What is (Hyper)empathy For?

I read Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower while researching for an exhibition I organized at the Tang Teaching Museum, Where Words Falter: Art and Empathy, which is open July–December 2022. Over the past two years, I have been eager to better understand what empathy really is, what it does, and how and why we practice it.

The word empathy first entered the English language only in 1909. It arrived in German slightly earlier, in 1873, as Einfühlung, which translates to feeling-into—a definition I've come to embrace. In Parable,the protagonist, Lauren Olamina, afflicted with hyperempathy, was feeling into others' pain and pleasure, bringing their emotions and physical ordeals into her own body. She calls it sharing, correcting Bankole's language after confiding in him about her condition: "'You feel other people's pain?' he asked. / 'I share other people's pain and pleasure,' I said." (277)

The protagonist's distinction encouraged me to consider the ways a person can share. For example, if I share my two cookies with you, we each get one. If I share my screen with you, we can watch a movie together in a communal moment. Parable offers a third logic: Olamina experiences a sensation as the other's condition is unchanged. I was forced to recognize that empathy doesn't immediately or directly impact the one generating it. So, what is it for? Butler writes: "[I]f everyone could feel everyone else's pain, who would torture? Who would cause anyone unnecessary pain?" (115) To add to Butler's queries: If everyone could feel everyone else's joy, who would rob them of it? Who wouldn't bring more joy to others? So often we mistake empathy as pertaining only to suffering, but the full range of emotion makes us human. Recognizing another's humanity—including, as Olamina said, one's pleasure—is vital to the type of empathy that can lead to allyship and a better world.

As an art curator, I was interested that Olamina must see another person to share—and has no choice once she sees. This sensorial specificity offers respite; she can hide from screams of agony and avoid pain. We, too, often hide from others' hardship, and sometimes their joy as well. We turn the page, change the channel, scroll past, look away. But just as seeing mandates that Olamina share, I hope that the art in Where Words Falter mandates the conscientious practice of empathy to strengthen our muscles of compassion. The exhibition features hardship, joy, kindness, celebration, pride, pain, sorrow, peace, melancholy, and ambiguity. It encourages us to recognize and challenge our judgments of others—as Butler's characters had to do to form a community for survival. And if we look straight-on, opening ourselves to see, to feel, to feel into,what happens next?