What follows is a series of hypotheses that continues a project which I have begun in The Violence of Empathy, which may be accessed here.

1: One must remember that empathy takes place always within the symbolic order: a body must have the means for recognizing and internalizing another’s pain; such recognition is prone to mechanical frictions and failures as is any other signification. One might not feel another’s suffering, or may even feel another’s suffering where there is none.

1.1: There is a prevalent position among ethicists to assume a perfect resonance among agents who suffer, without sufficiently acknowledging the mechanisms by which suffering is communicated, the pathogenic vectors by which the contagion of suffering is spread.

1.1.I: Walter Benjamin’s “divine violence” may be considered an example of such a position.

1.1.II: When another’s action strikes one as being undesirable, one desires that the other suffer for it. The form of this perfect resonance among agents is regret: “karma is a bitch,” and “one reaps what one sows.” Regret is the communication of suffering; the victim’s pain contaminates the perpetrator. Should such regret fail to take place in an obvious fashion, one assumes that it occurs either within the profoundest depths of the human soul, or at a later stage.

1.1.III: One has an aversion to the idea that the guilty could harm without feeling regret, and yet one must question whether this aversion is a lack of charity. Would such ignorance not be a bliss? Is the permission of such ignorance not the very meaning of forgiveness? Is ethics the removal of suffering, or the “proper” allocation of suffering?

1.1.III.a: One should not assume that the absence of empathy is always a bad thing. Surgeons must not be revolted by the wounds they inflict; counselors must have patience, cannot weep with their patients.

1.2: When philosophers (e.g. Kant, Arendt and Levinas) discuss the problem of radical evil, they face the same dilemmas as counselors who attempt to diagnose narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders; the central dilemma is that an agent might fail to read another’s suffering, and might even benefit from such illiteracy.

1.2.I: Debates persist on whether there is a substantive difference between psychopathy and sociopathy, which are no longer acceptable diagnostic terms, but which referred, respectively, to those whose antisocial symptoms were a result mainly of socio-cultural influences and those whose symptoms were neurological in origin. A comparable difference might be to say that the prior cannot read others’ pain in much the same way that a person illiterate in a language might fail to read a page written in that language, while the latter cannot read others’ pain in much the same way that a person with retinal decay cannot read from a page. Part of the movement away from such terms is the obvious fact that these respective failures exist on a spectrum, with no event being purely socio-cultural or neurological.

1.2.I.a: The obvious disclaimer is that the prescriber makes a judgment about the patient’s capacity to feel others’ pain, which is based in the prescriber’s own socio-cultural assumptions on what pain looks like, where it occurs, and how one ought to read it.

1.2.I.b: It should not be taken for granted that those who have mechanical failures in reading others’ pain are able to exist in a therapeutic setting. What does it mean that those with antisocial personality disorders may learn to act as if they were reading others’ pain? What does it mean that such patients may desire to learn such strategies for reading (or faux reading) in a therapeutic setting? Is such desire endogenous or exogenous (is the counseling sought out by the patient, or mandated by the patient’s community)? If this desire is exogenous, if it is the result only of a karmic debt, the result of needing to get along well with others, is there a meaningful ethical distinction between an endogenous and exogenous desire? (Such a question, again, demands to know: what precisely is the difference between ethics and aesthetics?)

1.2.I.c: Do people with antisocial disorders not feel alone? How would this loneliness compare to the lover’s hunger for affection, to the blind’s hunger for sight, to the deaf’s hunger for sound, to the numb’s hunger for touch, to hunger and thirst themselves?

1.2.II: It is likely that all agents have a limit to how much suffering they may identify, and that such a limit may, indeed, be functional. One should turn to Melville’s tale of Bartleby: “My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul be rid of it. What I saw that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder.” (p. 35)

1.2.III: These floodgates of the soul must always remain secret, even to our very selves, for they are so disagreeable to us. Public discourse is liable, therefore, to weigh in favor of further action, while one’s private thoughts—perhaps even more private than one’s own consciousness—remain against it. This is the root of hypocrisy.

1.2.IV: One’s narcissism may never be sufficiently confessed, just as ignorance always exceeds knowledge, just as sight reaches horizons unreachable to this fleshly prison. Shame is that which cannot bear our finitude, that which hides our failures from ourselves, as from others.

1.3: Though this position is less frequently an object of concern than that of 1.2, it is possible that one may read suffering where it does not in fact exist.

1.3.I: The obvious cause for this improper reading is a fraudulent author: an account of debts and earnings which has no history supporting it. When manipulating others, one gives the appearance of suffering, to make another suffer.

