Mobilizing Empathy: From Einfuhlung to Homo Empathicus

This dissertation traces the movements of empathy across and within diverse contexts. Empathy is shown to be conceptually amorphous with significant degrees of variation in its applications. With an analytic lens focused on use (conceived of as the mobilization of empathy) heterogeneous conceptions of empathy are examined, illuminating the different psychological and social realities that are created when empathy functions in different ways. This systematic reconstruction is facilitated through an analysis of empathys moral, relational, epistemic, natural, and aesthetic conceptual foundations, and its quantitative, gendered, pathological, political, educational, commodified, and professional uses. It is argued that at the core of empathy is a moral valence; specifically, that empathy is irreducibly connected to ethical questions and, thus, there is always a moral dimension inherent in its applications. Based on the reconstruction an ontology of empathy is derived that includes the individual, the other, and its moral valence. The dissertation concludes with considerations of the consequences of this ontology. Challenging empathy exclusively construed as a matter of individual intentionality, it is argued that socio-political, economic, and societal structures create, shape, and maintain much of what individuals have access to and experience empathically. For this critical understanding, the notion of empathy avoidance, arm-chair empathy, and regulated empathy, are introduced.