood claims that art is valuable because it offers us an expanded body of experience. When we try to imagine another’s experience we are changed by the process. “It is this experience...,” he argues, “that is the heart of his poetry; it is the ‘enlargement of our experience’ by his own... that tells us he is a true poet; and” ( 27).

Engagement with art is therefore about reciprocal empathy. The artist empathizes with the audience and expresses their feelings. The audience in turn empathizes with the audience’s expression and therefore is able to express themselves in new ways. The constant struggle to reconstruct the artist’s experience is thus an act of collaboration on the part of the audience. Now I briefly hinted at the use of this. But let me ask this question of pragmatics a bit more seriously.

5. Knowledge of Self and Knowledge of Others: That Artist's Communal Expression as Enabling Empathy and Creativity

So if art is about this reciprocal empathy, why does this matter? Well, the answer has something to do with the way that the sharing of experience enhances our ability to engage in the social world. When we share other people’s experiences I think we can benefit in two ways. First, by sharing experience we are expanding our ability to empathize with other people. In Part I.3.18 I explained the existence of experience-deficient empathy: the idea that when we lack experience with something we are less able to understand other people who are having that experience. Second, by sharing experience through art we are expanding our ability to be creative. Both of these line up with Collingwood’s claim that “Art is knowledge; knowledge of the individual.” If art is knowledge of the individual, then it should help us both understand other’s and ourselves, and help us be more creative.

So as for art expanding our ability to empathize. This isn’t an issue that Collingwood handles explicitly. But I think that this following quotation hints at the notion of experience-deficient simulation: “If a poet expresses, for example, a certain kind of fear, the only hearers who can understand him are those who are capable of experiencing that kind of fear themselves” (118). I know I already used that quotation in my previous discussion of experience-deficient simulation, but it is too potent to not use again. If we can’t empathize unless we have an adequate store of experience, then experience is a valued commodity. This notion of sharing experience is indeed confirmed by Frith’s work. He says that “sharing of experience is not just words. When I tell you of my experience, your brain will change as if you had that same experience” (Frith,176-7). We are literally transformed when we empathize with others.

This act of understanding a work of art, however, doesn’t only expand our ability to understand others, it should help us understand ourselves. “Hence, when someone reads and understands a poem,” Collingwood says, “he is not merely understanding the poet’s expression of his, the poet’s, emotions, he is expressing emotions of his own in the poet’s words, which have thus become his own words. As Coleridge put it, we know a man for a poet by that fact that he makes us poets. We know that he is expressing his emotions by the fact that he is enabling us to express ours” (118). Thus art should give us access to new experiences that will enable us both to understand others and ourselves.

Furthermore, this expansion of experience should allow us to exert more creativity and expression in our daily lives. This is why in art the “kind of contact that is required is collaborative contact in which the audience genuinely shares in the creative activity” (331). The audience themselves must learn to be creative in their appreciation of art. But this idea also extends to daily life. Collingwood says that in our daily lives we should be learning to express ourselves. That artistic expression doesn’t stop at the moment we leave the painting, or leave the museum. Artistic expression is something that can help us in our daily affairs with peers. In particular, Collingwood addresses the notion of shameful emotions. “Every one of us feels emotions,” he argues, “which, if his neighbours became aware of them, would made them shrink from him with horror: emotions which, if he became aware of them, would make him horrified at himself.... bad art arises when instead of expressing these emotions we disown them, wishing to think ourselves innocent of the emotions that horrify us, or wishing to think ourselves too broad minded to be horrified by them” (284). We cannot deny our emotions. If we choose to deny our emotions, to ignore our deepest and darkest feelings, then we are engaging in a life of bad art. The task is to turn our lives into a work of art by always showing down our emotions, by using our consciousness to transform our emotions into expressible material. And it is the appreciation of art that is supposed to enable this. Art should provide us with access to more experiences that will enable us to empathize with others, to understand ourselves, and to become more creative in our daily lives.

Now in the last five parts of Part II I have come a ways. I’ve explained how art is emotional, and how art is social. Art is always about expressing emotional experience, and therefore understand art is always about empathy. Furthermore, art is always embedded in a community. It is embedded both in the community of artists, and in the larger social community. This means that there is a relationship of empathy, collaboration, and creativity between the artist and all of his various communities. This long quotation summarizes Collingwood’s arguments well: “The artist (although under the spell of individualistic prejudices he may try to deny it) stands thus in collaborative relations with an entire community; not an ideal community of all human beings as such, but the actual community of fellow artists from whom he borrows, executants whom he employs, and audience to whom he speaks. By recognizing these relations and counting upon them in his work, he strengthens and enriches that work itself; by denying them he impoverishes it” (324). By recognizing that art is engaged in a conversation with a community we have positive benefits to reap. We can learn to expand our own experience by appreciating art; we can learn to express ourselves more clearly; we can learn to empathize with others; and we can learn to understand ourselves.

