The following notes are a brief reexamination of the themes discussed in our previous blog. We’ll focus on Empathy, participatory knowledge and introduce the relevance of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy and cosmology to understanding these themes as universal concepts (Whitehead, 2010). We’ll also make a very brief return to Aristotle.
In the last blog we discussed the role of empathy in effectively apportioning our emotions and virtues to people and situations (drawing from Aristotle, 2019). To make the point, we briefly discussed two potentially opposing virtues- kindness and honesty. As an example, you could not apportion maximum kindness to a situation whilst also apportioning maximum honesty. We’ll expand below.
Imagine breaking bad news to someone you work with. You need to be honest so the news is as clear and insulated from misunderstanding as possible. However, the news is difficult and carries an emotional impact. With this in mind, the news cannot be delivered so honestly that it becomes blunt and cold. Empathy allows us to sense that a degree of kindness needs to play a role in the delivery of this message. The relative degrees of virtue which are fitted to this situation are determined by the respective traits, character, history and current mood of the people involved. However, empathy allows the messenger to sense some of this in the other person and properly fit the delivery to the current circumstances.
It is worth noting that the above is an organic and emergent situation. Empathy provides the means to track how the relative degrees of kindness and honesty are impacting upon the other. If our approach seems poorly fitted, we can adapt it, and then sense the impact of this adaption. Because of this process, empathy is a core part of participatory knowledge (Verveake et al, 2017), allowing us to gain an optimal grip on situations as they develop (Merleau-Ponty, 2004).
The main point is that empathy requires the sensing of something beyond us, and allows us to feel what we are sensing (Whitehead, 2010). Sensing and feeling allows us to change where we are in relation to someone or something else, it allows us to inject novelty into our life by including these feelings and modifying our approach (Whitehead, 2010). For example, when we watch a film, we may become emotionally moved by the plight of a central character. Our state has been modified by sensing and feeling the experience of something beyond us.
By contrast, if we do not use empathy to sense and feel, then we are merely imposing ourselves on the external environment, we have shut off a relationship to it. In regard to this, Whitehead (2020) presents three states that all life from the particle level to the level of a galaxy share, these are-
Living- to survive
Living well- to develop survival routines which minimize stress and uncertainty.
Living better- to inject novelty into our routines and evolve.
Living well, although above just living, still relies on repetition. Whitehead (2020) observes that constant repetition produces fatigue and exhaustion. We can place this into the example of delivering bad news. If the messenger is someone who has lived in an environment where being brutally honest has allowed them to more or less get things done, then they are living well. However, if their environment changes and they persist with the repetition of brutal honesty, then they are going to encounter more barriers. This will lead to inevitable fatigue.
If a mentor speaks to our messenger and advises them to use empathy to sense the degree of honesty which would be appropriate to specific contexts, then our messenger is injecting novelty into their way of being. Our messenger is moving away from living, through novelty, and moving toward living better. And living better is achieved by sensing and adapting to the subtleties of the world around us.
The introduction of Whitehead allows us to re-examine Aristotle in a new light. Criticisms of Aristotle have included the idea that the notion of apportioning virtues to situations is too mathematical and cold. Whitehead (2010, 2020) adds that universal objects are sensed and felt on a continuous basis by each other. Therefore, by connecting Whitehead and Aristotle, we could argue that apportioning virtues to situations is not a process of calculation but the outcome of feeling. Empathy, properly applied, allows us to track where we are in relation to other people and make intuitive adjustments to fit ourselves to an effective relationship- in our example, to deliver bad news effectively by being in a sensing relationship to the context at hand.
Reading
Aristotle, A., 2019. The ethics of Aristotle. BoD–Books on Demand.
Whitehead, A.N., 2020. Whitehead’s The Function of Reason. Lindhardt og Ringhof.
Whitehead, A.N., 2010. Process and reality. Simon and Schuster.
Gibson, J.J., 1977. The theory of affordances. Hilldale, USA, 1(2),
Merleau-Ponty, M., 2004. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings. Psychology Press.
Vervaeke, J., Mastropietro, C. and Miscevic, F., 2017. Zombies in western culture: A twenty-first century crisis. Open Book Publishers
Voss, C. and Raz, T., 2016. Never split the difference: Negotiating as if your life depended on it. Random House.
