Media narratives as the solution to limited human empathy: narrative empathy, imaginative perspective-taking, Einfühlung, and the 'what it's like' theory of consciousness

• Main Author: Nurul Hannah Bte Azman
• Other Authors: Grace Boey
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Humanities::Philosophy
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/165401
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In this paper, I propose that stories are the best way to overcome empathy-related epistemic challenges - experiencing stories is the closest we can come to putting ourselves in the shoes of others because of the tropes and devices used by writers, the fact that stories portray consciousness in ways we can best understand, and the fact that stories must contain characters whose lives we follow. I define empathy and narrative empathy, exploring its limitations with reference to Thomas Nagel and Olivia Bailey. I posit that the ability of stories to represent the inner worlds of people, depict consciousness in a way that allows for uniquely human understanding, and encourage attitudes of imaginative perspective-taking, allows us to largely overcome the limits of human empathy. I respond to the objection that there are other means of imaginative perspective-taking that are more effective than stories (i.e experiential simulators) by emphasising that these methods would still cause us to face the same problems described by Nagel and Bailey, and that stories, understood as art, inherently involve the process of empathy - the German Aesthetic concept of Einfühlung.