What Eliot is implying is that art is capable of inducing one of the most profound aspects of empathy: the ability to sensitize us to the emotions of other people, transcending the limits of our own experiences and perspective. This wasn’t territory that Aristotle covered.
In India, there has been a literary tradition parallel to that of the West that does address this topic. In this Eastern tradition, readers’ and audience members’ emotions have had a more central role. The idea in Indian poetics is that fictional characters and fictional situations have to be created in the minds of readers and audience members by suggestion. The Sanskrit term for this suggestion is dhvani. This aspect of the tradition is not so different from Aristotle’s idea of the world-creating aspect of mimesis. But the Eastern notion, for which there is no Aristotelian parallel, is that what is suggested to readers or audience members in their empathically imagined worlds are special literary emotions, called rasas.
The job of writers or actors is to write or act in such a way that the reader/audience experiences these rasas. The Indian theorists thought that we experienced rasas because, by means of the suggestiveness of the poetry and the actors’ skills, memories would be brought to mind from the whole range of past lives. We moderns would probably now say that we experience emotions even from outside our own experience because of our kinship with the rest of humanity. But here is the important point that was stressed by the Indian theorists: rasas are like everyday emotions, except that we experience these literary emotions without the thick crust of egotism that often blinds us to the implications of our ordinary emotions in our daily lives. For instance, if we are sexually attracted to someone in ordinary life, we can become rather selfish. Indeed in the West, falling in love is often given as a reason for suspending other social obligations. In a play or novel, however, we not only feel empathically with the character in love, but can feel with other characters as well. The idea of a rasa is that we can feel the emotion, but also understand its social implications without our usual, often self-interested, involvement. We can experience the energizing aspects of love, but also—depending on the context—understand its potential effects on others.
You may be surprised to learn that in the West, the person who seems to have been the first to write about empathic processes in literature was Adam Smith, who became famous for his ideas about how the market regulated itself as if by an “invisible hand.” Smith’s abiding interest was in the glue that holds society together. His first book was The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In it he argued that an important component of this glue is what I am here calling empathy, which he called sympathy or compassion. Reading, he argued, draws on sympathy, because we necessarily become an interested but “impartial spectator” in other lives. We become involved in what is going on in the story, but not as if it were happening to us directly. We might become angry in sympathy with a protagonist, but without the narrow-minded vindictiveness that can occur when injustices affect us directly. The argument is the same as that of the rasa theorists, although it seems unlikely that Smith knew about them.
Reading certain kinds of fiction, then, is the very model of how we might properly view events in our social world. It is right that they engage our emotions, as if they were happening to someone with whom we are closely involved, but not directly to us. In literature we feel the pain of the downtrodden, the anguish of defeat, or the joy of victory—but in a safe space. In this space, we can, as it were, practice empathy. We can refine our human capacities of emotional understanding. We can hone our ability to feel with other people who, in ordinary life, might seem too foreign—or too threatening—to elicit our sympathies. Perhaps, then, when we return to our real lives, we can better understand why people act the way they do, and react with caution, even compassion, toward them.
In her book Poetic Justice, philosopher Martha Nussbaum has taken Adam Smith’s argument further and claimed that reading, particularly of certain novels, not only uses our faculties as sympathetic spectators, but exercises them in such a way as to make us better citizens when it comes to social issues such as justice. Nussbaum points out that what we really mean by justice is not just mechanically applying a rule book. It involves being able to understand imaginatively and deeply what is going on both for perpetrators and for victims. It is hard to think how this can be better achieved than through certain kinds of literature. Even some television shows, such as Law and Order, are written to enable the viewer to enter imaginatively into both sides of issues such as racism, women’s rights, and questions about whether people who are seriously mentally ill can act voluntarily.
Reading can be an escape—a ride on an emotional roller coaster. But we can also read and go to the theater to extend our sympathies. In Romeo and Juliet, we can feel for the adolescent Juliet as she finds herself in love with someone her parents hate because he belongs to the wrong family. In The Tempest, we can feel for the aging Prospero as he nears the end of his career. Our feelings are for these characters, but they are our own feelings. In the hands of writers like William Shakespeare or George Eliot, we can perhaps understand these feelings better than if they were caused by events in our own lives. Works of fiction draw on our skills of empathy and allow us to practice these skills. Then not only do they extend our individual experience, but they can become topics of discussion with others, who can show us even further implications of our emotions than what we had perceived ourselves.
A DIFFERENT VIEW
Alfie Kohn
FRANZ KAFKA once described war as a “monstrous failure of imagination.” In order to kill, one must cease to see individual human beings and instead reduce them to an abstraction: “the enemy.” Even in popular entertainment, the bad guys are never shown at home with their children. It’s easy to cheer the death of a caricature, not of a three-dimensional person.
But to step outside one’s own viewpoint and consider how the world looks to another person is one of the most remarkable capabilities of the human mind. Psychologists call this skill “perspective taking,” and it offers a foundation for morality. People who can—and do—think about how others experience the world are more likely to reach out and help those people—or at a minimum are less likely to harm them.
Taking another person’s perspective means realizing that in war, each person underneath our bombs is the center of his universe, just as you are the center of yours: he gets the flu, worries about his aged mother, likes sweets, falls in love—even though he lives half a world away and speaks a different language. To see things from his point of view is to recognize all the particulars that make him human, and ultimately it is to understand that his life is no less valuable than yours.
Less dramatically, many of the social problems we encounter on a daily basis can be understood as a failure of perspective taking. People who litter, block traffic by double-parking, or rip pages out of library books seem to be locked into themselves, unable or unwilling to imagine how others will have to deal with their thoughtlessness.