The Space Between: How Empathy

Really Works Heidi L. Maibom

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-space-between-how-empathy-really-works-heidi-l
-maibom/
The Space Between
The Space Between
How Empathy Really Works

H E I D I L . M A I B OM

1
 3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930912

ISBN 978–​0–​19–​763708–​1

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197637081.001.0001

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
But let us, forsooth, my philosophic colleagues, hence-
forward guard ourselves more carefully against this my-
thology of dangerous ancient ideas, which has set up a
“pure, will-​less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge”;
let us guard ourselves from the tentacles of such contra-
dictory ideas as “pure reason,” “absolute spirituality,”
“knowledge-​ in-​
itself ”:—​
in these theories an eye that
cannot be thought of is required to think, an eye which ex
hypothesi has no direction at all, an eye in which the active
and interpreting functions are cramped, are absent; those
functions, I say, by means of which “abstract” seeing first
became seeing something; in these theories consequently
the absurd and the non-​sensical is always demanded of
the eye. There is only a seeing from a perspective, only a
“knowing” from a perspective, and the more emotions we
express over a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we train
on the same thing, the more complete will be our “idea”
of that thing, our “objectivity.” But the elimination of the
will altogether, the switching off of the emotions all and
sundry, granted that we could do so, what! would not that
be called intellectual castration?

—​Friedrich Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals III, 12

 Contents

Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction  1

PA RT I : P E R SP E C T I V E S : W HAT A R E T H EY ?

1. The Space Between  13

2. What Is a Perspective?  36
3. The Self as Agent, the Self as Observer  60
4. Victims and Perpetrators  86
5. Getting Interpersonal  106

PA RT I I : HOW T O TA K E
A N O T H E R P O I N T O F V I EW

6. Perspective Taking  133

7. Knowing You  155
8. Knowing Me  177
9. The Empathy Trap  199
10. Being Impartial  220

Notes  249
References  271
Name Index  301
General Index  305
 Acknowledgments

This book is the culmination of more than six years’ research, and
many people have contributed to it by discussing my ideas with me.
Of those who have supported my work on the manuscript and offered
invaluable comments, Anthony Jack stands out. We have spent hours
discussing empathy and he has read through the entire manuscript and
commented on it. The book wouldn’t have been the same without him.
Jenefer Robinson is another person whose assistance has been inval-
uable. She has read various versions of the book and helped me think
through many of the difficult issues. At the very end of the process, as
I was grappling with how to illustrate the manuscript, my old friend
Peter Bruce stepped in and provided the beautiful drawings you see
in the book. Thanks, Peter! My PhD student, Kyle Furlane, has been
a great discussant and pointed me to some of the studies I discuss in
Chapter 2. I also benefited greatly from comments on the first part of
the book from a reading group at York University led by Evan Wenstra
and Kristin Andrews. The research group at the Institute for Logic,
Cognition, Language, and Information (ILCLI) at the University of
the Basque Country read through my manuscript in the final stages.
Zvi Biener, Kate Sorrels, Jeanne-​Marie Musca, Tom Polger, Valerie
Hardcastle, Larry Jost, Colin Marshall, and Peter Langland-​Hassan
read the zygote version of some of those chapters and their reflections
helped guide my writing. Angela Potochnik, Tony Chemero, and
Vanessa Carbonell assisted me greatly by commenting on more mature
chapters. Kyle Snyder provided comments and criticisms that helped
me make the central argument of the book clearer and more focused.
I am grateful to all! Thanks also go to my editor at Oxford, Peter Ohlin,
for pushing me to crystallize my ideas better.
In 2016–​17, I was a Taft Center fellow, which allowed me ample time
to develop my ideas in concert with two other fellows, Arya Finkelstein
and Gergana Ivanova. Karsten Stueber visited at the end of the
x Acknowledgments

fellowship and commented on the first half of the manuscript. His wise
input made the book a great deal better than it would otherwise have
been. The Taft Center had already provided invaluable support the pre-
vious year, when it helped finance a visit to Macquarie University in
Sydney. Here, Jeanette Kennett led a seminar, where we discussed early
chapters of the book. I learned much from that.
I have given talks on various parts of this book to audiences of the
ILCLI research group at the University of the Basque Country, the
Center for Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Antwerp,
and the philosophy departments of Indiana University South Bend,
Southern Illinois University, Roskilde University, University of Rijeka,
Macquarie University, University of Memphis, Jadavpur University
in Kolkata, University of Wollongong, Carleton University, Case
Western Reserve University, University of Copenhagen, University
of Manchester, University of Cincinnati, and York University. I am
grateful to the audiences for frank and instructive discussions. During
the summer of 2019, Francesco Orsi organized a summer school at
the University of Tartu in Estonia with Bart Streumer and me. This
gave me a wonderful opportunity to discuss the book with a bunch
of very smart people, and to do so in an idyllic setting. I’ve also bene-
fited from discussions at conferences and workshops, such as those
by the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions; the
European Society for Philosophy and Psychology; the International
Society for Research on Emotions; the Brazilian Society for Analytic
Philosophy; the Workshop on Language, Cognition, and Context; and
a joint workshop between the philosophy departments at University of
Cincinnati and Ohio State University.
Last but not least, I have learned a lot from presenting some of
the materials here at graduate and senior seminars the University
of Cincinnati. At different stages of the book, I also presented the
materials to the Association for the Study of Psychoanalytic Thought
in Cincinnati. I am grateful to the participants for their incisive and
helpful comments and criticisms. Through it all, and particularly
during the trying isolation imposed by Covid-​19, my friends, family,
and Crosby kept me sane (assuming, of course, that I [still] am).
 Acknowledgments xi

The book was written while I was a professor of philosophy at the

University of Cincinnati, a Taft Center fellow, and, during the final
stage, an Ikerbasque research professor at ILCLI at the University of
the Basque Country, and while benefiting from grants from the Basque
Government (IT1032-​16) and the Spanish Government (PID2019-​
106078GB-​I00 [MCI/​AEI/​FEDER, UE]).
 Introduction

On May 1, 2009, President Barack Obama interrupted the afternoon

White House press briefing to announce the retirement of Justice
David Souter from the Supreme Court. It would now fall to him to ap-
point a new Supreme Court justice. “I will seek,” Obama announced,

someone who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract

legal theory or footnote in a case book, it is also about how our laws
affect the daily realities of people’s lives. . . . I will seek somebody
who is dedicated to the rule of law. Who honors our constitutional
traditions. Who respects the integrity of the judicial process and the
appropriate limits of the judicial role.1

This seemingly innocuous statement provoked the opposition and the

press to re-​examine what else Obama had said about empathy and the
judiciary. The focus quickly turned to a speech to Planned Parenthood
back in 2007, while he was still campaigning for the presidency, where
he said:

What you’ve got to look at is, what’s in the justice’s heart? What’s their
broader vision of what America should be? Justice Roberts said he
saw himself as an umpire, but the issues that come before the court
are not sport, they’re life and death. And we need somebody who’s
got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young
teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or
African-​American or gay or disabled or old—​and that’s the criterion
by which I’ll be selecting my judges.2

This statement was widely interpreted to mean that Obama wanted to

appoint justices who would bend the rule of law to fit their intuitions in
particular cases or, much worse, flout the law altogether. The situation

The Space Between. Heidi L. Maibom, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197637081.003.0001
2 Introduction

was not improved by the fact that the judge he nominated, Sonia
Sotomayor, had once made comments that, to lawmakers like Mitch
McConnell, suggested she let her personal experiences and ideas in-
fluence her legal judgments. Perhaps most famous is her memorial lec-
ture to UC Berkeley’s School of Law in 2001, where she said:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion
than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.3

Sotomayor’s speech stoked the fear that identity politics would inform
her decisions on the Supreme Court. In the minds of many Americans,
particularly right-​leaning ones, this implies introducing bias and par-
tiality into an otherwise fair judicial process. As Jeff Sessions insisted:

That is, of course, the logical flaw in the empathy standard. . . .