There is one more section in Part II.1. In that section I want to explain how art is also historical in nature.

6. Art and the Attitude of Modernity

I believe that in addition to art being a social phenomenon, it is also a historical phenomenon. Furthermore, I think that this point can be clarified with reference to Foucault’s idea of modernity as an attitude. In his 1984 essay ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ Foucault argues that modernity is not a time period, but is rather an attitude, a philosophical ethos. He says that modernity is about a concern for the self in the present in relation to history. The modernist asks, ‘given what I know about history, what can I say about myself?’ I think that Collingwood’s work in The Principles Of Art exemplifies this attitude of modernity in two ways. First, Collingwood himself expresses his concern for himself and his world in the particular historical moment that he was writing. Second, Collingwood argues that art itself must exemplify this attitude of modernity. Collingwood, of course, never uses this idea of modernity as an attitude, but I think that Collingwood would agree with this notion. So whenever I use the word modern here I am using it in the sense of an attitude that is historically situated and concerned for the self in the present.

As for Collingwood himself as embracing the attitude of modernity, I think it comes out most clearly when he discusses his intentions in writing the book. He says that his writing of the book was prompted by his contemporary situation: "Everything written in this book has been written in the belief that it has a practical bearing, indirect or indirect, upon the condition of art in England in 1937, and in the hope that artists primarily, and secondly persons whose interest in art is lively and sympathetic, will find it of some use to them" (vi). Collingwood was surprised and excited at the growing aesthetic discussion taking place among philosophically inclined artists. "It is too soon to write the history of this movement," he said, "but not too late to contribute to it; and it is only because such a movement is going on that a book like this can be published with some hope of its begin read in the spirit in which it is written" (5). These two quotations should make it clear that Collingwood was prompted to write his book because he had a concern for the contemporary, for the present. He wanted to know what was happening to the arts in that particular historical moment.

Collingwood also believes that art itself is a fundamentally modern. He says that artists “become poets or painters or musicians not by some process of development from within, as they grow beards; but by living in a society where these languages are current. Like other speakers, they speak to those who understand” (317). In other words, creativity does not come from birth, it is not genetic, it is not fundamental, but is rather about the historical movement of society. And Collingwood believes that artists are fundamentally concerned with the historical movement of their society, and with the realities of their present moment: “The aesthetician, if I understand his business aright, is not concerned with dateless realities lodged in some metaphysical heaven, but with the facts of his own place and his own time.... The problems I have discussed are those which force themselves upon me when I look round at the present condition of the arts in our own civilization; and the reason I have tried to solve them is because I do not see how that condition (both of the arts and of the civilization to which they belong) can be bettered unless a solution is found” (325). It seems that the attitude of modernity is implicit in Collingwood thought: he himself was concerned with himself in relation to history, and he believed that artists too should be concerned with their particular historical moment.

So in Part II.1 I have tried to explain how art is both emotional, social, and historical. I started by explaining how the definition of art as the imaginative expression of emotions means that art must be fundamentally connected with empathy. If we are to accept that art, both in its production and appreciation, is about emotional experience, then it must have something to do with empathy. This turned out to be true in several senses. Furthermore, if we are to accept that art is fundamentally social, there are further implications to draw about the relationship between art, society, and empathy. First, it means that the artist is always in collaboration with all of the other artists who are working alongside him, they empathize with one another, they share with one another. Second, it means that the artist is in constant collaboration and empathy with all of society. Collingwood claims that the artist is attempting to express the core of everyone’s experience, that the artist is the person capable of apprehending and expressing the quality of contemporary experience. Third, this means that the audience’s understanding of art is about empathizing with the artist. But this process becomes one in which the audience is not only empathizing with the artist, but one in which they are also expressing themselves. This means therefore that art has some practical consequences when it comes to how we engage with experience and empathy. I claimed that it means that art can allow people to understand themselves better, which means that they would be able to understand others better, and that they could become more creative and expressive in their own lives. Finally, I explained how all of this is framed by what Foucault called the attitude of modernity.

In the next section I want to add some nuance to all of these ideas by connecting them to John Searle’s work on status functions.

