Empathy, sharing and mental voyeurism

• Applicant: Radu Bumbacea, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Practical Philosophy ; Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 552619687

This project aims to advance our understanding of a number of inter-related phenomena that are lumped together under the label of ‘empathy’, phenomena relating to our understanding of and emotional reactions to other people’s mental states, in particular emotions. While most of us intuitively agree on the importance of these phenomena, and the literature on their value is extensive, not that much has been written on the minute details of when various forms of empathy are possible and indeed desirable. I aim to advance to redress this by arguing for three thesis: First, in the philosophical literature, ‘affective empathy’, or having an emotion that is very similar to another person, is usually considered the important form of sharing another’s predicament. However, I aim to argue that very often affective empathy is impossible. This is because the other person’s emotions involve a certain direct relationship to the world that we as empathisers do not share: for instance, the sadness that their friend drifts apart involves seeing their friend as their friends, while we cannot see their friend as our friend (unless she is also our friend). The only case in which we can have some form of affective empathy is when we adopt a project of another person as our own in a way that is not completely dependent on their involvement in it. In the other cases, the normal, and valuable, form of sharing their predicament is to have emotions directed at their emotions. Second, I aim to discuss ‘imaginative empathy’, that is, imagining another person’s emotions from the inside without having those emotions ourselves. I claim here that it is our own emotions that should guide our imagining other people’s emotions in more detail. If our imagination is driven solely by curiosity about how the other person feels, without any deeper involvement, we are guilty of mental voyeurism, that is, of treating other people’s mental states without due respect, merely as a form of entertainment. Third, I aim to argue that the discussion above about imagining emotions can illuminate our engagement with narrative art and our evaluation thereof. If a work proposes the exploration of the mental life of a character, the imagination of that character’s emotions in great detail, the work should in some way provide a motivation for that. If the motivation is mere curiosity about emotions that it might be entertaining to imagine, the work can be criticised as voyeuristic.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position