The Problem of Other Minds Here and There

Cavell’s “Notes Mostly about Empathy”

Abstract

Stanley Cavell’s 2009 essay “Notes Mostly about Empathy” represents a significant development of his investigation of other minds skepticism in Part IV of The Claim of Reason. The essay begins with Cavell’s concerns about the psychoanalyst Bennett Simon’s — in Simon’s own eyes, rather loose — use of the term “empathy” in interpreting the effects of tragedy on its audience in his book Tragic Drama and the Family. In Simon’s words, “empathy is the English version of a nineteenth-century German term Einfühlung referring to the aesthetic act of "feeling one’s way into’ a work of art”; and tragedy, for Simon, produces for the audience a “space […] in which empathy can grow.” On his view, King Lear models relations between characters that call out an empathetic response from the audience. Cavell finds something akin to this relationship between characters and audience in the play; and he is certainly not rejecting the idea that we will empathize with, say, Gloucester’s suffering. His reservations, however, suggest that a more fundamental aspect of our relation to others is made manifest in tragedy.