Una ruptura temporal con las ocupaciones significativas que da

Now we are in a position to examine common views of understanding and explain why they have such intuitive appeal. I will start with the set of views that place empathy at the center of understanding.

Understanding as empathy

As we have seen in the last chapter, philosophers interested in the role of empathy in morality tend to exaggerate its epistemic contribution. Michael Slote, notably, seems to think that correctly exercised empathy (with the right people, at the right time, etc.) will put us in a position to take the right action. The implicit assumption is that when we empathize correctly (with the right people), we thereby understand them well enough to respond in morally appropriate ways.17

But it is not just these philosophers who confuse understanding with empathy (or at least construe understanding in terms of empathy). Other moral philosophers do too, and our ordinary usage of understanding sometimes suggests equivalence of the two.18 In philosophical discussions of wrongdoing, the issue of understanding the wrongdoer

17_{Alisa Carse does distinguish between empathy and understanding, stating that the former con-} tributes to the latter. Her views on empathy are thus more plausible than Slote’s, but she tends to attribute a bigger role to empathy in its contribution to understanding than it actually has, as we have seen in her discussion of examples of “improper empathy.” She makes this mistake because, I think, she does not have a clear conception of understanding to work with.

18_{Psychologists seem to slide quickly from “understanding” to “empathy” too. In their article,} “Why Do Friends Understand Each Other Better Than Strangers Do?” Colvin, Vogt and Ickes answer the question posed in the title in terms of “empathic accuracy” of another’s inner states. A similar move is made in another article, “Managing Empathic Accuracy in Close Relationships,” by Ickes and Simpson. Whereas the article begins with the French Proverb, To understand all is to forgive all,” and the English epigram, “To understand all is to forgive nothing,” and promises a way to make sense of both, it switches to a discussion of empathic accuracy from the second paragraph onwards.

is often raised, but never quite elucidated. The discussions typically turn on a distinc- tion between a “shallow” understanding and a “deep” one, where the former involves knowing facts about the wrongful act and explaining it in terms of reasons, and the latter some sort of “empathic understanding,” “identification,” or “imaginative pro- jection” into the wrongdoer’s point of view.19 _{This tendency to fall back on empathy} in explaining understanding may in part be influenced by our everyday usage of the term, “understand.” We do seem to tend to emphasize the understanding of one’s internal experience when we talk of understanding. “You just don’t understand” is a common complaint we hear, which typically means that we are failing to see things from the other person’s point of view. When I say, “I understand what you are going through,” the implication seems to be that I can imagine what it must be like for you to be struggling in the difficult situation, and how frustrated and anxious you must be because I can vicariously experience your feelings as well. Or when we think that one is too harsh in his judgment of his father, we ask him to try to understand his father by “stepping into his shoes.”

If understanding is the mental grasp of a person’s reality, it becomes clear why we are inclined to take understanding to be (primarily) empathy even though what we implicitly look for is something like the mental grasp of one’s reality. On this account of understanding, our understanding of a person is first of all based on knowledge about her, and in particular, propositional knowledge of various facts about her and acquain- tance knowledge of her subjective experience. Our subjective experience constitutes a significant part of our reality. Especially from our own point of view, it may seem as if

19_{See, for example, Pamela Hieronymis “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness,” and Paul} Formosa’s “Understanding Evil Acts.” Adam Morton, in his discussion of how we could come to understand evildoers, follows a common view that we can have “intuitive understanding” of an evil act only if we can imagine ourselves doing it. This is not exactly empathy yet, but since the goal is to understand how the person turned to evil, I suppose imagining ourselves doing it is a means to approximate the internal experience of the evildoer. Thus it is very close to empathy, if not the same as it.

it is all there is to the reality of us. So it is quite natural to emphasize knowledge of it when we talk of understanding someone, with the implication that empathy is what we are looking for since it is what yields that knowledge. Furthermore, understanding in- volves appreciation of how bits of information about the person fit together, and again when we privilege her point of view in considering what makes up the reality of her, we would be led to construe the appreciation as that of howshetakes everything about her to fit together. To understand a particular action of hers, then, would involve relating it to her beliefs, desires, personality and other things in the same way that she herself makes sense of it. Here again, empathy is called for.

Besides the weight we assign to the subjective experience and point of view of a person in constituting her reality, another reason why we tend to mistake empathy for understanding has to do with the fact that empathy reveals to us the more opaque part of a person, her internal experience. Complacent as we usually are, we are quick to assume that we understand someone enough through observing what she does and hearing what she says. A lot of information about her is readily available to us as long as we care to notice. When we urge someone toreally try to understand another, we are effectively asking her to start “noticing” the part of the other that is much less straightforwardly obvious. Even though we may well mean to urge her to grasp the reality of the person as a whole, the focus often falls on that person’s internal experience, and hence on empathy, because that is typically missing from what one might already have grasped. But since one’s subjective experience does not exhaust the reality of her, nor does her point of view necessarily supply us the right way of structuring our knowledge of her, empathy falls short of understanding. One might think perhaps that at least in cases where the subject matter of understanding is part of a persons subjective experience (e.g., her pain, or her love of good burgers), we can substitute empathy for understanding. I doubt we can. In such cases as in other

cases where the subject matter is the whole person, empathy is only one of a range of

processes we can use to achieve understanding. Perhaps empathy is almost always an indispensible process, but it is at least logically, if not also empirically, possible for one to achieve understanding – even of anothers subjective experience – without empathy.

Understanding as explanation

Another familiar view takes understanding to be the ability to explain one’s actions. While some, as we just saw, identify “shallow” understanding with this ability, it is also common for philosophers and nonphilosophers alike to treat understanding as none other than being able to explain a person’s actions, if only more thoroughly than what is assumed to be sufficient for “shallow” understanding. Here’s a typical example of what we think about when we think about understanding someone. In a paper that explores the relation between understanding, judging, and mercy, Samantha Vice explains in one section titled, “Understanding Another,” what understanding a person amounts to. She begins the section as follows:

In this section, I wish to render as plausible as possible the claim that understanding another dissipates both the urge to condemn and the appro- priateness of doing so. The starting point is the thought that providing a full explanation and evaluation of a person’s action requires knowledge of the particularities of her character and situation. The idea is that knowl- edge of such particulars will lead to mercy rather than harshness towards the person, even when our judgement of the worth of the action remains negative. What then are these ‘particularities’, that in trying to explain a persons action would bring us to judge her more leniently, and how do they generate mercy (96-97)?”

It’s true that in this context, Vice is interested in understanding a person’s action rather than understanding a person. But the fact that she does not feel the need to distinguish “understanding another” from being able to “explain another’s action” underlines an unspoken assumption that the two are, if not the same thing, at least closely related. The assumption is unspoken because it is so obvious; we as readers

are expected to follow along with ease as she goes from talking about “understanding another” to elaborating on what we need to explain the person’s action.

The intuition that understanding is a matter of being able to explain one’s actions does contain some truth about understanding: when we understand a person, we are able to perform certain actions in relation to her, including giving explanations of her actions (and thoughts, feelings, etc.). Since this ability correlates with the degree of ones understanding, and more importantly, since we can only gauge one’s understanding on the basis of her actions, it is easy for us to mistakenly take the ability to explain a person’s actions to be the whole of understanding.