In my work, I often ask people what they are feeling, and the answer that seems to come up more often than not is fear. Fear of irrelevance, of illegibility, of precarity; fear of poverty, abandonment, pain and suffering. What’s often interesting about these conversations is the way that naming the fear in some way makes it easier to get a hold of, as if a name were a weapon. With a name, you can knock the fear down to a more reasonable size, or shapeshift its nebulous and spectral form into something with solid edges, like catching smoke in a net. For a brief moment, you can finally see the thing that’s been hovering in your peripheral vision, taunting and toying with you; but now that you’re looking right at it, it shrinks and shivers.

In Madness, Rack, and Honey, Mary Ruefle writes about fear:

Emotions are hardwired, biological functions of the nervous system such as fear, terror, sexual attraction, and hunger-impelled action (also called “feeding behaviors”). They are each purely physical reactions over which one has no control, and they are common to all animals with a central nervous system. The emotion of fear is what drives all animals away from life-threatening situations, and that is not the kind of fear I have in mind. Feelings, on the other hand, are more complicated and involve cognitive reactions that combine, or can be combined, with emotions, memories, experience, and intelligence.

Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey, page 106

She continues:

Feelings of fear, being at least in part cognitive, and therefore thoughts, often constitute knowledge.

Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey, page 109

Ruefle appears to be referring to something that she read here, some scientific paper or coverage of the same. But I am not interested in going to the source. I am interested in Ruefle’s interpretation of whatever it was she read; I am interested in the poet’s take on this distinction between feelings and emotions, because I see it as a distinction not of science (i.e., of observable and repeatable study) but as a one of language. It’s a kind of story, one in which our ability to ask questions about our emotions, to process and interrogate them, permits us to transmute those unruly, shapeless creatures into something we can hold and use, something we can grip in our fingers. Something like knowledge.

I was thinking about this when I opened Jade Davis’ The Other Side of Empathy and hit this sentence on the very first page:

Feelings and emotions are chemical pollution of the brain that cloud the accuracy of experience.

Davis, The Other Side of Empathy, page ix

Clearly, Davis is not operating from the same definition that Ruefle is. And I’ll admit that, at first, I wanted to reject this statement out of hand. How can feelings be both knowledge and pollution, both perception and poison? But then, I thought, pollution can be something out of place, something where it doesn’t belong. Carbon in the air instead of in the ground, say, or light pointed at the night sky. Which makes me wonder, when is a feeling out of place? Where do feelings belong?

Where Ruefle is talking about feelings of fear, Davis is attending to feelings in the context of empathy. So it’s useful to dig into what Davis means when she uses that word:

By empathy culture, I mean the current cultural narrative in which a lack of empathy is used for all forms of disapproval: the goodness or worthiness of people, humanness of the self and others, or any degree of compassion and caring. I mean the culture where empathy is lobbied, uncritically, as a solution to techno-determinism, medical malpractice, racism, inequality, war, and all other ills plaguing humanity.

Davis, The Other Side of Empathy, page 1

I want to distinguish here between two common uses of the word “empathy.” There’s the casual way we often use it among ourselves, as when, say, describing feeling empathy for a friend going through a tough time. Often, that use is more akin to older uses of the word “sympathy” or “compassion,” that is, fellow-feeling or perhaps commiseration. But there’s another use of the word, within the political framework that declares empathy a necessary—or even sufficient—ingredient for relating to others, a kind of precondition that then seems to satisfy all the conditions that follow. This is empathy as policy, as measurable career competency. It’s this latter form of empathy—and, especially, its substitution for more substantive action—that Davis is condemning. This is the empathy that asks us to feel what our colleagues are feeling while refraining from any action that will lead to pay parity; or the empathy that asks us to imagine what’s like to be homeless without changing our stance on multi-family housing.