Empathy And Language: Particularization, Generalization, And Restructuring Default Thought

Table of Contents:

1.Introduction: Empathy And Language

Part I: Defining The Problem: Tension Between The Inclinations Of Language And Empathy

2. The Issue: Language As Dulling Empathy

3. Language And Generalization

4. Empathy And Particularization

5. The Solution: Putting Language Towards The Expansion Of Empathy

Part II: Defining The Solution

6. The Problem Of Autopilot: The Intuitive Nature Of Social Life

7. Intuitive Behavior As Structured By A Priori Assumptions And Mental Models

8. Intuitive Empathy As Requiring The Restructuring Of Mental Models

Part III: Enacting The Solution

9. Exploring Our Mental Models: Personal Archeology

10. Modifying Our Mental Models: Intellectually Buttressing Empathy

10a. Empathy And Experience

10b. The Humanities And Acquiring Synthetic Experience As Expanding The Empathic Palette

11. Re-Internalizing Our Mental Models: Mindfulness As A Mental Model

12. Conclusion: The Paradox Of Empathy And Language

1. Introduction: Empathy And Language

In this essay I’m going to be breaking down the relationship between language and and empathy. I think that language interacts with empathy in both negative and positive ways. First I want to summarily deal with the negative component: I want to analyze how language reduces our ability to empathize with other people. I’ll then start moving towards a more detailed analysis of this issue and my proposed solution. I’ll discuss language and its tendency to generalize, and how this inclination towards generalization can dull our sense of empathy. I’ll then contrast this by discussing the importance of particularizing in empathy. After that I will give a quick look at how language can be used to expand our capacity for empathy. Those four sections will comprise Part I called ‘Defining The Problem’. After that I’ll start analyzing a possible solution to this problem of empathy and language. The first step in this will be analyzing how social relations (in which empathy matter) are typically conducted. The short answer is that they are conducted intuitively, on ‘autopilot’ so to speak. So I’ll be trying to address this issue of how it is that our use of language and empathy exists on a largely unconscious, default sort of frame of mind. I’ll then corroborate this idea by discussing some neuropsychology on how the brain models reality for us. I’ll then try to explain how we can go about changing our mental models. I believe that if we are to successfully use language to improve our capacity for empathy we have to be using it to change our unconscious behavior, we have to be using it to alter our mental models that tacitly govern our feelings, thoughts, and actions. Those three sections will constitute Part II ‘Defining The Solution’. After that I’ll spend some time explaining how we can actually engage in this process, how we can use language to alter our mental models of reality so as to make our default behavior more empathic. I’ll do this by explaining how we have to explore, then modify, then re-internalize our mental models.

Sounds awfully abstract (as usual). But I think what I’m talking about is fairly serious. It matters how much empathy is a part of our default, autopilot behavior. If we are naturally empathic then we might have a richer and more rewarding social life. Perhaps all this business about empathy actually has something like political implications. I’m writing this partly so as to clarify issues I want to tackle in ‘Art, Zen, and Insurrection’. Here I go.

Part I: Defining The Problem: Tension Between The Inclinations of Language and Empathy

So in this section I’m going to be trying to define the problem of empathy in human life. The issue that I want to examine most closely is the way that our capacity for language interacts with and hinders our capacity for empathy. First, the issue generally. Second, the potential solution. Third, language and generalization. Fourth, empathy and particularization.

2.The Issue: Language As Dulling Empathy

So as I’ve been saying, the big issue is that language can dull our capacity for empathy. I sat down the other day in front of a book called The Age Of Empathy. I don’t know what the author argues, but the title suggests that he thinks that there is some sort of innate human capacity for empathy, and that this is somehow going to play a role in our lives. I also find this sentiment in other writers. Marco Iacoboni, the author of Mirroring People: The Science Of Empathy And How We Connect With Others, also lauds the human capacity for empathy, saying that it is one of our defining features (along with other social animals). Alvin Goldman, in Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, And Neuroscience Of Mindreading, also believes that empathy is a crucial part of how people interact with one another. This is no doubt the case. Mirror neurons exist, the enactment-imagination exists, simulation theory seems like a viable theory of mind. But I don’t think that there is quite as much empathy evident as I would like. It seems like people are harsher than that, that they are more dominated and consumed by their own lives than these authors let on.

So what is this lack of empathy in America all about? What is going on that is making it easy for people to bypass empathy and judge people in other ways? How could this supposed human tendency, natural human trait, be muddled or forgotten in this way?

This doesn’t mean that language has no place in empathic thought. On the contrary, I think that language can be used to make us more empathic. That is my solution. But before I elaborate the solution of how language can buttress empathy I would like to focus on two differing qualities of language and empathy: their inclination towards generalization and particularization, respectively.

3. Language and Generalization

So I think that the main thing that prevents language from being easily compatible with empathy is that language tends to generalize things. I think it has something to do with language and the way that language gives us new ways of looking at the world. I think that language simplifies people for us, it labels people for us, and it makes it so that we don’t have to spend much time trying to empathize with people. If we are too wrapped up in believing that a person is a criminal, or is crazy, we don’t need to pay much attention to the particulars of their experience. If we can label someone then we don’t need to go past that label: the label, the word, can stand in for any type of nuanced picture of that person themselves. I think these are the issues with language that Zizek is getting at when he refers to ‘the violence of language’. Language disfigures things, it alters them, both in our perception of them and in their perception of themselves. We can’t label something and act like we aren’t changing that thing in the process of labeling it. A friend referred to this as a Heisenbergian uncertainty phenomenon: we can’t label something without altering it, we can’t observe something with the aid of language without changing it. And unfortunately, I think that using language to classify in this way prevents us from engaging with empathy as much as we could or should. Furthermore, I think that our culture is overloaded with language and symbols. They are everywhere. We have names and labels for everything, and most of those labels have implicit value judgments. I think that our society in particular is one in which language might be drowning out empathy.

