Empathy

Empathy is a transfer, not an inference, and Marsh makes the point against a specific target. Karen Horney and most researchers since believed empathy was imagination, which she rejects both because it is wrong and because imagination is a black box word for which nobody has supplied anything but a circular definition. Her counterexamples are ordinary. We do not imagine the feelings of a loved one in distress but feel their distress, sometimes before knowing about it, and sometimes we feel an emotion empathically that we have never experienced ourselves, which imagination cannot account for since there is nothing to imagine from. The mechanism is the empathic conduit, and it operates between people who share a conduit or a self membrane, which is why empathy is unevenly distributed rather than uniformly strong or weak in a person. The distinction from sympathy follows. Sympathy is pity arising from cognitive analysis and moral judgment, reached about someone rather than with them. Marsh puts the clinical consequence directly. People diagnosed as psychopathic or narcissistic show low affective empathy and average cognitive sympathy, which she reads as support for the view that the supposed impairment is something other than a deficit of understanding.

The word entered English in 1909 as a translation of Einfuhlung, feeling into, borrowed from aesthetics. Contemporary psychology divides it into affective and cognitive components, measures both and studies the conditions that reduce it. Philosophy of mind has a long argument between simulation theory, which is close to the imagination account Marsh rejects, and theory theory, which treats understanding others as inference. Edith Stein and the phenomenological tradition treated empathy as a direct form of givenness rather than an inference, which is nearest to Marsh's position. Her contribution is to attach that phenomenological claim to a mechanism, so that empathy is unevenly distributed by which conduits exist rather than being a faculty a person has in greater or lesser degree.