1.3.I.a: One can never with certainty measure the commensurability between the appearance and experience of suffering, and one is therefore always open to being defrauded, just as one is always open to defrauding others.

1.3.I.b: Appearance of suffering will always be a factor of social standing. Experience of suffering will always be an inverse factor of social standing. Social standing is never known.

 1.3.I.c: The projection of fraud onto another is a key mechanism by which one justifies one’s selfishness. Fraud is the result, always, of conceit, of being self-centered.

1.3.II: The other cause for improper reading is a fault in the symbolic order, in the widespread assumptions about what suffering looks like and when it occurs.

1.3.II.a: These acts of misreading are harmful for those who project, insofar as the acknowledgement of suffering is itself suffering, and insofar such projections involve wasted effort.

1.3.II.a1: One must hope that the harm of such misreading may be witnessed, such that the symbolic order is able to be corrected.

1.3.II.a2: Individualism evolves as this symbolic order evolves. I don’t project harm when I realize that others do not like what I like. The preoccupation with conformity is a projection of harm, just as inauthentic conformity is a repression of one’s own suffering. 

1.3.II.b: These acts of misreading are harmful for those on whom they are projected: “how dare you infantilize me!” This paternalism infantilizes, renders speechless, insofar as it asserts the existence of repression.

1.3.II.b1: Being empathized with is therefore a form of harm.

1.3.II.b2: When you say that I am suffering, I cannot know with certainty that I am not. Just as the statement that one is suffering is itself a source of suffering, questioning one’s suffering must involve suffering. The counselor’s empathy requires the work of questioning-suffering on the part of the one counseled, though the counselor’s work may exceed that of the counseled.

1.3.II.b3: The counselor’s imposition of harm is acceptable to the extent that the counseled is thereby able to escape an addiction or a harmful environment.

1.3.II.b4: The suffering of the counselor and the counseled is suffering of mind. The term suffering of mind does not assume that such suffering has no bodily component—only that such suffering is non-localizable. Suffering of mind is non-localization itself. The questioning of the possibility of suffering, angst, is suffering of mind. Human agents are not sea creatures; suffering of mind is like being untethered in an ocean.

1.3.II.b5: An agent swims in one direction, hoping that—by maintaining course—land will eventually come in sight; one tumbles as the tide strikes, and, coming up for air, the cloudy sky reveals no way forward; suddenly one must ask: “which way was I going?” Suffering of mind involves perseverance. The natural course of affairs is change; an agent gains agency precisely to the extent that one is able to resist that course, to hold the wheel in place, despite its great frictions.

1.3.II.b6: Suffering of mind and suffering of body both draw from an agent’s resources of tolerance. Suffering of body may therefore render questioning impossible, insofar as an agent cannot engage suffering of mind. Similarly, suffering of mind may make an agent unable to engage suffering of body. (Note: One assumes most readily that suffering of body is externally imposed, and that suffering of mind is autonomously chosen. Exercise and grief seem to be rather common and potent counter examples.)

1.3.II.b7: Scientists, theorists and storytellers—those who are engaged with the task of questioning potential errors and solutions—are engaged with suffering of mind, and therefore have a social duty to maintain bodily health so as to ensure maximum suffering of mind.

1.3.II.b8: Cognitive scientists have demonstrated that decision-making is a calorie-burning activity. Suffering of mind is not simply language; it is thinking. Suffering of mind is a critical juncture, an aporia, an act of uncertainty—it stops ease, such that the next word does not readily follow. Imagination is not suffering of mind, though suffering of mind requires imagination.

1.3.III: This line of argument assumes that the projector is identifying harm with an actual agent, is not, for instance, perceiving that the statues of Laocoon and His Sons are being devoured by serpents.

1.3.III.a: That agents do experience such projection on non-agents, and do so intentionally, provides further evidence for the fact that some joy is attained in the appearance of another’s suffering. (It does not matter whether stones have feeling; it matters only that the perceiver feels empathy with the stone, while also maintaining the belief that stones do not have feeling.)

1.3.III.b: The above consideration makes one question the normative implications of the term mis-reading, and why it should be that agents desire or should desire an accuracy of representation for their and others’ sufferings. Indeed, this is the central question: how is one to feel another’s suffering?

2: Anti-representationalism may justify violence. Empathy is mimetic, which is why scientists discuss mirror neurons. Anti-representationalism is a defense mechanism, a retreat to solipsism, which prevents false projection of harm, but which may prevent reading of another’s harm.

2.1: There is a marked difference between the statements “if a lion should speak we would not understand it” (see also Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”) and “I feel another’s toothache.” The tooth need not jump out from another’s mouth and deliver a grand soliloquy about what it is to be a tooth, particularly such a forlorn, mistreated, rotten one; the mere image of a rotten tooth may induce squeamishness and pity in me.

