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Anja Berninger, How Empathy With Fictional Characters Undermines Moral Self-Trust, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 79, Issue 2, Spring 2021, Pages 245–250, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaac/kpab018
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Extract
I. Introduction
When reading novels and short stories, we often empathize with fictional characters. In some cases, these characters are highly problematic in moral terms. Two extreme examples might be the SS Officer Max Aue in Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes and Konstantyn Willemann in Szeczepan Twardoch’s Morfina. For many, the experience of reading these works of fiction is deeply disturbing. As Thomas Szanto has suggested in the conclusion to a recent article, we might register an unwillingness to engage empathically with these characters and this may relate (in part) to the fact that such an engagement can potentially “impact our very self-understanding” (2019, 800). This, of course, brings up a number of further questions: what sort of self-understanding is impacted here? And how can we best describe empathy’s influence?1
In this article, I want to provide readers with a brief answer to these questions. I will suggest that empathizing with such characters may change our relation toward ourselves by undermining our moral self-trust. My argument will proceed in three steps. In the first section, I make some definitional remarks on the type of empathy in which I am interested. I then use the rest of this section to suggest that empathizing with another will often leave us with the impression that we are similar to that person. In the second, I turn to the issue of empathizing with literary figures. I stress that literature is particularly well suited to fostering empathy and that it often gives rise to an impression of similarity. In the final section, I demonstrate how this is relevant to the relation in which we stand to ourselves. I will suggest that our trust in our own moral capacities can be undermined by the sort of empathy we experience in our engagement with literature.