Empathy for one part is always prejudice against another.4

It was therefore paramount for Sotomayor to allay these concerns in

her confirmation hearing. In a seeming repudiation of Obama’s insist-
ence that his judges should be empathic, Sotomayor stated:

Judges can’t rely on what’s in their heart. They don’t determine the
law. Congress makes the laws. The job of a judge is to apply the law.
And so it’s not the heart that compels conclusions in cases. It’s the
law. . . . We apply law to facts. We don’t apply feelings to facts.5

This seemed to satisfy conservative senators and interest groups. There

was no further mention of empathy being important in judges. In
fact, a New York Times article written a year later described the word
“empathy” as radioactive. In 2011, the Christian Science Monitor pro-
nounced Sotomayor “not guilty of ‘empathy,’ ” based on a careful exam-
ination of her judgments on two capital cases.6
It is easy to think that this debate about judicial empathy is simply
another polarized issue between left and right, cooked up to appeal to
different political interest groups. Perhaps there is some truth to this.
But the concern that empathy is biased, subjective, and based in feeling
 Introduction 3

as opposed to facts or reason is widespread. Left-​leaning intellectuals

from the humanities and sciences have, just like McConnell, accused
empathy of bias. The philosopher Jesse Prinz and the psychologist Paul
Bloom have both argued “against empathy,” insisting that empathy
should play no role in morality. Their work has been followed by others
raising similar concerns, with such ominous titles as The Dark Sides of
Empathy.7
But to many of us it seems bizarre that something we were taught
on our mother’s knee to help us navigate social relationships should
be as pernicious and undermining of morals and the rule of law as
critics suggest. Something seems to have gone wrong. And, indeed,
it has. As someone who has done research on empathy for more than
15 years, I can attest to that. Empathy is poorly understood, and not
just among politicians or interest groups. Sometimes experts seem
more clueless about what they study than ordinary people, who de-
ploy it unreflectively in their everyday lives. Part of the difficulty,
people often point out, is that “empathy” is used to designate anything
from pity or compassion to the ability to understand that other people
have minds.
Although this is true, the problem goes deeper than that. The fact is
that we tacitly subscribe to a mistaken idea of what it is to be impartial
and objective. We assume that we are naturally more or less objective
in our assessments, allowing for some eccentricities, and that greater
objectivity involves the stripping away of our personal experiences.
We aim, as philosopher Thomas Nagel famously put it, toward a “view
from nowhere.” In law and ethics, we tend to talk more about impar-
tiality than objectivity, but the concern is similar. We strip away sub-
jectivity to get at objectivity, which is to say we abstract away from
our particular (biased) way of seeing things to get to how things are
in themselves. Whether this is the right way to do science is not my
target here. It may or may not be. But what is certain is that this is no
way to be objective about human affairs. Why not? Human beings are
not simply objects in the world. They are subjects—​they experience it
and they act in it. As I am about to show, experiencing and acting in the
world involve having a certain perspective on it, namely seeing things
in terms of how they contribute to our survival and well-​being. Each
of us is caught inside our own perspective until another person breaks
4 Introduction

through it by presenting us with theirs. It is the encounter with other

perspectives on the world that makes us aware of our own limitations
and paves the way for a less insular, more inclusive, and, yes, more ob-
jective way of understanding the world—​our world. Empathy, rather
than making us less objective, actually makes us more objective and
more impartial.8
To see this, let us return to Obama’s quest for an empathetic judge.
He wasn’t interested in pity or compassion. Instead, he wanted
somebody who “understands what it’s like” for someone else. Why?
Sotomayor hinted at the answer in the speech that worried Senate
Republicans:9

I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people

concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance
in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and
ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities
permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and
cases before me requires. . . .
However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not
all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their
ability to understand the experiences of others. Other[s]‌simply do
not care.

Here Sotomayor acknowledges that her way of viewing the world is

neither unbiased nor objective. But the point isn’t that she, Sonia
Sotomayor, has limited abilities, assumptions, and perspectives. It is
that everybody does. We are the net result of our biological heritage,
our upbringing, our culture, our influences, etc. What sets Sotomayor
apart from some of her colleagues is not that she is more biased, but
that she knows she is liable to have limited and perhaps unique ways of
thinking about things. She therefore puts more effort into expanding
her views and re-​evaluating her assumptions. But why, then, did she
also insist that being a Latina made her more suitable than a white man
for reaching good judgments on cases? Because she believes that her
experiences make her more likely to see what white male judges don’t,
and because her viewpoint balances the other types of biases we see in
the judicial system. Sotomayor continues:10
 Introduction 5

As another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minow

of Harvard Law School, states, “there is no objective stance but
only a series of perspectives—​no neutrality, no escape from choice
in judging,” [which is why] I further accept that our experiences as
women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to im-
partiality is just that—​it’s an aspiration because it denies the fact that
we are by our experiences making different choices than others. Not
all women or people of color, in all or some circumstances or indeed
in any particular case or circumstance, but enough people of color
in enough cases will make a difference in the process of judging. The
Minnesota Supreme Court has given an example of this. As reported
by Judge Patricia Wald formerly of the D.C. Circuit Court, three
women on the Minnesota Court with two men dissenting agreed to
grant a protective order against a father’s visitation rights when the
father abused his child. The Judicature Journal has at least two excel-
lent studies on how women on the courts of appeal and state supreme
courts have tended to vote more often than their male counterpart
to uphold women’s claims in sex discrimination cases and criminal
defendants’ claims in search and seizure cases.

What Sotomayor and Minow both recognize is that applying the law
in a perfect, unbiased, almost mechanical way is impossible. Instead,
the impartial application of the law is an ideal we aspire to, and one
that requires extraordinarily hard work to meet. To determine what
crime has been committed, intent and extenuating or aggravating
circumstances must be considered. This is not a mechanical pro-
cedure. Instead, the people in charge of this process, which can de-
stroy lives, are fallible and rely on their own partial experiences,
backgrounds, and concerns. The prejudice against African Americans
in the US legal system is legendary. What may be less known is that
studies in many states have found systematic prejudice in cases
involving women, primarily by male judges and lawyers. In the United
Kingdom, a study found significant correlations between decisions
by jury members and their gender, occupation, and level of educa-
tion. The legal system is anything but unbiased. What is remarkable
is how many people are blind to this fact, including judges and juries
themselves.11
6 Introduction