This empathy is something of a trickster, in that it performs a kind of displacement of feelings from one body to another. I say performs, because the nature of empathy is such that it cannot be directly accessed; it can only be asserted. I can’t know what you’re feeling, and you can’t know what I’m feeling—and it’s possible neither of us fully knows what we are ourselves feeling, given the effort required to transform raw emotions into feelings. So when an organization names empathy as a core value, or even folds it into its performance management process, it’s inviting a kind of paradox: the only way for me to know that you are empathetic towards me is for me to also be empathetic towards you. Or conversely, the only way for me to accuse you of lack of empathy is for me to claim some ability to know what you’re feeling—to assert my own empathy as evidence of its absence in you. In either case, I am positioned as the evaluator of whether or not your empathy is present, which means by definition that I possess empathy, and in no way can that possession be contested or itself evaluated, because it leaves no marks for others to see.

In other words, what I am feeling becomes a priori evidence of what you are feeling. In this way—to borrow Davis’ language—empathy is a kind of colonization. Empathy takes our own emotions (often but not exclusively those of fear) and installs them in other people. It appropriates other people’s bodies as the locations for our own feelings. And in that way, the feelings become pollution, in the sense of a substance whose presence causes harm.

To put it another way: if I project my own feelings onto you—if I interpret my own feelings as the experience of your feelings—then I am polluting you.

So, to come back to Ruefle’s claim, I still believe that feelings can constitute knowledge, but that knowledge (like all knowledge) is limited. Critically, my feelings can constitute knowledge of my own perceptions and experiences but not of yours, not of anyone else’s. Feelings are self-knowledge.

Here, again, is Ruefle:

Feelings seem to represent a place where emotions combine with intelligence and experience to create a highly personal thought process that results in an individual’s worldview.

Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey, page 107

But empathy culture is unconcerned with the individuality of those feelings. It installs them, unwillingly, into the bodies of others. And then it mistakes that installation for a kind of action, for the resolution of injustice—as if a purported synchronization of feelings was all that was needed to make things right.

In this way, empathy works as a kind of technofix: a technology (in Ursula Franklin’s sense of the word, as a practice) that purports to solve myriad and complex problems while quietly maintaining the underlying power differentials. No wonder it’s a darling of corporate training manuals.

In place of empathy, Davis advises respect, compassion, and mutual recognition. I might add trust—i.e., rather than needing to feel what another person is feeling, we can trust their testimony, we can believe they are competent narrators of their own lives. To do that is to interrupt the performative cycle of claiming to grasp and pull other people’s feelings into our own bodies and to, instead, use our impressive intelligence to inquire into their experience. To ask and to listen.

It’s instructive to think with Ruefle and Davis here about fear, in particular, with all its associations of pain and suffering. Maybe that’s what we are aiming to escape when we engage with empathy instead of compassion. Maybe we are using those projections as a kind of shield. But a shield can imprison as well as protect. Davis writes:

Suffering is part of the transcendental as it is central to the human condition. Rather than that being a reason to internalize and intellectualize the suffering of the Other, it is rather a call to see and acknowledge it, to listen and to accept it. The recreation of suffering that empathy demands is not moving forward. It is constantly looking back and putting the sufferer in stasis. Mutual recognition requires letting go of some level of control/power and agency. It assumes an active Other, equally engaged and valued in the process of meaning-making. Mutual recognition is accepting without understanding, and it is believing that this acceptance of the value of another is reciprocated. Mutual recognition is not about cognizing the Other into being. It is recognizing that the Otherness is mutual. To decolonize something as pervasive as empathy is to understand that the power of colonization resides in how it imprisons the oppressor who attempts to empathize while continuing the cycle of oppression.

Davis, The Other Side of Empathy, page 97

I think, in some ways, that letting go of empathy is to accept the freedom of difference, that we are each our own unique and wild selves, never wholly understandable to each other. It’s to accept that it isn’t necessary to understand someone to fight for their liberation. Perhaps, then, to relinquish empathy is to become aware of our own interdependence, to trade power for solidarity, with all the joy and possibility—and, yes, fear—that entails.