Like many humanists, when I graduated with my bachelor\u2019s in English, I started searching for a way to justify my choice to pursue the humanities. Sure, I\u2019ve developed \u201chabits of mind\u201d such as \u201copenness\u201d and \u201ccreativity,\u201d a couple of the more \u201cmarketable\u201d qualities I developed from my minor in writing studies\u2014qualities that are as undoubtedly as important<\/a> as they are problematically vague<\/a>. Yet, in the conceptually opaque value system of a humanities education, it seems that empathy reigns supreme. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, many years later, as an instructor in a college of liberal arts, I\u2019m encouraged to pass on what I\u2019ve learned to my students, to train them to become \u201cthe next generation of rigorous and empathetic thinkers<\/a>.\u201d This is not a difficult mission to embrace because I\u2019ve been trained to value empathy in my scholarship and teaching. But watching White supremacists storm the Capitol on January 6th<\/a> made me wonder if empathy can be used as a \u201c#RhetOps<\/a>\u201d strategy. Like the moral psychologist Paul Bloom<\/a>, you might say I\u2019m \u201cagainst\u201d such digitally mediated empathy. But what does it mean to be against empathy? In this post I situate my critique of empathy in brief historical and contemporary discussions of empathy, and I consider the role empathy plays in our age of viral rhetorics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Western roots of empathy lie in the philosophical tradition of moral philosophy, whose most famous proponent, Adam Smith, is a familiar figure because of his (often negative) associations with current-traditional rhetoric. Perhaps it\u2019s time to resurrect Smith, not for his rhetorical theories but for his innovative move to ground ethics in empathy. Smith essentially argued that \u201csympathy\u201d (as empathy, a word only a century old<\/a>, was then called) is the capacity for \u201cfellow-feeling,\u201d which all humans possess to some degree (Smith <\/em>12). Starting with the premise that humans have \u201cno immediate experience of what other men feel,\u201d Smith reasoned that to experience empathy, we must use our imagination to understand what gives rise to passions and sentiments in other people (11). While Smith is well known for making self-interest the basis of his political economy, he believed (confusingly) that it is our only interest in others, gained solely through empathy, which could serve as motivation for our moral behavior. Today Smithean empathy competes in an overcrowded conceptual terrain filled with contradictory ideas about how empathy works and why it\u2019s important, making it hard to say what it really<\/em> means to be empathetic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today\u2019s moral and social psychologists have rebranded Smith\u2019s ideas, distinguishing, for example, between \u201cemotional\u201d (or \u201caffective\u201d) empathy, \u201cprojective empathy,\u201d and \u201ccognitive empathy.\u201d But there\u2019s little consistency in how contemporary scholars use the term \u201cempathy\u201d or its variants. Another hopeless distinction is between empathy, sympathy, and compassion, which \u201crenders it difficult to have productive critiques and analysis about the potential and limitations of these emotions\u201d (Yam 30). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take \u201cprojective empathy,\u201d which has been described as what happens when \u201cyou try to imagine yourself in another\u2019s situation, and feel certain emotions as a result\u201d (Fleischacker 30). This is often synonymous both with Smithean empathy and what psychologists sometimes call \u201ccognitive empathy\u201d because it involves reflecting on another\u2019s feelings. Yet this kind of empathy has also<\/em> been distinguished from cognitive empathy, in which a person understands<\/em> another person\u2019s feelings but does not share them (Bloom 17).  Such disputes aren\u2019t merely arcane academic squabbles: how we conceive of empathy has major ethical implications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n