It is this ability for language to generalize, its tendency to over simplify things, that causes it to drown out our capacity for empathy. I think the problem with language and generalization will become a little clearer if I explain how empathy requires particularization.

4.Empathy and Particularization

While language is typically used in terms of generalization, I think empathy should be thought of more in terms of particularization. Because when it comes to emotions, empathy, and emotional sensitivity, language comes across as very generalized and doesn’t do very much to help us empathize with people. We speak of ‘anger’, ‘sadness’, ‘confusion’, ‘anxiety’, ‘irritation’, and so on, as if though they were simple, static, and self-evident feelings. But they are far more complex and nuanced than that. At one point in The Principles Of Art Collingwood says that every emotion we feel is always different than the one that came before it. I might feel ‘angry’ and it might be similar to other angers I have felt in the past, but each time it is wholly new, wholly different in its particular cause and manifestations. Emotions are not general, as we like to think, they are nuanced, particular, and embedded in complex social situations.

If we were to take pains to recognize the nuance of emotions I think that people would be more likely to empathize with others. If we were to recognize that emotions are very dependent on our social situation, our context, our history, then we might take these things into account on a more regular basis, and we might empathize with people on a more regular basis.

I guess what I’m getting at is the level of creativity and imagination that is required to really empathize with someone. If we want to understand someone’s thoughts and feelings in complex and rich ways we can’t revert to generalization and labeling. We can’t say ‘oh well she feels sad because her boyfriend broke up with her’, or ‘he is just sad because his dog died’. because that doesn’t do justice to people’s experience. They are so much more complex than that! And while perhaps those words capture the core of it, they don’t capture the nuance of it. So empathy, creativity, and the imagination pretty much go hand in hand. That is why I’m talking about empathy as requiring particularization. We have to push ourselves to treat other people’s experiences as particular, not general.

My life feels pretty god damn particular. I am ‘sad’ sometimes, ‘elated’ at others, even ‘excited’. But why?! You think I live this general existence in which it is just easy, simple, and fun to be a barista? Doing what I do because working for money is what you do?! Outrageous! I feel incredibly contingent, dynamic, complex, weird, uncomfortable, particular. I think and hope that other people also feel complex and nuanced. I hope that other people are turned off by generalization. I hope other people feel robbed of their nuance when they are labeled.

Anyways, this essay is ranty, not academicy. Good.

I think that if we want to empathize with people then we need to recognize that emotions are particular, that empathy requires creativity, imagination, and most importantly, particularization. Now let me try to explain how language can assist us in this quest for particularizing, creative empathy.

5.The Solution: Putting Language Towards The Expansion Of Empathy

So the task is therefore to make it so that language is used to expand our capacity for empathic thought. But how to do this? How to make it so that language loses its overly generalizing nature and acquires instead a sensitive and nuanced view?

Well I guess right now I think that there would have to be two parts to this process of re-empathizing language, re-sensitizing language. We would first have to attack the overly generalized social taxonomies that we work with so as to reveal how they give us an over-simplified perspective. That would be the negative component. Second, we would have to undertake a positive process in which we equipped ourselves with a set of concepts that were more prone to particularizing rather than generalizing.

As for the negative component of attacking our current set of concepts. To me this is the proper project for nihilism. I continue to believe that nihilism is ultimately a positive philosophy that contributes to the larger project that I am searching for, that is bubbling in me. In this case, it is clear that nihilism contributes something to this project of overcoming our overly-generalized set of social labels. I have written on several occasions about how nihilism is the elaboration of certain forms of meaning that are meant to escape other forms of meaning. This is precisely what I am saying we need to do in order to put language at the service of empathy. If we want to be able to use words to become more empathic, and the issue is that words can make us less empathic, then we have to engage in this process in which words are able to help us escape the domination of words. It is articulation that is in search of the ineffable. It is words that are meant to make us better at feeling emotions.

As I explained in the previous section, words have the tendency to generalize our experiences and our perceptions. If we are too quick to label things then we will be dulled to the nuance of our experience. Words get in the way of accurate perception of ourselves and others. So the negative component of this project has to be about overcoming the overly-generalizing nature of words. And I think that nihilism can help us do that. I think if we are willing to use history to attack our vocabulary we would be able to see how inadequately it captures our and other’s experiences. I think that nihilism is an integral component to mindfulness in modern America.

