Feeling Into
Thesis Paper by Mikaela Nunnally
12 March 2018
The saying “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” conveys a need for empathy. My work, Feeling Into, expresses an expanded interpretation of this metaphor for human connection through the use of other people’s shoes and panoramic photographs of my own feet and shoes. It is undeniable that even an unsuccessful attempt at empathizing is an essential part of the human experience. As my work reflects on how empathy for others requires conscious effort and commitment, it also intentionally recognizes the possibility that individuals will never be able to completely know or understand another person. The interaction between these two ideas is familiar and yet strangely paradoxical. This paper frames how the paradox of empathy is a part of our everyday lives. I intend to explain how empathy is examined in my work and in the work of other artists as they analyze the real world application of empathy and connection. Ultimately, my argument is that although individual perspective prevents us from completely understanding one another, it is essential that we continually try to make connections and cultivate empathy.
The German word for empathy, Einfühlung comes from the verb fühlen, meaning "to feel", with the prefix ein which indicates a movement “into” something. Essentially, the word means "feeling into”. This poetic translation beautifully demonstrates the difference between empathy and sympathy, and prompts a conversation about the nature of empathy and how we experience it, thus qualifying Feeling Into as an appropriate title and starting place for my work. As researcher Dr. Brené Brown explains in her lecture, The Power of Vulnerability, empathy is feeling with people while sympathy is feeling for people. Brown emphasizes that empathy is a choice that requires connecting with your own feelings as well as being willing to share them with others. Sympathetic people usually have the best intentions at heart; they want to make it better for the other person. Empathetic people on the other hand, recognize that a simple response isn’t enough to solve someone else’s problems. An empathetic reaction can create connection and let the other person know that their feelings are valid and that they are not alone in their experience of those feelings. Brown describes four requirements, or qualities, of empathy: perspective taking, staying out of judgement, recognizing emotion in other people, and then communicating that recognition. On the surface, Brown’s description of empathy and its importance seems to hold a lot of truth and wisdom. However, a more in-depth analysis of her outlined steps reveals holes in the foundation. The first step, perspective taking, makes a lot of careless assumptions about communication through language and the nature of individual perspective. Philosophers like Michel Foucault and Jacque Lacan reveal flaws in the way natural language expresses our internal processes. The limitations of language do not allow for us to accurately express or interpret complex thoughts or emotions, therefore making it impossible to tell if another person, or even we ourselves, are experiencing true empathy. Bleak and lonely as this may be, it is recognizably more accurate to real life experiences. However, even this conclusion is still incomplete.
The paradox of empathy, a theory by Ramsey McNabb, proposes a more balanced interaction between the isolation of individual perspective and the hope-filled concept of empathy. The paradox is that individual perspective makes complete understanding of another person impossible, but also possible and just not recognizable. In other words, it can’t be proven that another person doesn’t experience true empathy just as much as it can’t be proven that they do. Although McNabb’s theory is relatively new, this same concept can be traced back to multiple religious teachings. For example, the Daoist sage Chuang-tzu is recorded discussing this particular paradox with his friend and logician, Hui Shih:
Chuang-Tzu and Hui Shih were strolling on the bridge above the Hao river. “Out swim the minnows, so free and easy,” said Chuang-tzu. “That’s how fish are happy.”
“You are not a fish. Whence do you know that the fish are happy?”
“You aren’t me, whence do you know that I don’t know the fish are happy?”
“We’ll grant that not being you I don’t know about you. You’ll grant that you are not a fish, and that completes the case that you don’t know the fish are happy.”
“Let’s go back to where we started. When you said, ’Whence do you know that the fish are happy?’, you asked me the question already knowing that I knew. I knew from up above the Hao.”
McNabb's theory offers a more personal choice than the one between empathy and sympathy afforded to us by Brené Brown. The choice faced now is between succumbing to the impossibility of true understanding between people, accepting loneliness and isolation, and the option to give others the benefit of the doubt and choose to have faith in the unseen possibility of empathy.
Often times, I find that I bounce between these two states of mind to suit the situation and validate one way or another the level of connectedness I feel towards others and this world. This fluctuating connectedness is represented in the self portraiture series of Feeling Into. My feet, the body’s anchoring points, are perceived to be separated from the rest of my body. Additionally, as the viewer interacts with these images and interprets them through a subjective perspective, their meaning changes due to misunderstanding and recontextualization, resulting in a level of understanding of my self which is different than my own. We tend to think that no one knows us as well as we know ourselves, but there is a third person perspective of the self which we will never have access to.