What is to be done? It seems obvious that we must first all recognize

that we are biased. But who thinks they’re biased? No one, it seems.
When ordinary people consider their own thoughts and attitudes, they
don’t look biased to them. Even extremists deny they are biased. The
Ku Klux Klan refuses to admit they are white supremacists and white
supremacists refuse to acknowledge that they are racist. The problem,
then, is not only with what is called “implicit bias”—​bias that we are
unaware of—​but also with explicit bias. The very word “bias” is part of
the problem. It has become synonymous with being unreasonable and
morally questionable. But bias isn’t a flaw in reason; reason itself is bi-
ased. Our reason is a kind of reason, the kind suited to our species. We
see the world in relation to our interests, concerns, and needs. Far from
being a problem, it is what allows us to survive and thrive. However,
bias becomes a liability when we are concerned with such things as
justice, truth, or interpersonal understanding. To correct for our own
partial perspective on things, we need to—​you’ve guessed it—​take
other people’s perspectives. So contrary to McConnell’s and Sessions’s
concerns that empathy introduces bias and subjectivity into an oth-
erwise orderly and impartial process, empathy helps counterbalance
pre-​existing biases. Subjectivity is not a flaw in a person’s otherwise ob-
jective outlook on things. Subjectivity goes all the way down, though
there are clearly degrees of it. Most of us learn to incorporate other
points of view into our outlook as we grow up and mature. We remain,
nonetheless, creatures with a way of seeing the world that is not a view
from nowhere—​as many people think true objectivity demands—​but
a view from somewhere: a view from here.12
Accepting our fundamental subjectivity leads to a profound re-​eval-
uation of empathy. Empathy can no longer be seen simply as a way for
us to understand the subjective and quirky aspects of another person.
Empathy is also a way for us to overcome our own limited view of the
world, other people, and ourselves. Rather than making us blind, em-
pathy opens our eyes to a greater reality. For instance, it allows judges
to gain a different perspective on a crime that they have been socialized
to see one way. They now possess more information about the event
that they are standing in judgment over. This does not mean that this
new way is the only way to think about the crime in question. But it is
another one; one that might be as valid. More ways of thinking about
 Introduction 7

the case at hand therefore put the judge in a better position to offer
a more impartial ruling. So, contrary to simplistic objections to em-
pathy, empathy never was about embracing another’s point of view as
if it were the unvarnished truth. We empathize to balance our self-​care
and self-​interest with care for other people’s interests and well-​being.
We empathize to transcend our culturally, temporally, and spatially
limited view on the world. What we often don’t realize is how egocen-
tric and narrow our image of the world is. And it therefore seems that
when we empathize with others, it is a way of getting nonobjective in-
formation about them. But our pre-​existing ideas and attitudes are al-
ready subjective. As a result, empathy actually makes us less partial and
more objective.
This book aims to correct our mistaken view about what empathy is,
what it does, and why we need it. The first step is to recognize our own
perspectives. This is the topic of Part I. We think of ourselves, explic-
itly or implicitly, as agents who directly apprehend reality. Of course, if
pushed, most of us acknowledge that our own perspective is limited.
But we don’t act as if that were true. We acknowledge pockets of sub-
jectivity amidst an overwhelmingly objective and truthful assessment
of the world, ourselves, and others. We are wrong. Our point of view on
the world reflects who we are. The world is something we inhabit, and
that we use to stay alive and thrive, not primarily one we train a sci-
entific eye on, as I explain in Chapter 2. This is reflected in the way we
regard our own actions compared to how we see actions of people we
have no relation to. We take an agent perspective on ourselves and an
observer perspective on others, as I show in Chapter 3. When we take
another person’s perspective, we no longer view them from the posi-
tion of an observer, which I call “an observer perspective.” Rather than
seeing them from the outside and from a distance, we try to see the
world through their eyes, as if we were them, what I call “an agent per-
spective.” But there is a third type of perspective we can adopt when we
are more intimately enmeshed with other people, which I call “an inter-
personal perspective.” One form of this perspective is seen in conflict
situations, where we find victim and perpetrator perspectives. These
reflect distinctive views on a wrong that express each person’s relation
to it, as I explain in Chapter 4. There is also a more truly enmeshed and
cooperative way of relating to others, which I discuss in Chapter 5. In
8 Introduction

these interactions, we momentarily leave our individuality behind and

become as one with the other.
Once we have explored the first-​person perspective and seen how
it sets up a fundamental distinction between how you regard yourself
and your own actions and those of other people, we can move on to
perspective taking. This, it turns out, is a complex procedure whereby
you use your own ego-​centeredness to represent the point of view of
another person in their situation. It is a blending of self and other that
I call “the space between.” Since you can never enter into or adopt the
subjectivity of another person, you must use your own to simulate
theirs. This is not as hard as it seems because subjectivity has formal
and invariant aspects, as demonstrated in Part I. The “I” relation-
ship to the world can be replicated by other “I”s. To capture the situ-
ation situation that “I” is in, however, and the particular relations it
represents does require experiences and insights of a special kind. This
means that perspective taking can be difficult and daunting, as I show
in Chapter 6. Most of the time, though, we are not interested in cap-
turing the fine details of another’s experience. We have broader and
more diffuse concerns. Is this person positively inclined toward me?
Did what they just say reflect hostility? Will what I’m thinking about
saying hurt them? Are we on the same page? I discuss this in Chapter 7
and then move on to show how important taking other points of view
on ourselves is to understanding what we are really doing. Being re-
sponsible requires the ability to flexibly shift points of view, as I show in
Chapter 8. Psychological experiments show that taking another’s point
of view has positive effects on interpersonal relations, morals, and jus-
tice. But it is not an unmitigated boon. Others may harbor misleading
and oppressive views of us. Adopting them can be damaging, as we see
in Chapter 9. Empathy really does have a dark side. It might even have
more than one. But the solution is close at hand. We need to balance
different points of view. Another’s point of view shouldn’t simply over-
ride our own. Instead, it should give cause for reflection on how the
two can be accommodated in a coherent picture of the world. We often
use empathy to give us a fuller, more complete picture of reality. But
when perspectives clash, our reality isn’t simply enhanced by shifting
our point of view. It is potentially upended by it. And that is not always
a bad thing.
 Introduction 9

By Chapter 10 we will be in a position to provide solid answers to the

questions raised here. One answer is that perspective taking, as well as
feeling with others, makes us less, not more, biased. The key to using
empathy in the context of morality and the law lies in triangulating
between different points of view. For instance, in adjudicating a con-
flict, we must consider the point of view of the two parties as well as
that of an involved observer (which might turn out to be us). Doing so
can give us all the impartiality we need. This might seem rather com-
plex, and it is. But there is no decent alternative. It is no good, for in-
stance, to imagine the point of view of an Ideal Observer. The problem
with such a fictional being is that although it may be ideal, it usually
fails to be human too, for in order to be “ideal,” such an observer must
be stripped of most of what makes it human, which is to say most of
what matters to ordinary people. Law and morality are not abstract,
universal, and eternal facts that we ought to fit ourselves to, even if we
must cut off a heel or a toe to do so. They are human endeavors, and
must therefore be fitted to human capacities, human interests, and
human experiences. The way to do that is to take the perspectives of
human beings. And this is why a certain view of impartiality and ob-
jectivity, which is so prevalent in our culture, turns out to be not only
wrong but also damaging.
I am a philosopher by training and profession. Therefore, Knowing
You, Knowing Me represents a philosophical outlook. There are many
books on empathy by psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists,
and other science writers. Many of them are excellent, but few of them
address the deeper aspects of empathy. What is needed is a good shot of
philosophy. Why? Because philosophy digs deep. Where the biologist
asks, “What makes an organism alive?,” a philosopher might wonder
what the nature of being is. When a psychotherapist asks a client,
“What do you remember about the event?,” a philosopher might in-
stead ponder what it is to remember. The question you ask determines
the answer. I ask what it is to take someone else’s perspective and why
it matters, and the answer I provide has implications for how we can
know ourselves, others, and the world around us—​what it is to be a
self, how we exist in the world, and what objectivity is. And yet, this
is far from being a purely speculative book. My ideas and claims have
ample empirical support. Psychological data and philosophical ideas
10 Introduction

are interwoven throughout the book, hopefully satisfying the phil-

osophically and empirically minded alike. At the same time, you
will find every part of this book useful. Bad date? Go to Chapter 9.
Confused about why others are angry about what you did? Consult
Chapter 8. Looking to settle an argument with a partner? Confer with
Chapters 4 and 7.
By the end of the book, I hope you will see empathy as I do—​as a
capacity that is more powerful, more complex, and more central to
our grasping reality than it is given credit for. Rather than trapping
us in another’s subjectivity, it provides a more expansive view of our
common world.
 PART I
PE R SPE C T IV E S :
WHAT A R E T HEY ?
 1
The Space Between

Hermia: “I would my father look’d but with my eyes.”