But what about the positive part of the solution? Well, the issue is still that words are often overly-general, but we still have to use words. So what we need to do then is come up with a way of using language that manages to avoid dangerous levels of generalization. We need to reacquaint ourselves with how very particular and nuanced language can be. We need to particularize language. We need to be careful about synonyms and about labels. I’m not saying we can avoid generalization entirely. We just need to be mindful about how we are using language. We need to recognize it as limited but not give up on it entirely. I’m sorry I can’t say this more clearly. But I suppose the issue is that what we require is creativity, is brand new words and ideas, new understandings of things. So I can’t really tell you what this looks like because what it looks like doesn’t exist yet. We need to be creative with the way we think of ourselves and the way we think of others. We somehow need to go about particularizing the language we use.

This isn’t very clear, I realize. But I think that this is a very important thing. I think we need to care about how language prevents us from being empathic, and we need to consider how to use language to become more empathic. Like I said, it has to be creative, so I can’t be precise about what this looks like. But it has to involve both a negative and a positive component–it has to be about attacking our current concepts and about particularizing a new set of concepts. But I would now like to turn to the way I see this as happening within an individual mind. I’d like to give an analysis of how individual minds work and relate to language and empathy in the social world. Hopefully this will help me articulate how I feel that I am trying to go about this process of using language to become empathic.

Part II: Defining The Solution

So in this section I want to do a little bit of work to explain how this process could be undertaken. I think that this has been a major task of mine for the last number of years. This is a very personal essay for me because I feel like have been working so hard at using my intellect to become more empathic and compassionate. I hope that I am not just talking bull shit. I hope that I have really done this. I don’t want to ooze intellect, I want to ooze gentleness, love, compassion, and empathy. I want to be everyone’s mirror. Because I want people to be my mirrors. So I hope that the things that I’m about to talk about will explain how I think of this issue, how I think that things can happen, and how things can change. So first I’m gonna talk about how social life is intuitive, we just do it, we don’t reflect, we just do it. The problem therefore becomes modifying our intuitive behavior. In order to do this I think we need to reckon with how our intuitive behavior is structured, we have to identify our tendencies, our habits, because we have to modify those. So I’m going to talk about the notion of a priori thought and that of mental models. Then I’ll be talking about how intuitive empathy requires the restructuring of models.

6. The Problem Of Autopilot: The Intuitive Nature Of Social Life

Now, I think the problem with this idea of using language to make us more empathic has to do with the intuitive nature of social life. We don’t operate consciously most of the time, we operate on autopilot. We just do things. We walk around living our lives unreflectively for the most part. I just do my thing, I laugh, I smile, I talk to people, all with minimal reflection or conscious thought. I hope this is true for the rest of you as well. I hope you feel that life isn’t all about consciousness, but is about being intuitive. This clashes with some of my other concerns, because I also think consciousness, mindfulness, and all this is very important stuff. But we can’t be ever vigilant. Sometimes we lapse into unreflective behavior. And I should say that I think we are behaving unreflectively most of the time. It is more appropriate to say that sometimes we lapse into consciousness, not the other way around. Autopilot is what we do. Think of driving, think of most our lives.

So the issue becomes modifying autopilot. Changing the way we behave has to come back to changing our default, intuitive, autopilot behavior. But how?! How to change our heart of hearts! Our core of cores! How to feel that we are modifying our intuitive behavior? Well, the first step has to be conceptualizing intuitive behavior adequately. But first a digression.

What am I doing with this writing? What is this language doing to me and to you? Does it feel particular to you? Does it feel general to you? Is my language doing an adequate job of explaining how I want language to bring us empathy and not generalization? Does it seem like this language is doing anything for empathy? I think it is for me. I think the more I push myself to grapple with this problem the more empathic I become. I hope. I am engaging in this articulation to get at the ineffable empathy that I want. I want your emotions. I don’t want you to become my words. I want my emotions to become your emotions. I want my words to become your heart.

Now let me try to more clearly conceptualize intuitive behavior

7. Intuitive Behavior As Structured By A Priori Assumptions And Mental Models

I think that if we want to get a grip on our intuitive behavior, so as to modify it and make it more empathic, we need to have an adequate conceptualization of intuitive behavior. As I said above, I think we need to grapple with the structure of our intuitive behavior. We can notice that we have certain tendencies, there are trends to my behavior. I say certain things, I make certain sounds, I do certain things on a regular basis. My intuitive behavior is structured in certain ways. So how to think of this? Well, I have two alternatives. The first comes from R.G. Collingwood’s notion of the a priori imagination. The second comes from Chris Frith’s discussion of mental modeling.

