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6.2.4.
Empathic access: another challenge?
Another objection to biomedically induced radical change could stem from
Schechtman’s distinction between ‘person narrative’ – i.e., the recognition of
oneself as continuing over time – and ‘self-narrative’, which involves a sense of
stable self over time. According to Schechtman, self-narrative, in contrast to
person-narrative, requires not only that one remembers or recognises past actions as
belonging to oneself, but that one has empathy with one’s past actions:
empathic
access
. Thus if one recognises
that one has done something in the past – a bad act
for example – but no longer feels empathy for the person that committed that act,
the act is integrated into one’s person-narrative, but not into one’s self-narrative.
Schechtman claims that when self-narrative is discontinuous, one’s identity is
threatened. It could be argued that even if a patient’s narrative after DBS can fulfil
the articulation constraint, it cannot fulfil the
empathic access
constraint
.
Schechtman contrasts the person-narratives and self-narratives in a following way:
‘Temporally remote actions and experiences that are
appropriated into one’s
self
narrative must impact the
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present in a more fundamental sense than just constraining
options or having caused one’s current situation and outlook
[as they do in a
person
narrative]. These events must
condition the quality of present experience in the strongest
sense, unifying consciousness over time through affective
connections and identification. To include these actions and
experiences in my narrative [i.e., my self narrative] I will
need to have what I have elsewhere called “empathic
access” to them. In
this
sense of narrative [i.e.,
self
narrative], actions and experience from which I am
alienated, or in which I have none of the interest that I have
in my current life, are not part of my narrative.’ (2007, p.
171)
According to Schechtman, having empathic access to an episode of one’s past
consists of two elements which are individually necessary and jointly sufficient.
First, one must be able to remember what happened ‘from the inside’, with a
suitable richness of phenomenology – to have an emotionally rich episodic memory
of that event. Second, one must display ‘a fundamental sympathy for the states
which are recalled in this way’ (Schechtman, 2001, p. 106). Empathic access on this
account is more than just having an understanding of one’s past and being able to
make sense of it: empathetic access implies a particular kind of
identification
with
one’s remembered past. The stable defining traits of which we might not be
explicitly conscious, but are revealed in the process of empathically accessing the
past, provide the rich self-understanding which makes us, in Schechtman’s words,
‘intelligible to ourselves’ (Schechtman, 2007, p. 18). When empathic access to
one’s past is absent, the stability of defining traits required for a self-narrative is in
doubt and, consequently, survival in what Schechtman calls the ‘subtle sense,’ is
threatened.
The main challenge to the
empathic access
criterion is that the necessity to
recognize one’s past actions as one’s own in the way outlined above might be too
stringent a requirement. I will argue that we have two strong reasons to abandon the
empathetic access requirement. The first reason is that this view would deny the
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possibility of survival through radical change even when such change is best
understood as personal development – change stemming from personal projects,
values, beliefs and experiences. The second reason is that empathetic access
unjustifiably privileges a certain kind of backwards-looking attitude, while other
backwards-looking attitudes can be seen as sufficient for maintaining a self-
narrative.
Consider the conversion of St. Augustine. According to Schechtman, this would be
a survival-threatening disruption of narrative personhood rather than a continuing
progress toward the good in the life of one particular person, despite the fact that
Augustine gave voice to the narrative of change in his
Confessions
. Indeed,
Schechtman remarks that religious conversion is ‘frequently cited as a case of
identity threatening psychological change’ (2001, p. 105), and adds that the convert
often ‘retains vivid recollection of lusts and passions that he now finds shameful
and horrible' (2001, p. 105). Thus, according to Schechtman, although the convert
maintains vivid memories of past deeds, she lacks the element of fundamental
sympathy required for empathic access.
One can easily bring forward other examples: the person who in his twenties
thought that being rich and powerful was at the heart of his self-conception, but
who now realizes his mistake and feels alienated from what he now considers
superficial values; the reformed criminal who for many years thought that robbing
people was a fair game, but who now sees that this was ethically wrong and who
now feels no sympathy for those mental states that at one time motivated him
(Goldie, 2011). In his criticism of Schechtman’s account, Goldie argues that where
Schechtman sees a loss of one’s defining traits as a threat to one’s survival, one can
easily adopt an alternative position, according to which ‘allowing that change,
possibly radical and profound, can be a source of personal moral progress and very
much part of the human condition.’ (Goldie, 2011; 2012)
Moreover, it is unclear why ‘sympathy’ should be privileged as
the
backwards-
looking attitude that allows affective connections which, according to Schechtman,
are necessary for a subtle sense of survival. As Goldie (2007; 2011; 2012) correctly
points out, alienation, mortification, ironic distance, amusement and embarrassment
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are perfectly possible ways of engaging with our past and do not imply bringing our
survival (in the identity sense) into question. A similar point was eloquently made
by Simon Beck, who, writing of his feelings about his actions when young, says: ‘I
cringe at the actions of Simon Beck as a 16-year-old when I can bring myself to
think about them. I would not
cringe
if there were not a rich level of continuity of
consciousness—that embarrassment requires seeing those actions as my own’
(2008, p. 75). Thus, other kinds of affective connections might ground a deep sense
of one’s continuity.
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