—​William Shakespeare: A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, Act I, Scene I

The summer I first started thinking about this book, I went to see
our local Shakespeare Players perform in the park. Okay, so it
was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is not one of my favorite
Shakespeare plays—​what with all the fairies frolicking about—​but it
was a beautiful warm night, and I didn’t have anything else to do. The
play opens with a scene at the palace of the Duke of Athens. Egeus
has arrived to ask the Duke permission to kill his daughter unless
she marries Demetrius, the man he has chosen for her. Hermia, how-
ever, is in love with Lysander, whom she says is just as good a match as
Demetrius. Egeus is not impressed. As his daughter, he insists, she is
to do what he says. Then it happens. Hermia speaks directly to me, in
a manner of speaking. She turns to her father to make one last appeal.
She says: “I would my father look’d but with my eyes” (Act I, Scene I).
As luck would have it, I had just started working on a book on per-
spective taking. What are the chances, I thought? Pretty high, actually.
Once you start looking for examples of perspective taking, you find
them everywhere.
You might think that what Hermia wants is simple. She wants her
father to agree with her. End of story. A friend of mine, who’s a re-
nowned empathy expert, interprets the story this way. I disagree. Of
course, Hermia doesn’t want to die, and she doesn’t want to marry
Demetrius either. But that’s not why she asks her father to see with her
eyes. What she wants is recognition. And through that recognition, she

The Space Between. Heidi L. Maibom, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197637081.003.0002
14 Perspectives: What Are They?

hopes to convince her father to let her marry Lysander. What, then, is
recognition? It is best brought out with the Duke of Athens’ reply to
her. “Rather your eyes must with his judgment look” (Act I, Scene I).
Hermia has disappeared as a person in the discussion. She is a thing
to be bartered and controlled. She is an object. And an object has no
point of view or, if it does, it is entirely irrelevant to what we do with
it. By raising her voice and asking her father—​whose property she,
technically speaking, is in this society—​to take her perspective; she
is showing that she is, in fact, a subject or a person, and that she has
her own way of responding to the world. She has an inner life. She is
a center of conscious experience. What she wants is to be recognized
as such.
Taking Hermia’s point of view on the matter of her marriage would
be an act of recognition. Recognition, however, is not agreement, as we
shall see. But when we successfully take another’s point of view, we em-
body, if even for just a moment, attitudes and thoughts that are closer
to hers than to our own. To see this, let’s see what Egeus says about the
situation (Act I, Scene I):

Thou, thou, Lysander, thou hast given her rhymes,

And interchanged love-​tokens with my child:
Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung,
With feigning voice verses of feigning love,
And stolen the impression of her fantasy
With bracelets of thy hair, rings, gawds, conceits,
Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats, messengers
Of strong prevailment in unharden’d youth:
With cunning hast thou filch’d my daughter’s heart,
Turn’d her obedience, which is due to me,
To stubborn harshness: and, my gracious duke,
Be it so she; will not here before your grace
Consent to marry with Demetrius,
I beg the ancient privilege of Athens,
As she is mine, I may dispose of her:
Which shall be either to this gentleman
Or to her death, according to our law
Immediately provided in that case.
 The Space Between 15

This passage brings out the first misunderstanding about taking an-
other person’s perspective. It is not simply a matter of thinking about
the other person as having motivations, thoughts, or intentions. It is
not just about ascribing mental states to others, as philosophers say.
Without taking anybody’s perspective other than his own, Egeus
nonetheless succeeds in thinking that Lysander intended to seduce
his daughter and that Hermia has been seduced and is now stubbornly
refusing to do what he wants her to.
Looking over the passage again, it is apparent that his is a very pe-
culiar picture of a love affair: one seen entirely from the perspective
of someone whose plans and projects are thwarted by it. Egeus’s view
of the situation is hardly objective; it is a warped way of seeing things
only in terms of how they affect him. Consequently, the thoughts and
motives he imagines the lovers having are just bizarre. The way he sees
it, Lysander set out to seduce Hermia in the worst sense of that term;
he cunningly filched her heart. Hermia, on her part, is now refusing to
marry Demetrius for reasons that are as bad as Lysander’s ill-​advised
seduction: out of stubborn harshness. And though Egeus acknow-
ledges that she is as much a victim of Lysander’s cunning as he is, he
still insists on her untimely death. A more Freudian interpreter might
note that “stubborn harshness” applies as much to Egeus’s own actions
as it does to her unwillingness to yield to his will, if not more so.
Shakespeare invites us to see the situation differently. Lysander
“feigns” love and steals Hermia’s heart by means of various “conceits,”
Egeus says. But why? If Lysander didn’t love her, why fake it? Perhaps
to gain sexual favors. But Lysander intends to marry her. Perhaps he
will gain social advantages he would not otherwise gain by marrying
her? But, if Hermia is right, he is as well placed socially as is Demetrius.
Isn’t, then, the best explanation of why he courts Hermia that he loves
her? The story Egeus tells doesn’t add up. The situation is not much
improved when we focus on his view of Hermia. Is her refusal to marry
Demetrius simply “stubborn harshness”? She is no doubt stubborn, but
she is not only stubborn. She can’t imagine life without Lysander or
being shackled to a man she doesn’t want. Moreover, her father’s insist-
ence that she marry his candidate just because it is his seems inconsid-
erate at the very least. Perhaps it is something like this Hermia wants
her father to see.
16 Perspectives: What Are They?

Were Egeus, then, to take Hermia’s perspective on things, he would

at least come to understand that his view of the situation is partial, bi-
ased, and incomplete. He is missing information that could turn out to
be crucial for him to make a good decision. If he is interested in making
good alliances through marriage, killing off a daughter isn’t the way to
go. It may save his “honor” in some sense, but it seems a strategically
problematic step, even by his own lights. Were Egeus a kinder man, less
obsessed with power and influence, he might be concerned to under-
stand his daughter better. Were he more reflective, he might want to
understand himself and his motivations better. These goals can also be
accomplished by taking Hermia’s point of view. But given the man that
Egeus is portrayed to be, he is unlikely to be moved by such motives.
He might, however, be interested in having a more complete picture of
the situation he finds himself in; one that is not so subjective. And the
fact is that contrary to what is often thought to be the case, perspective
taking makes you less, not more, subjective, partial, or biased.
Why? Because your own view is itself subjective, partial, and biased.
And, as we shall see, you don’t become more objective by excising ex-
perience from your view of the world. There is no view from nowhere.
The only way to move away from subjectivity toward objectivity is to
take many different perspectives. This implies that objectivity is always
a matter of degree. We cannot, as humans, achieve complete or perfect
objectivity. In fact, no living creature could. But we can expand our
knowledge of the world around us. As Nietzsche pointed out a long
time ago, “There is only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects
we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can
use to observe one thing, the more complete our ‘concept’ of this thing,
our ‘objectivity,’ will be.”1
Many people are skeptical about the possibility of taking another’s
perspective. The problem is that doing so seems to require an act of
identification. The worry is that such identification turns into mere pro-
jection, so that we don’t actually end up understanding the other at all.
Instead, we understand how we would react if we were in that person’s
situation. This can be useful, but it leaves little room for understanding
differences. How do we ensure that we capture the other’s particularity
in our simulation of her? Many philosophers and psychologists think
we can’t. Either it is impossible to do so in principle or it is too large
 The Space Between 17

a project for anyone to take on. Chapter 1 takes us through this de-
bate and out the other side. It shows that the current debate involves
a profound misunderstanding of what we are aiming for in adopting
another’s point of view. It is not to become fully identified with that
person. Instead, it is to make sense of them from a standpoint between
ourselves and them. We must use our own knowledge, character, and
inclinations to understand them in their situation. However, we are not
positioned so differently vis-​à-​vis others as we think. Although there is
a gap between how we think of ourselves and how we think of others,
there is also one between our experiences in the present moment and
our experiences in the past. And they are quite similar. If we can ever
understand ourselves outside the present, we are about to see, we can
also understand others—​at least in principle.