In The Idea Of History Collingwood discusses what he calls the a priori imagination. He says that when we observe certain things our mind fills in gaps in evidence for us. When we look at a box of matches on the table all we see is two or three sides of it, but our mind automatically perceives it as a fully three-dimensional object with all of its sides. Same thing when we look at a table. All I see right now the top of my table, and a little bit of the legs. But my mind automatically knows that the table has an underside, that it has two legs in the back of it. In these ways my thoughts simply unfold a priori, they unfold automatically based on my assumptions about the physical world. This also applies to the social world. When I see people dressed in certain ways, when I see them doing certain things, it is very easy for me to simply have intuitive judgments of them. I assume that they act or think in certain ways. I see someone holding a door as I approach, for example, I assume that they are holding the door for me. Or I see a guy dressed in a certain way, I automatically make certain assumptions about him. Not that I mean to. I just have all these intuitive understandings of how things work in the physical and social world. I assume a lot of things without knowing it. My thought unfolds a priori because it is structured in certain ways. I think that this same idea can be spoken of in terms of how our brain models the world.

In Making Up The Mind: How Our Brain Creates Our Mental World Chris Frith discusses how our brains models reality for us. He talks about it in terms of ‘getting ahead through prediction’. That our brain wouldn’t be able to deal with complex information if it was simply receiving input all the time. On the contrary, the brain models reality, attempts to predict it, so that it can deal with it more efficiently. This is why he says that ‘perception is a fiction that coincides with reality’. What we are dealing with is not raw perception of reality, but our brains constructed model of reality. This is why sometimes we wake up at night and we think we see a person in the room, only for them to disappear when we turn on the light. Perception is not passive, it is active and constructive. Our brain builds reality for us, it doesn’t simply perceive it. Many of our social interactions likely function on these mental models. We perceive things to happen in certain ways, we categorize in certain ways, based on models. We think of ‘men’ and ‘women’, ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ people, ‘black’ or ‘white’ or ‘asian’ people. It doesn’t matter how fluid these categories are or how much they blend because our brain has locked them in as a model of reality. Our perception goes along these lines.

The most important point is that these models are not innate and static. They are not hardwired, but are rather cultural. In The Brain That Changes Itself Norman Doidge has an appendix called ‘The Culturally Modified Brain’. In that section he explains how our exposure to culture changes the way that we perceive reality. A good example is that Inuit are able to perceive upwards of 100 shades of snow. Because they have more than 100 words for snow, their experience registers that on a certain day this kind of snow was around. Culture determines what we do and what we do not perceive. Because the brain is plastic and changes based on our experiences, our mental models of reality are formed by our exposure to culture. Because our models of reality are culturally crafted this means several different things. First, it means that our intuitive behavior is not static, essential, or hardwired, but is rather plastic and culturally determined. This means that we have hope of changing. Second, this means that our mental models are likely overly-generalized by our cultures tendency to label and categorize. In short, if our overly generalized mental models are cultural and not essential, then we have the potential to change them, and overcome our reliance on overly generalized thought. Let me explore this more fully.

8. Intuitive Empathy As Requiring The Restructuring of Mental Models

I’ve made some important connections about how it is that intuitive behavior is structured. Now to bring this back full circle to the issue at hand. If we want to become more empathic, and we want to use language to become more empathic, then we have to think of it in terms of mental models and their restructuring. This is because our behavior in the social world is primarily intuitive, and because that intuitive behavior is structured by our mental models of reality. So if we want to become more empathic we have to be willing to restructure our intuitive thought. We have to be willing to grapple with our culturally determined models of reality and to recognize the ways that they either encourage or discourage empathy. As I said above, I think that our mental models of reality are overly generalized and categorized, because I think our society is overly categorized. The task is thus to create new mental models that would make us intuitively more open to empathy and particularization of experience.

Now that I have defined the solution as using language to 1. identify our existing cultural models, and 2. to create new mental models that would make us more empathic, let me try to explain how this could be done. How can we enact this solution?

Part III: Enacting The Solution

So, in order to enact this solution I think we need to take three distinct steps, all of which will blend in some kind of weird reflective process. But I think that nonetheless I can identify three distinct steps in this process. First, we need to grapple with our already determined models of reality. Because the bottom line is that we already think certain things, have certain mental models, simply because we were raised in a certain cultural and historical situation. Second, after having discovered our already existing models, we need to go about modifying those models so as to have them more under our control. Finally, we need to engage in a process of reflection in which those new models are internalized and can change our intuitive behavior.

9. Exploring Our Mental Models: Personal Archeology

So this first step of exploring our already determined mental models I think can be called ‘personal archeology’. It is as if though we are digging up parts of ourselves that are submerged deep in our mind. The structures of our thought have the quality of being hidden from us. They are elusive, they lie below the surface and influence us without our knowledge. So what we have to do is dig them up. We have to expose them. We have to go down deep into ourselves and figure out ‘why the hell do I think this way? Why the hell do I think any way at all?’ And this is a question that has to be historical in nature. Because our culture is historically created, and our mental models are cultural, it follows that our mental models are also historical. Duh.