During the process of creating the first part of Feeling Into, the self portraits, my focus and intention was to represent my own perspective in a familiar but also peculiar way. Meditating on perspective, I immediately recalled photographer David Hockney’s work, one of the first artists I can remember studying and truly appreciating. I had emulated Hockney’s process before, by taking multiple images of an object or space from slightly different angles and then collaging them together to form a cubist-like image. As I revisited this process, my experimentation led to the discovery of what I initially called No Body Panoramas, or No Bod Panos for short. Digitally stitching together images of my feet, taken from above and of all four sides, resulted in the pinching off of my body and legs which should exist in the middle of the composition. This collaboration between me and the panorama programing results in a variety of glitches and distortions. I made no attempt to do further editing of the compositions after they were compiled together. Initially, I justified this decision by expressing my delight over the mysteriousness of the way the program collages the images together. Now I believe that there was a subconscious recognition of the way I relate to my body already present in the portraits. For example, I recognize in myself the social behavior pattern where a women shrinks herself to take up less space, and in these self portraits, it’s like I’ve succeeded in melting away or compressing myself down to only a pair of feet.
My intention while developing the second part of this project, the portraits of other perspectives, was to convey a sincere attempt to empathize. I did this by collecting used shoes from family members, friends, and acquaintances. The intimacy of asking people for their shoes and explaining to them why I needed their help had a kind of wholesome bonding effect on me and on those relationships that I did not expect. This collection of shoes represents the variety of perspectives in my life which I struggle to comprehend as my restricted view of other perspectives is both what drives and cripples connection making. To express the limited way that I can understand other people’s perspectives, the shoes are all painted a neutral beige. Although they are real shoes, representing real people, they are also empty, serving as merely a symbol for an absent person. Details about the real person who wore those shoes are surely present, but they are obscured by the paint and lost in translation. These two portions of Feeling Into come together to challenge the typical understanding of empathy.
Other artists dealing with similar concepts, such as Clare Patey, Lenka Clayton, and Doris Salcedo, are not only using shoes as a symbol for a whole person, but for empathy and connections as well. For example, as director of the Empathy Museum, Clare Patey addresses human interactions between individuals and the community by coordinating pop up exhibitions such as A Mile In My Shoes, in which participants physically walk in another person’s shoes while listening to a recording of that person telling their life story. Patey also directed A Thousand and One Books, a pop up library comprised of books donated by someone who loves that book and thinks others might love it too, as well as the Human Library, where instead of borrowing a book, participants borrow a person for some conversation. All of these works exhibit Patey’s interest in other people’s stories and uses recognizable symbolism to address empathy and connection making. In One Brown Shoe, Lenka Clayton explores and records the differences in perspective. Clayton asked one hundred married couples to each make one brown shoe out of found materials without collaborating with their partner. Once they completed the task, they revealed their creations to each other for comparison. The similarities and differences between each person’s approach fascinatingly demonstrates individual perspective. Social activism artist Doris Salcedo addresses violence and compassion in her work, Atrabiliarios. Salcedo describes her use of worn shoes as a significant symbol for a human life, “Every time we see a shoe on the street, we wonder what happened there. It’s the wrong place for that shoe to be.” All of these artists use shoes and empathy to address the multiple ways in which humans experience feeling with someone else, and to ultimately advocate for a more intentional usage of empathy.
Perspective and the concept of empathy are perpetually joined. In Eric Dyer’s zoetropes, or what he calls “wheels of life,” he explores relationships and analyzes life experiences through varying applications of perspective to his work. Dyer described the importance of intimate connections and relationships in his Ted Talk, The forgotten art of the zoetrope, “As individuals, we’re finite. As a family we’re an ongoing cycle, a kind of wheel of life.” Over the last year and a half, my obsession with personal relationships, whether with family, friends, acquaintances, or even strangers, has resulted in a constant stream of questions about the genuineness and intimacy of those interactions. What makes a person feel like they deeply know you? How can you tell if you are truly understanding someone else’s perspective? Are we all doomed to feel alone, even as we are surrounded by other people who probably feel the same way? For me, the paradox of empathy recognizes all of these thoughts, feelings, and questions as valid, and then demands accountability and self-ownership for my choice of pursuing either empathy or isolation.
Feeling Into visually exhibits my experience of attempting to empathize with others. Humans are social creatures that are incapable of understanding each other beyond outwardly relatable elements, in this case, shoes. This can often lead to the feeling that we are forever alone in this world. Allowing these feelings of disconnection to be an isolating force creates a detrimental cycle of self absorption and a significant decline in mental wellness. In order to counter this, it’s crucial to question and challenge feelings of loneliness, since doing so gives remarkable power to the choice of empathizing and seeking connections despite the infinite unknowns.