1.1 The Philosophy and Psychology

of Perspective Taking

Psychologists talk as if there were just two options when it comes to

taking another’s perspective; either you imagine the other in her situa-
tion or you imagine yourself in her situation. But it doesn’t take much
to see that merely imagining the other in her situation need not involve
taking her perspective. Even if Egeus had considered his daughter’s
feelings, he might have come up with resentful stubbornness all the
same. Have you not sometimes lain at night fuming over an insult
that you imagined was the result of malicious intent? If so, you are no
stranger to egocentric constructions of others. Particularly when we
are agitated, we base our ideas of people’s motivations on the way their
actions impacted us. We are often mistaken. And it does rather seem
that had we taken the perspective of the other person, we might have
understood the situation better. Imagine-​other perspective taking
need not involve shifting one’s perspective at all.
What about imagining oneself in another’s situation? That seems
better, right? But the problem is, people say, that simply projecting
yourself into another’s situation merely tells you how you would react
to it. That is surely not what the other person is asking you to do.
Let us imagine, for a moment, Egeus imagining himself in Hermia’s
18 Perspectives: What Are They?

situation. What might he think? He, a middle-​aged respectable citizen,

courted by a young man at his window, who sings to him and gives him
nosegays and sweetmeats? Outrageous! Would he prefer to while away
his days in a nunnery rather than consent to a prearranged marriage?
Unlikely. And so on. Pure projection fails miserably in this case.
Nonetheless, projection accomplishes one thing: it leads to partial
identification with the other person. How? By adopting a first-​person
perspective on the situation they are in. And although pure projection
ignores all the other information that is relevant to how a person reacts
in a situation, it does organize information in the same way. That is,
you imagine that what is happening to the other person is happening
to you. As it turns out, this makes a significant difference. For one, you
will have a much stronger emotional reaction to it. If you don’t believe
me, just give it a try. Even psychopaths do well on this one.
Projective identification, though, is only part of the picture. We
must allow for differences between people. In the philosophical tra-
dition, the question of how to do this efficiently has played a pivotal
role. Jane Heal, an early proponent of the so-​called simulation theory,
thinks that projection is only the first move when we simulate another
person. “Simulation” here means imagining that we are in another’s sit-
uation and then “seeing” how we would react to it. We simulate, the
idea goes, not in order to feel, do, or believe what the other person
feels, does, or believes, but so as to gain information about how we
would feel, do, or believe. To allow for interpersonal differences, we
need to make adjustments, says Heal. That is, we must add extra beliefs
(e.g., the earth is flat) or desires (e.g., I want to conquer Spain) when re-
quired. At the same time, we have to quarantine those beliefs or desires
that we have reasons to think are not shared by the target person.2
A fictional example might help here. In Jorge Luis Borges’s story
Pierre Menard, el autor del Quijote, Pierre Menard sets himself the task
of writing Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote again, word for word. He
begins by attempting to situate himself in the socio-​historical context
of Cervantes:3

The first method he conceived of was relatively simple. Know

Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or
 The Space Between 19

the Turks, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and
1918, be Miguel Cervantes. Pierre Menard studied this procedure (I
know he attained a relatively accurate command of seventeenth-​cen-
tury Spanish) but discarded it as too easy.

The joke, of course, is that the method was thought to be too easy. And
yet recovering the Catholic faith, etc., would only be a fraction of what
it would take to be Cervantes. It is little consolation to point out that
the project is not to become another, but to understand him better by
imagining being him in a particular situation. For if understanding
Cervantes during his writing of Chapter XX of Don Quixote, for ex-
ample, really required imagining having the Catholic faith of the time,
fighting the Moors, forgetting European history between now and
1602, and so on, our task would only be slightly easier—​which is to say
that it would be impossible.
The idea that it is ultimately not possible to imaginatively trans-
form oneself enough to imagine being in another person’s situation, as
if one were that person, has weighed heavily on philosophers’ minds.
It is the very same concern that a teenager has when, upon her mother
trying to console her after being jilted by her lover, she maintains
that her mother simply doesn’t understand what it is like to be her.
Although teenagers do lack experience, their ultimate concern is real
enough. Philosopher Peter Goldie puts it this way: People have unique
characters, particular ways of reasoning, certain types of biases, etc.,
many or all of which they remain unaware of, but that nonetheless
affect how they react in a situation. What it is like to imagine living
at the time of Cervantes is very different from how Cervantes ex-
perienced it. He was embedded in a time and a place without much
consideration of this fact. Menard’s simulation, by contrast, would be
based on an extensive reading of history, and would lead to different
reactions to, say, Moors. The hostile attitude of Cervantes is in his
bones; in Menard it is a conscious affectation.4
If we are to have any chance of taking another person’s point of view,
then, we cannot be required to fully imagine being them in their situ-
ation. But then what should we do to make up for the differences be-
tween ourselves and the person we are trying to understand?
20 Perspectives: What Are They?

1.2 A Method of Identification

We might get a better sense of why full identification with the person
we are trying to understand is not simply impossible but also unde-
sirable by looking at another fictional example. In Lars von Trier’s
1984 movie The Element of Crime, Detective Fischer uses a method of
identification to help him catch a serial killer, whose targets are girls
selling lottery tickets. And like Pierre Menard, he puts his back into
it. He doesn’t sit idly in his armchair with a furrowed brow trying to
bring up the right mental images or change the right kinds of beliefs.
No, he goes on the road. He uses an old police report to re-​enact the
movements of the suspect. The idea is that by placing himself in the
same situations as the suspect and by following the same (limited) tra-
jectory as him, he will eventually gauge his plans and catch him. He
checks into the same hotels, takes the same medications, even sleeps
with the killer’s mistress. The danger is, of course, that the identifica-
tion becomes complete. And, sure enough, Fischer turns into the killer
he is trying to catch. Or, more precisely, he turns into another, but very
similar, killer of Lotto girls. The original killer is already dead. Killing
a girl himself—​seemingly by accident—​brings him no closer to un-
derstanding the killer’s motives. Indeed, the more he becomes like the
killer, the less he understands him. “I cannot stop until I understand,”
he says. But he never does.
Full identification, then, won’t help us understand the other person
because we have ceased to be. We are now the other person or, more
precisely, a doppelgänger of that person. We can’t be another person,
exactly, because any person is unique. But we could be an exact replica
of that person. If we have become such a replica we have, of course,
ceased to be ourselves. This may seem surprising at first. But imagine
we strip you of all your individuating characteristics: your character,
your experiences, your beliefs, and your preferences. What is left is a
center of conscious activity. A philosopher like René Descartes might
call it a Res Cogitans, or a Thinking Thing. Without your memories,
your character, and so on, there is nothing to distinguish you from an-
other Thinking Thing. You have been stripped bare; you are only there
in the minimal sense that you are capable of conscious activity. Once
we fill you back up, as it were, with the other person’s memories, beliefs,
 The Space Between 21