This phrase personal archeology is actually inspired by Michel Foucault’s notion of historical archeology, the archeology of knowledge. I think that Foucault’s notion of archeology is actually something like the archeology of the unconscious of society. The archeology of our mental models of reality. It is an archeology of our perception of reality. I think that Foucault’s work does a huge amount of this work for us. It can show us why we think of sexuality in the ways we do, why we think of crime, medicine, insanity, all of that, in the very particular ways that we do. So the first step in overcoming categorization’s hold on empathy is to perform an archeology of our mental models of reality. Then we will have determined why we are thinking the way that we do. We will understand our own generalization in new ways. And hopefully then we will be able to move past those overly-general forms of thinking. Maybe then we will be able to see more then ‘men’ and ‘women’ who are ‘sad’ or ‘angry’, but rather particular people dealing with unique circumstances and emotions. We will then maybe we will be able to intuitively engage in a particularizing form of empathy rather than an over-generalized glossing of empathy. Now for the modification.

10. Modifying Our Mental Models: Intellectually Buttressing Empathy

So after we have exposed our already existing mental models the task becomes the modification of those models. Once we have dealt with our set of culturally formed concepts we can potentially go about changing how we relate to them, and thus the way we relate to ourselves and others. As I’ve been saying, that I think our culture encourages insensitive and unempathic engagement with other people. So once we have realized the way that our culture’s use of language encourages this insensitivity, how do we go about becoming more empathic? Well, I think the answer lies primarily in experience. Because empathy is all about experience.

10a. Empathy and Experience

In Simulating Minds Alvin Goldman discusses simulation theory of mind. He posits that we understand people by an extended form of empathy which he calls simulation. He discusses what he calls ‘experience-deficient simulation’. Meaning that when certain people try to imagine how someone feels, it becomes incredibly hard to imagine their feelings if you have never had a similar experience. People with a damaged amygdala, for example, cannot feel anger, and therefore have a very hard time understanding why other people are feeling angry. This extends more generally to the issue of empathy. I believe there is something called experience-deficient empathy. When we don’t have experience with other people it becomes very hard for us to feel for them, to empathize with them. If we don’t know what it is like to be poor it is easy for generalization to step in and just tell us that they are lazy or stupid. We might not realize how hard it is to pull ourselves out of a bad economic situation because our experience doesn’t give us a very rich palette to empathize with them. I think that in our culture we might have very narrow experiences. We don’t always get a sense of how dynamic and weird people’s lives can be. They can have such weird experiences. Life can be so hard. But we might not experience that directly. Wealthy people might not have much experience with poverty. Straight white people might not have much experience with feeling alienated and abnormal. And like I said, that could prevent us from being able to empathize with people. It might encourage us to simply label and categorize people and not empathize with them. The issue then becomes acquiring as much experience as possible so as to expand our capacity for empathy. So how to get experience?

10b. The Humanities And Acquiring Synthetic Experience As Expanding The Empathic Palette

So what we really need in order to become more empathic is experience. We need to have lots of experience so that we can feel for more people in more situations, so that we don’t so quickly revert to linguistic categorization, but can more readily experience people’s emotions for ourselves. I like to think of this as the expansion of the empathic palette. If empathy depends on our experiences, then there must be a certain body of experience that we use to engage in empathy. This is what I’m calling the empathic palette. So how to get experience? How to expand our empathic palette?

I think that we can get experience from more places than just life. Of course, living life has to be our first way of acquiring experience. We have to talk to people, we have to go places, do things, meet people. So first of all experience has to come from real life, and most importantly from relationships with other people. Other people are the bread and butter of life. So experience in reality is other people’s experiences. The mingling of experience. The sharing of experience! What a delight it is to know that others too are alive and breathing with their dynamic and painful lives!

But apart from real life and other people’s real experiences, we can acquire experience from language itself, from reading and writing. I think that there is such a thing as synthetic experience. Alvin Goldman corroborates this idea in Simulating Minds by showing that the imagination invokes the actual qualities of experience. When we imagine being sad our brain is identical to when we actually feel sad. That means that imagining things is almost as good as actually doing them. So then, doesn’t the humanities suddenly take on a vital new importance? The humanities becomes an enormous store of synthetic experience. Think of all the worlds we could visit through language: fictional worlds, historical worlds, contemporary foreign worlds. There is an enormous store of experience out there in the humanities that we can tap into. And I think if we are willing to take that world seriously, if we are willing to read it with a potent imagination, we will be gaining access to all kinds of experience that will aid us in our quest for empathy.

In this way the humanities could be a way to intellectually buttress our capacity for empathy. We would be learning a new set of terms to think of people in. Historical terms, fictitious terms, empathic terms. These synthetic experiences would then transport into the real world and change the way that we engage with other people.

