Empathy and Its Limits in the Museum

Abstract

In recent years ‘empathy’ has attracted scholarly attention in various academic areas, from neuroscience, psychology and sociology to memory, literary and film studies. While it is important to acknowledge the breadth of these different approaches, I will focus for the purpose of this analysis on the explorations of empathy that have informed memory studies and museum practices. The concept of empathy has become central to the transdisciplinary field of memory studies, with the rise of interest in witnessing and trauma. More recently, with the growing attention on mediated memory and the way it travels, a focus has emerged on the possibilities for empathy in ‘postmemory’ (Hirsch 2001), ‘secondary witnessing’ (LaCapra 2001) and ‘prosthetic memory’ (Landsberg 2004); the understanding is that memories, together with emotions are either transmitted by empathy or, indeed, create empathy. But empathy is often not sufficiently distinguished from other emotional engagements such as identification, concern or solidarity. While empathy as a term is fairly young, the concept as such can be traced back to the eighteenth century ‘when empathy and sympathy [were] regarded as civil society’s primary emotional resources, connecting citizens and fine-tuning their mutual relations’ (Frevert 2001: 12). David Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739), Adam Smith (Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759) and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Hamburg Dramaturgy, 1769) may have used a different terminology to describe what is now termed ‘empathy’, but they all argued that moral judgement and moral behaviour ultimately depend on it. Even if they did not all see empathy as an innate human response, they still assumed that empathy, compassion and moral behaviour were intimately connected and would follow from each other automatically. However, they were also concerned with the limits of empathy and conceded that without resemblance between subject and object compassion might fail. The lack of empathy for somebody removed in time, space and kinship was readily acknowledged.