etc., you have become a replica of that person. You cannot understand
the person you set out to understand because you no longer exist.
This line of thinking might seem like a sophism. Why wouldn’t you
just switch back after you have occupied the role of the replica for a cer-
tain amount of time? You could then use the memories that you have
acquired to understand the person whom you replicated. Why, for in-
stance, doesn’t Fischer return to his own self in good time and bring the
understanding he has achieved in the role of the killer to bear on the
case? The reason is that he can’t. Thoughts and experiences don’t work
that way. Any thought, desire, or experience takes place against the
background of other thoughts, experiences, and desires, and is made
sense of in that context. Remove the background, and the thoughts
lose meaning. Change the background, and the thoughts change their
significance. Philosophers call this mental holism.5
Holism is initially a puzzling concept, but it can be made quite clear
with some choice examples. Stephen Stich uses the following: Imagine
that you are visiting an old aunt, who suffers from dementia. As you sit
down to chat, she says, “President McKinley was assassinated!” You in-
dulge her and try to have a conversation about this. It quickly becomes
clear, however, that she no longer knows what a president is, and she
denies that a person who has been assassinated is dead. What sense
can you now make of her statement? She surely doesn’t believe that
President McKinley was murdered. This general point carries over to
all forms of thought. And it is not just knowledge gaps that are relevant.
The entire context of a person’s environment, access to information,
desires, etc., is relevant.6
Borges illustrates this idea very nicely. Remember Pierre Menard,
who thought it was too “easy” to become Cervantes? Well, he decides
to use his own experiences to rewrite Don Quixote instead. He knows
he cannot succeed fully, but he manages to reproduce certain passages
perfectly. But, the narrator of the story says, these pieces are “almost in-
finitely richer” than Cervantes’s original. I quote at length:7

It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’s.

The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):
22 Perspectives: What Are They?

. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of

deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and
the future’s counselor.
Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius”
Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history.
Menard, on the other, writes:
. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of
deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and
the future’s counselor.
History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a
contemporary of William James, does not define history as an in-
quiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not
what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final
phrases—​exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s coun-
selor—​are brazenly pragmatic.
The contrast in style is also vivid. The Archaic style of Menard—​
quite foreign, after all—​suffers from a certain affectation. Not so
that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of
his time.

Menard reproduces perfectly the written words of Cervantes. But

even so, those words take on a different significance. Why? Because
the interpretation of words, and the interpretation of what someone
says, takes place against a background of knowledge. Menard’s words
must be understood in the context of his knowledge, his time, and his
life. Only this can give us a proper understanding of Menard’s passage.
It is this interplay between the universality of language and ideas and
the particularity of their expression or occurrence that Borges is con-
cerned with.
Even if Detective Fischer was rehabilitated, and fully himself again,
and was able to explain his experiences using words he would have
used while he was identifying with the killer, these words would mean
something different in his current context. Suppose his words reflect
his thoughts—​a quite reasonable assumption—​and it was possible for
Fischer to retain only those thoughts that relate to the serial killer’s
thoughts, plans, and personality. Still, those thoughts would take on
a different significance as they are being thought by him, Detective
 The Space Between 23

Fischer. There would be no thrill, for instance, at the thought of mur-

dering a little girl.
The idea that Fischer can’t simply import the thoughts he had when
he was deep in his simulation of the serial killer into a present rehabil-
itated self is not as strange as it might initially seem. After all, mem-
ories are not old movie reels waiting to be replayed. Memories are
constructed. They retain their central elements, but many things can
change: the location of the event, the significance of it to one’s life, one’s
emotional reactions to it, even one’s recall of what one felt. Unlike a
movie reel, which plays the same movie on any projector, memories
are filled in by all sorts of other facts about a person’s psyche. A couple
of examples help highlight this point.8
A philosopher I know fell down the stairs when he was pretty
young. It was a frightening experience, which he claims to recall
very clearly. This is often true of traumatic memories. But, he says,
he recalls himself falling down the stairs of a house that they moved
to when he was a teenager. He knows those were not the stairs he fell
down, and yet he has this powerful memory of his fall that always
happens on those stairs. Memory is fickle that way. It usually retains
central information well—​falling down the stairs—​and reconstructs
the rest from materials currently available in the person’s mind. To
complicate things further, what matters often changes over time.
Diary writers, such as myself, are often shocked to discover that the
way they now think of a certain period of their lives bears little re-
semblance to the way they thought of it at the time. I recall a certain
time of my life mainly as exciting, promising, and relatively happy. My
diary, however, makes it clear just how unhappy and anxious I was at
the time.
We often assume that perspective taking can only be useful if we are
able to adjust our psychology fully to that of another. But since time,
resources, and psychological abilities stand in the way of full identi-
fication, any attempt at taking another person’s perspective is bound
to fail. In my mind, this view is mistaken. Full identification amounts
to self-​transformation. But we want understanding, not self-​change.
Our understanding always takes place against the background of
our knowledge, experiences, and the way we are situated in time and
space. Understanding itself is a contextual act. For me to understand
24 Perspectives: What Are They?

you, I have to understand your experiences using my own background

beliefs, experiences, aspirations, and so on.
Not everybody thinks this is an obstacle to taking another person’s
perspective or, as they would say, simulating another. Instead, they
think this is why we are able to understand others in the first place, as
we are about to see.

1.3 Perspective Taking as Reenactment

There are many reasons some philosophers believe we simulate others’

thought processes in order to understand them. One is that the alter-
native is that we apply something like a folk theory to others. Although
this idea long appealed to philosophers, and still does, it has certain
problems. A simulationist like Karsten Stueber has been quick to point
these out. On the so-​called theory theory view, if I see Jamie heading
down to the pub after he says, “I want a beer,” I can infer that he believes
that he can get a beer in the pub by applying a part of my theory, which
says that if a person wants q, and believes that if p then q, then she
will try to make p happen. The trouble is, of course, that even if we do
happen to know that Jamie wants a beer and that he thinks he can have
one at the pub, he might not go to the pub. Perhaps he has a nice beer
in the fridge, perhaps he thinks having a beer right now is a bad idea,
or maybe he thinks there are people at the pub who will hurt him if he
shows up. No amount of theory could help us predict what Jamie will
do. We cannot even be sure that just because Jamie went to the pub
after saying he wanted a beer, he went there because of his desire for
beer. Perhaps he thought the pub was a spaceship, or perhaps he went
there to use the loo. Who knows? To predict what people do, we must
know more than just a handful of their beliefs and desires.9
The only way to truly get started on this process is to rely on our own
background knowledge, Stueber says. Recall Stich’s example of the old
aunt talking about President McKinley’s assassination? We can agree
that we can’t really ascribe her the belief that President McKinley was
assassinated. Why not? Because she lacks other beliefs required to give
life to otherwise empty concepts or words. A belief only makes sense
against a background of other beliefs. This has enormous implications
 The Space Between 25