The modification of mental models therefore comes back to the acquisition of certain types of experience. And I think that the humanities can provide us with synthetic experience that will make us capable of empathizing with more people in a variety of situations. This is all an intellectual and linguistic process. We would be thinking hard about our own thoughts and experiences, and would be reading lots of things. But this is an instance in which intellectual work is meant not to make us smarter, but to make us more sensitive and empathic. This would be intellectual work that would change our intuitive behavior and make us more empathic. This is articulation that would be expanding our capacity to understand the ineffable world of emotions and experience. But this deliberate process wouldn’t be everything. Because we would have to make sure that these linguistic processes worked their way into our unconscious, intuitive world. That is the topic of the final section.

11. Re-internalizing Our Mental Models: Mindfulness As A Mental Model

So once we have dug up our old culturally determined models, and once we have gone about the process of modifying them through the acquisition of synthetic experience, how would we re-internalize them? How would we be sure that these newly constructed models would make it into our intuitive lives? Well, I think that the answer has something to do with reflection and rumination. We would have to be willing to daydream about these issues, let them float in our mind in uncertain ways, let them just be. But I think that if we were to reflect on these things carefully, take time to let them sink in, we would be able to internalize these things.

The main thing that I would want this to do would be to make us mindful. It would ideally enable us to pay attention to our experience and other people’s experiences in attentive ways. We would be more sensitive, more loving, more particularizing about how we treated other people. But there is tension between the issue of mental modeling and that of mindfulness. Mindfulness is about overcoming our overly-generalized perspective. Mindfulness believes that concepts and words get in the way of accurate perception. So how is it that mindfulness and mental models can both be possible? I think that this can be the case. But only if we recognize that mindfulness itself can be a mental model of the world. Mindfulness, though, would be a model of the world in which we are far more open to how particular people’s experiences our, how particular lives are, and how much imaginative effort it takes to really empathize with people. So then this is a task: to create a mental model of the world that is open enough to enable mindful observation. We need to encounter all kinds of different experiences and people so that we can say ‘holy shit none of these generalizations are adequate. I can’t believe how nuanced people and the world are and how hard I have to work to appreciate their complexity’. We need to be able to create a model of reality that is aware of the limitations and danger of language. Only then will our intuitive behavior be able to be constantly empathic and sensitive.

12. Conclusion: The Paradox Of Empathy And Language

So that is that. I don’t know how I feel about this essay. I think it is all over the place and lacks continuity. I started out by trying to define the problem. I wanted to explain how there is tension between the tendencies of language and empathy. I think that language is more inclined to make us generalize, to simplify things. While empathy, on the other hand, has a lot more to do with particularization, with appreciating the nuance of things. I then tried to outline a solution in which language itself could be used to help us become more empathic. I said that it had to address the intuitive nature of social life, so the issue thus becomes modifying our default behavior, our intuitive thoughts and actions. I then explained how our intuitive behavior is structured by a priori assumptions and mental models of reality. I then explained how our capacity for empathy would therefore have to be expanded by restructuring our mental models. I then tried to explicate how we would go about restructuring our mental models. I tried to claim it would be three part process of exploring our old mental models, then altering them through the acquisition of synthetic experience, and finally the internalization of these new models through reflection and mindfulness. The goal would ideally be a mindfulness in which we were able to appreciate people as nuanced individuals that needed to be treated as particulars and not generalities or labels.

The hardest part of all of this is the way that language is paradoxically the thing to battle and the weapon that we are battling with. We need to overcome the tendency of language to dull our perception, to make it too focused on generalities, categories, archetypes, and so on. But the only way to overcome this aspect of language is to use language itself. We have to use language to attack the generality of our culturally determined language. We have to be creative with language to change our mental models of reality. We have to use language to enable empathy and mindfulness. This is so confusing to me.

This paradoxical nature of the relationship between language and empathy. They are both so necessary. They go hand in hand. Yet language can overrun empathy if we aren’t careful. And we can’t use language to simply replace our categories. We have to use language to overcome our categories. We have to use language to overcome language. It is so confusing. If articulation of empathy is ever done for its own sake we are making a huge mistake. Articulation of empathy is only useful if it puts us in touch with the ineffable, the inarticulable world of emotions. Articulation of empathy must leads to the transcending of language, and into the realm of the ineffable.

Original notes:

The notion of water should be in here. We should talk about submerging and raising. Because the water metaphor is helpful.

It seems like it does have to come back to the issue of mental modeling. The main concern should be the way the language changes our mental models, guides our assumptions, guides our interactions.

So it has to come back to this paradoxical idea of creating a model of mindfulness that would allow us to be compassionate.

Hmm. Using language to alter things. To change our models. To restructure our a priori thought.