2.1.I: The feeling of another’s toothache may be either mechanic or symbolic. What is unappealing may be unappealing to the organism, or it might be unappealing to a specific organism which has a history of adverse effects with what is unappealing (It may be that I am predisposed with an image of what comprises healthy teeth, or it may be that I remember an awful toothache, when my teeth looked similar to another’s.)

2.2: If it is true that teeth must ache, then should one conscript to dentistry those who least feels another’s toothache, just as one leaves animal heads with the butcher? Or are the best dentists those who, more than sympathize with their patients, have a thin empathic enamel—are so sensitive to the conditions of others’ teeth to exceed the others’ regard for their teeth (as an artist may be much more heavily invested in the care and upkeep of a painting than the wanton purchaser)? Similarly, should I leave the slaughter to the soldier, or should I put myself on the frontlines, precisely because I am so cowardly, precisely to prevent the killing?

 2.2.I: The violence of empathy is victim to the intractable dilemma of Pareto optimality.

2.2.II: In the supply of labor, capitalism rewards the lowest bidder. If agents and their desires are isolated, each agent will seek to limit discomfort, including the violence of empathy. The result is an arrangement where those who are suffering are liable to come into contact with those who are least likely to feel another’s pain (either symbolically or mechanically), which runs the risk of silencing pain, of acquiescing to what should have been altered.

2.3: Anti-representationalism likely occurs once suffering of mind has reached the limits of one’s tolerance. My ironic distance may be indicative that the originary event is so destructive that it overwhelms even my gaze: I cannot imagine suffering as another. To be a successful agent, one must liberate one’s capacities for tolerance. One makes available one’s capacities for tolerance by engaging others in suffering of mind; this is violence.

2.4: The violence of empathy is of utmost concern for political action, because tolerance is a communally distributed resource. The individual must not tolerate what will become unlivable for the individual, just as the society must not tolerate what will become unlivable for the society. The unfortunate possibility remains that what is livable for the society and what is livable for the individual may be at odds, and the sufferings of various subalterns throughout history would suggest that they often are. The desire for justice is the desire to bring what is livable for the society and what is livable for the individual closer together, but this desire is only a contributive—not a constitutive—aspect for what is livable to the individual desiring justice.

3: Introversion and extroversion are affected by the violence of empathy.

3.1: If an agent has a high degree or likelihood of reading others’ pain (this may be socio-cultural or mechanical, may be an accurate or inaccurate reading), then they are likely to avoid others as a means of avoiding reading their pain. This factor of introversion is magnified if an agent believes that others suffer to a greater extent than oneself.

3.2: If an agent has a low degree or likelihood of reading others’ pain (this may be socio-cultural or mechanical, may be an accurate or inaccurate reading), then they are less likely to avoid others. This factor of extroversion is magnified if an agent believes that others suffer to a lesser extent than oneself.

3.3: If an agent experiences pain, then isolation may enact suffering of mind, whereas sociality may disperse suffering of mind (e.g. counseling). This would suppose that those who suffer exhibit extroversion.

3.3.I: Those with melancholic or auto-aggressive affects often isolate themselves, which suggests that there is an additional factor at play: in order to socialize, an agent must be capable of an initial tolerance against suffering of mind, such that an agent may ask for or seek aid.

3.3.II: An additional explanation may be that the experience of suffering causes an agent to have increased anxiety, to be more afraid of the possibility of punishment, see Lacan’s definition of anxiety below.

3.4: Introversion and extroversion are not entirely the result of the violence of empathy.

3.4.I: Lacan defines anxiety as the fear of what the Other might want of me, of being unable to meet or determine those desires, of being harmed or of harming as a result (if harming is read through the violence of empathy, then it amounts to being harmed).

3.4.II: This definition seems particularly apt in the case of social anxiety. Social anxieties may arise from early traumas, when the Other’s demands are impossible to meet, when one fears others precisely because they may enact punishments which one is helpless to avoid.

3.4.II.a: This anxiety is exacerbated by the mechanical phenomena of strength, though strength is often neglected in philosophical discourse, e. if I think I stand a better chance of killing the Other than being killed, my fear of the Other’s demands are diminished.

3.4.II.b: However, the strength of the Other is not entirely physical, its violence is also discursive. (Discursive strength is authority.)

3.5: Introversion and extroversion are not static variables which remain constant throughout an agent’s existence. Some extenuating variables include: who is suffering, who is around, how their suffering manifests itself, one’s expectations for reward or punishment.

The Violence of Empathy series continues here.