for understanding others, of course. We must bring other people’s

beliefs to life against a background. But that can only be our own. We
use our own sense of relevance, context, etc., to make sense of what
the other person is thinking or doing, or to predict the same. We are
not simply applying a theory. We are using our own experiences, our
own good sense of what is relevant to what, and so on. But rather than
seeing this as a problem, we should recognize that it is what enables in-
terpersonal understanding in the first place! That is the glass-​half-​full
version of the idea I broached in the last section.
I think this reasoning is right. We can understand others only
against the background of our own knowledge and experiences. But
philosophers who think simulation is the way to understand others
are wrong in other ways. Most importantly, they are wrong about the
fact that we understand others always as from the inside. Remember
Egeus’s view of his daughter’s love affair? He thinks of Hermia’s refusal
to marry Demetrius in terms of stubbornness born from an illicit se-
duction. This is an explanation, and a psychological one at that. But it
is not the result of taking Hermia’s perspective. It very much expresses
Egeus’s own view. Nonetheless, he is using his own background expe-
rience and knowledge almost as much when he thinks about Hermia
from his own perspective as he would were he to understand her from
her own. Taking another person’s perspective, then, is a way of under-
standing that person from their own point of view, not one’s own. And
it is this fact that makes the difference. To see how, let’s look at a real-​
life example of successful perspective taking.
Some years ago, I went on a road trip to the Maine coast with my
dog, Rune, and my friend, Julie. One night, we had dinner at a lob-
ster shack and Julie offered to drive home so I could have another beer
with my lobster duo. I took her up on the offer. But the drive back was
awful. As Europeans, we both drive stick. But my God, the way she
drove my car! She was in fourth gear at 30 miles an hour. And as if that
wasn’t bad enough, she took the tight country lane corners without
downshifting. I watched the speedometer with bated breath, sweating
in silence. In the end I could stand it no more. I demanded—​more or
less—​that she use a lower gear on the corners. She gave me a puzzled
look and said something about this being the ideal gear for the speed,
but downshifted, nonetheless. I felt awful. “She does me a favor and
26 Perspectives: What Are They?

I criticize the way she does it,” I thought. “I’m an awful person!” I began
to apologize profusely. But Julie was pretty cool about it. “At first,”
she said, “I couldn’t understand why you were getting so upset. Then
I thought about how I would feel if Timothy drove my car. And I would
totally feel the same way.” (Timothy is her husband.) And everything
was okay again. As the French say: tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner
(“to understand all is to forgive all”).
Julie saves the day by putting herself in my situation. But notice how
she does it. She does not fully project herself into my situation. If she
did, she would imagine sitting next to herself and thinking critically
about how she was driving. But she didn’t think she was driving ir-
responsibly at all. And, let’s face it, she probably wasn’t. She was just
driving differently from how I would. So simple projection would
not have helped. Instead, she imagines herself in the passenger seat
of her own car. Then she imagines someone she is close to—​not her-
self—​driving that car. If you think it’s simple, you are wrong. She first
identifies what the problem is. It’s not actually the way she is driving so
much as the fact that she is driving my car. She then imagines another
person driving her own car while she watches from the passenger seat.
From that position, she finds it easy to imagine getting agitated about
how that person drives her car, even if that person—​her husband—​is a
perfectly good driver. What drives this transformation is her replacing,
in the imagination, objects that are related to me in a certain way for
objects that are related to her in a very similar way: her car, not mine;
her husband, not her. That is what is perspectival about perspective
taking. That is what it is to imagine what happens to another is hap-
pening to you.
There is a puzzle, though. Because Julie replaces a number of things
in my situation with objects that have a certain significance for her and
then imagines her own reactions, in what sense does she understand
what I am going through?

1.4 The Problem of Understanding Other People

Understanding others by imagining ourselves in their situation

appears to be doomed if we are serious about really understanding
 The Space Between 27

the other person, and not simply how we would react in their situation.
Because we must provide the psychological background to their situa-
tion, we always get stuck with ourselves. Perspective taking invariably
fails to give us what we want. The world is disappointing that way.
I have no quarrel with the world being disappointing at times. It’s
just another fact. What I do object to is the idea that we cannot truly
take other people’s point of view. I think we can. That is why I’m writing
this book. To see why I have this confidence, let’s take a little detour
through the history of philosophy of mind.
Writing in the 17th century, French philosopher, mathematician,
and scientist René Descartes had a profound impact on Western
thought. His ideas have been so influential that he is known as the
father of modern philosophy, which presumably makes Plato or
Aristotle the father of ancient philosophy. (Sadly, philosophy appears
to be motherless.) Descartes is associated with rationalism, dualism,
and the Cartesian coordinate system. You might know him from the
many recent bashings of his ideas in popular science circles, such as
Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error. Undergraduates, however, usually
know him from his Meditations on First Philosophy. In this work, he
aims to provide a foundation for science by re-​examining all know-
ledge. Descartes’s reasoning goes like this. The big bugbear of phi-
losophy dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks is skepticism.
Can we ever know anything? Or are we merely stuck thinking that we
know? Sense perception is pretty persuasive, but then again, how can
we know that our experiences of the world correspond to the actual
world? Put differently, it seeming to me that I see a duck walk across my
lawn is not enough for me to know that there is a duck walking across
my lawn. There must actually be a duck walking across my lawn. How
do I figure that out? I can’t. Because to truly do that, I must be able to
access the world other than through my perceptions of it. But that’s not
possible, right? Maybe.10
Faced with the rather obvious problem that we are often deceived by
our senses and that there is no way to be sure that we are not, Descartes
came up with a criterion of truth he thought we can rely on: certainty.
What we are certain of, we cannot doubt. If we cannot doubt some-
thing, Descartes reasoned, we are certain of it, and if we are certain
of it, we know it. We use the power of our own minds to get at reality.
28 Perspectives: What Are They?

We rely on reason, not the senses, to get to knowledge. This is why

Descartes is known as a rationalist. Skepticism can now be used as a
method to arrive at what we can and cannot doubt. Using this “meth-
odological doubt,” Descartes sets out to take us through all the things
we can doubt. It’s a great idea with only two flaws. The first is that it
seems possible that our minds are simply unequipped to discover the
ultimate nature of reality, doubt, or no doubt. The second flaw is that
we can doubt almost everything. We can doubt, Descartes says, that
the sun is shining, that the birds are singing, and that 2 +​2 =​4. We can
even doubt that we have bodies, that we are real. Some people believe
that we are holograms or simulations of people. We could be living in
a version of The Matrix. If the inverse of doubt is certainty, it seems we
cannot be certain about much at all.
Can we be certain about anything? Luckily, we can. We can know that
we exist as consciousnesses or, as Descartes would put it, as thinking
things. How? Try doubting that you are doubting. How would you do
that? By doubting. Even if you are more skeptical than Descartes, who
thought he could not doubt that he doubted, you can agree that even
if you think you could be wrong about actually doubting, you couldn’t
be wrong about thinking. As Descartes says, I doubt, therefore I think.
The thing is that if you think, you must exist. Or, more precisely, if I
think, I exist. I have no certainty at all that you exist. Why? Because
it is the very act of thinking that verifies our existence. Since we have
no way to be certain that other people actually think too, the fact that
other people have minds is as doubtful as the fact that the bowl I’m
eating from is round and green, say. In short, I can be certain that I
exist, at least as a consciousness, but I have no such certainty that you
do. In his last meditation, Descartes attempts to establish that you too
exist (well, that other minds do), and that you and he have bodies. The
trouble is that to do so, he must rely on the assumption that God exists
and is good, and so would not deceive us, none of which is indubitable.
In other words, Descartes’s method gives each one of us reason to think
that we, but not others, exist as thinkers. This leaves us in a strange sol-
ipsistic hinterland. But it captures something important about the way
we think about our own minds and the minds of others.
Most of us do not actively doubt that other minds (read: people)
exist, but we are aware that we can never reach out and access these
 The Space Between 29

