Encountering the stranger: Hannah Arendt and the shortcomings of empathy as a moral compass

Abstract

It is an often taken for granted notion in contemporary Western everyday life that there is an intimate connection between empathy and moral action. Yet in recent years, this connection has come under scrutiny. In this article, we first ask the question, what is empathy? A brief survey over the psychological and philosophical approaches to the notion of empathy shows that it remains a highly contested concept. The field has a propensity to discuss empathy within the frame of sameness. We instead argue that in order to grasp empathy it is necessary to foreground otherness. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, we further argue, that when encountering the stranger, moral action requires both visiting the other -as distinct from empathic knowledge as well as thinking in order to judge what is right. Ultimately moral dilemmas are solved, not by having or demanding empathy, but by addressing the issues at hand in joint action.Any justification ends finally with the rationally gratuitous presence of the emotion of sympathy: if that condition were not met, one would simply have no reason to be moral.(Thomas Nagel, cited in Denham, 2017 p. 227).

Thinking and the Moral Landscape

“…This would be to realize the potentials of scholen agein —the free time that was the original purpose of schools. One may “rise up to humanity through culture” (Gadamer, 2000) by entering into a suspended relationship with the world and other people, where the goal is not to develop knowledge in a purely cognitive sense, but rather to engage in imaginative thinking concerned with meaning: “according to Arendt’s theory, moral education should strive to teach pupils to understand the world from multiple perspectives in a continuous, never-ending manner whilst developing their own voice and ability to take responsibility.” (Matthiesen & Klitmøller, 2019, p. 196, p. 196)…”

“…Arendt celebrates this as something wonderful when the inner dialog leads people to new meaningful insights or simply revolves around treasured memories. As Matthiesen and Klitmøller (2019) explain when quoting Arendt, thinking is not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication, but rather the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself, to have intercourse with oneself, that is, to be engaged in that silent dialog (p. 194). Arendt pays tribute to Socrates, who discovered that one may have a conversational relationship with oneself as well as with others, as he was famous for suddenly falling into spells and seemingly be preoccupied with his own inner life for a long time.…”

“…In their discussion of Arendt’s “halfway plausible theory of ethics,” Matthiesen and Klitmøller (2019) draw our attention to another one of her key moral concepts that deserves mentioning, viz. “visiting.” The fundamental plurality and constant becoming of human beings so central to Arendt in fact “hinders the possibility of knowing the other.…”

“…In this world, humans must engage in a practical, political life together with other human beings, but it is also important that their capacity for thinking is cultivated, since this is what enables them to “visit” the lives of others, and imagine other people’s existence, without thereby reducing them to the same. Thinking, in short, is morally more important than empathy (Matthiesen & Klitmøller, 2019).…”

Reflective function: A move to the level of concern

“…Freud (1921) pointed to a decline in personal responsibility and to regressive processes in group dynamics. It has been claimed that empathic response is a culturally scripted norm that is biased towards those who are similar, while overlooking the suffering of particular others (Matthiesen & Klitmøller, 2019). Brain studies have indicated that perceiving others as similar activated the medial prefrontal cortex, whereas its reduced activation was related to dehumanization, that is, to denial of the mental and moral characteristics of others (L. T. Harris & Fiske, 2011;Haslam, 2006;Jack et al, 2013).…”