Abstract
The contemporary world, it appears, is characterised by a widespread absence of empathy. When confronted with egotistical hedonism, commodification and culture, appeals for a more empathic world seem destined to remain a purely normative enterprise. Claims that we can actually form empathic relationships with distant and even previously despised others seem particularly illusory.
In Politics of Empathy: Ethics, Solidarity, Recognition, Anthony Clohesy offers a somewhat more sanguine (but not naïve) normative and prescriptive account of how a more empathic and ethical world might be formed. The author contends that ‘the tending of the ground on which empathy can flourish is the most important political and ethical task of our age’ (p. 6).
Forming empathic relationships, according to the author, requires us to imagine ourselves in the position of different others. Furthermore, leaving the comfort of our own bounded reality (what the author calls being home) compels us to interrogate the values and assumptions underpinning our unified communities. We will then come to realise that our identity claims are contingent.
It is only when we experience The Event (empathic and lived experience of a different other) that we can become ethical subjects bound by duties to these different and equal (including distant) others. The Event crucially makes us aware that we have committed violence to these others ‘in order to sustain the unity of our own identities and in order to resist the spectre of finitude that haunts us’ (p. 3).
The author systematically considers the obstacles and potential pathways to the creation of a more empathic and ethical world under the headings of culture, nature, religion and politics. A particular strength of this book is that it contains provocative insights such as ‘it is only the Left that that can articulate an ethically sustainable vision of the good life’ (p. 103). Similarly, religion in its mythical guise is deemed an empathic resource.
Ultimately, it is for readers to decide whether empathy can become an ethical ingredient which shapes actually existing political and social reality. Clohesy does not disguise the reality that this task is an onerous one. He acknowledges that an ethics of empathy might justifiably be categorised as ‘poetic politics’ (p. 126). However, he insists that we cannot give up hope.
What is clear, however, is that the author presents a compelling, rigorous and sophisticated case. Readers will benefit from Clohesy’s easy command of a diverse interdisciplinary literature. This book should prove particularly useful for scholars whose research focuses on empathy and recognition. It deserves a wide audience.