minds the way we access our own. As a philosopher would say, my mind
is transparent to myself, whereas your mind is opaque to me. And vice
versa, of course. On this picture of the human condition, the epistemic,
or knowledge, gap between people is insurmountable, permanent, and
ineradicable. It is what gives rise to what is called “the problem of other
minds.” I know what you’re thinking. And you’re right. Other people
are often troublesome, but this is not what philosophers are concerned
about. They wonder how we can ever know that other people exist at
all. Perspective taking is meant to help bridge the gap between my
mind and yours, by replaying in my own mind, whose contents are im-
mediately available to me, what I imagine goes on in yours. Perspective
taking is a form of introspection via (partial) identification.
And yet, perspective taking can’t bridge the gap between knowing
my mind and knowing yours even when I take your perspective be-
cause it doesn’t give me the kind of access to your mind that I have to
mine. This is often seen as the fundamental difficulty. There is no way,
the thinking goes, of bridging the knowledge gap between my mind
and yours. However, the truth is more interesting and surprising. There
is a gap between direct and indirect access to the mind, of course, but
it is much wider than we thought. The problem is not that I am me and
you are you, and that we are therefore locked each inside our ineradi-
cable subjectivity. The real issue concerns how a person’s psychological
background—​her knowledge and experience, her wants and needs,
her habitual ways of thinking, and so on—​interacts with the partic-
ular experience she is having in a situation. And that changes even
within the life of a single person. To see this, let’s have another look at
Descartes’s cogito argument.
When Descartes proved that he existed as a thinking thing, he
seemed to assume that he, René Descartes, existed as the person he
is, except for his body. But does his argument entitle him to assume
this? Imagine that you are Descartes. You have doubted everything
you thought you knew, except these indubitable facts: I am doubting,
which means that I must be thinking, and therefore I exist. When you
conclude that you exist—​albeit only as a thinking, and not also as an
embodied, thing—​do you not assume that you, as the person you are,
exist? You are the person who takes yourself to have grown up in La
Haye en Touraine, who has a great facility with mathematical proofs,
30 Perspectives: What Are They?

who thinks your mother died when you were only one year old, who
once wanted to be a military officer, and so on. But if it is the self-​veri-
fying nature of thought that proves your existence, because there must
be a thinker of thoughts, surely all you are licensed to conclude is that
something thinks. To say that that thinker is me smuggles in more
than that.
Nothing about the nature of thinking can ensure that what does the
thinking is identical with what did the thinking that is now remem-
bered. In other words, when I run through the cogito argument, I can
conclude that I think, but only if ‘I’ refers to whatever is doing the
thinking. That is not necessarily me, Heidi Maibom, as a person who
was born in Rødovre, who sat down to write this morning, and so on.
For all I know, the thinker of thoughts passes out of existence each time
a thought does. The only certainty we can have, it seems, is that for
each act of thinking there is something that does it. I cannot be sure
that it is me in any robust sense. And so, the gap in knowledge is not
simply between our minds and other minds. It is between the unshak-
able knowledge that I have that ‘I’ am now thinking this or that, and
that this ‘I’ is the same as the ‘I’ of previous experiences that can be
brought to mind. None of this provides any certainty that the ‘I’ that
thinks these thoughts is the same person who conceived of writing this
book, for instance.11
My point is not that Descartes was wrong. He was. The problem is
that so are we, for we all think that being able to recollect a past makes
it our past. We take for granted that we exist over time. I think I am
the same person now as I was when I got up this morning. Why?
Because I can recall getting up in the morning. My certainty seems
immediate and is not based on further ideas about the probability of
memory swapping or implanting, and so on. The point of the matter
is, I can be no more certain that I am the same person who got up this
morning than I can be that you are thinking about Descartes right now.
Introspection gives me access to my inner mental life now, but it leaves
my continued existence as doubtful as the existence of others. I cannot
be sure that any of the things I remember doing or thinking or wanting
were actually “my” doings, thinkings, or wantings. I may never have
experienced what I think I did. The lesson is this. My relation to my
 The Space Between 31

own thoughts outside of the present moment is not fundamentally

asymmetrical to my relation to other people’s thoughts. I can know
that I think that I remember going to the shops yesterday, but I can’t be
certain that I did. I would have to rely on information outside my own
mind to verify whether I actually did. This is not altogether different
from the possibility of my knowing your mind. I am much closer to
you than either of us thought I was. The gap between us is not what we
thought it was.
Descartes, then, was wrong, not about the certainty that thinking, or
consciousness, exists, but about it establishing our existence as persons
or individuals, who exist over time. So how does this relate to whether
or not we can ever truly understand others by taking their perspective?
After all, many of us won’t want to buy into a notion of knowledge that
requires certainty since that won’t take us that far, as the failure of the
Cartesian project shows. If the only thing we can be certain of is that
something is thinking while thoughts occur, then we can’t know much
at all. We can’t know whether we are in the Matrix or not, for instance.
Consequently, theories of knowledge have taken a different direction.
But what doesn’t change is the fact that the principled gap we thought
existed between us and others exists between us in the present and
everything else, including our own past, our existence over time, and
other people’s minds. Why?
The key to answering this question is to ask: Can you ever under-
stand yourself? If you think you can, most of the time, then you can
also understand other people. Metaphysical worries about the exist-
ence of persons over time aside, it is a fact that we change—​which is
to say that what we think, what we want, how we act, and so on do not
remain static. Even our characters change; introverts sometimes be-
come extroverts and vice versa. Our background psychology, which
helps make sense of our momentary experiences, is in flux. This is why
we can be surprised when we read our old diaries. Usually, we change
slowly and gradually so that the change is imperceptible. But some-
times the change is more sudden and profound. The following cases
illustrate rather powerfully the point that I am trying to make.12
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James recounts the
following testimony of a young man:
32 Perspectives: What Are They?

For two years of this time I went through a very bad experience,
which almost drove me mad. I had fallen violently in love with a
girl who, young as she was, had a spirit of coquetry like a cat. As
I look back on her now, I hate her, and wonder how I could ever
have fallen so low as to be worked upon to such an extent by her
attractions.13

The man goes on to describe the courtship and the point at which he
suddenly fell out of love. Once out of love, he can no longer “see” how
he could have been so infatuated with the girl. If I am not much mis-
taken, falling madly in and out of love in ways that later seem incom-
prehensible happens at least once to many of us. Although we know
that, as a matter of fact, we had the experiences we had, we don’t under-
stand why. We can’t even recreate the experience in the imagination.
This is particularly true of very passionate states. We have changed
and, as a result, can’t make sense of our former selves.
The fact that we constantly change illustrates that we need have no
better understanding of ourselves in the past than we have of another
person who is as different from who we are now as is our former self.
The barrier remains. The problem, then, is not subjectivity. It is that we
must understand from the standpoint we occupy now. This would be
bad news were it not for the fact that at least some of the time, we can
gain something of an understanding of ourselves in the past, even when
we have changed a fair bit. Having a child is something that changes
you. New things begin to matter to you, you have new experiences, and
old ways of living fade into the background. Things you find you were
worried about missing when you settled down are now almost entirely
out of mind. Crowded bars with loud music, once something sought
after and enjoyed, have lost their appeal. When you then think back on
your former childless self and the things that mattered to that person,
the things she worried about, you might find a bit of a stranger there.
But—​and this is the important point—​it strains the imagination to in-
sist that you simply cannot understand your former self in principle.
What is true is that looking back, you feel somewhat alienated from the
you years ago. If you try, however, you can probably connect with her.
How? By using the very same method you would use to understand
others: by putting yourself in her shoes.14
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back