A philosophical journey from mind to heart

As a philosopher, Stephen Darwall has lived much of his life in his head. Over his 40-year career, he has written extensively about fundamental moral philosophy, moral psychology, and ethics. 

But for his latest book, Darwall strove to better understand matters of the heart. 

In “The Heart and its Attitudes” (Oxford University Press), he applies an analytical philosophical approach to heartfelt phenomena. More to the point, he theorizes the distinction between “reactive attitudes” (a term from the philosopher, P.F. Strawson) of the heart and reactive attitudes of the will. 

The latter — which might include resentment, guilt, and moral blame — assume a mutual accountability between the person having that feeling and its object. They are emotions grounded in established ideas of moral rights and duties. In contrast, attitudes of the heart — forgiveness, love, gratitude — express a desire for a mutual responsiveness.

“They implicitly open the heart of the person who has the attitude and address another person, inviting them to open their heart in response,” Darwall said. “They don’t have anything to do with expectations. They have to do with hopes.” 

In short, he adds, they come with an RSVP.

Darwall, the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a widely published author of books and scholarly articles, is currently finishing up a three-volume history of modern moral philosophy in the West. 

He sat down with Yale News to talk about the power of empathy, the difference between guilt and remorse, and why the United States needs more than reparations to heal the scars left by slavery and its legacy institutions. The interview has been edited and condensed.

You say that discussion of heartfelt connection is largely absent from analytical philosophy. Did you feel compelled to write about it for that reason, or is it more personal than that? 

Stephen Darwall: It’s both. I owe a lot to a lot of people, most obviously to my wife Laura, but also to my sons, Will and Julian. They wanted me to operate on a different plane. I was a head guy, and Laura wanted me to come more from my heart. There was a lot of trying to figure out, how does this work exactly?

It is also true that I saw this amazingly interesting area of philosophy that analytical philosophers had pretty much not touched. I mean, it’s not that nobody has. There are a few, mostly women, who’ve thought about some of these things, but not systematically. 

Early in the book you use two famous speeches — by Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin — to show the difference between the empathic exchanges between the speakers and their mostly white audiences. The speeches are Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” and Baldwin’s side of the argument in a 1965 debate with William F. Buckley on the question of whether the American dream has been achieved at the expense of Black people. Both speeches were well received, but in different ways. Would you talk about this? 

Darwall: My claim is that Baldwin reached the crowd on a heartfelt level, but Douglass addressed the consciences of the audience. He gives philosophical arguments. He notes that he’s been advised to “argue more and denounce less.” He asks, and I’m paraphrasing, “What should I argue exactly? That the slave is a man? You admit it in your laws, when you hold enslaved people responsible for disobedience.” He uses all these arguments that insinuate a second-personal relation to his audience. I think of that as about mutual accountability. He’s saying, hold yourselves accountable.

Now it’s pretty different, I think, with Baldwin. He’s not giving an argument that Jim Crow is unjust. He’s showing you what it does. And interestingly, not just what it does to Black people, but also what it does to white people. There’s this one point where he says, “I picked the cotton, I carried it to the market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing.” As I read it, this is less about blame than about personal anger, which expresses emotional (heartfelt) hurt. There are about 200 people in the audience, almost entirely white, mostly male. And after it’s over, they give him the most amazing applause. And he’s just beaming. I think of it as an exchange of love. He’s touched them, moved them in their hearts, and he’s moved in response by their applause. 

You argue that love is the principal attitude of the heart, and here you’re referring to romantic love and strong friendships. Love that seeks reciprocation. One distinguishing characteristic for romantic love, you say, is that lovers seek to be present with each other, not just physically, but emotionally. And that requires empathy. Would you explain? 

Darwall: Empathy can mean various things. Cognitive empathy is what is sometimes called perspective taking — the ability to put yourself in someone else’s perspective. That’s utterly central to all the reactive attitudes and to the second-person standpoint. Another form is sometimes called emotional contagion. And that’s where people catch each other’s feelings without feeling them as if from the other’s point of view. For example, you walk into a room, and everybody is really down, and you find yourself feeling down. You don’t really know why. You catch the feeling without catching the object of the feeling. 

Being open to someone involves cognitive empathy, perspective taking. But it also involves the capacity to share feelings. If someone is sad, not just to figure out that what they’re feeling is sadness, but to feel sad as well. Being sad with them at the thing they’re sad about, but also sad because they’re sad. That gives rise not just to empathic sharing of their feelings, but also what I would call sympathetic concern. So there are various kinds of empathy and they’re all implicated in being emotionally present to someone. 

You distinguish forgiveness from heartfelt forgiveness. And you provide this poignant example concerning a young man named Ahmed. Would you tell that story? 

Darwall: I learned this from the writings of Richard Boothman, who’s an attorney who defends the University of Michigan hospitals against lawsuits and tries to head off lawsuits. When he started, their policy there was “deny and defend” when it came to malpractice claims. Tell the claimant, “Well, you could sue us, I suppose, but we’ve got a million lawyers and a big budget. We’d beat you. So let’s make a deal.” And they’d try to make a deal at the lowest cost. 

Boothman realized this was not a very good way of doing things. Most obviously for the victims, or alleged victims, but also for the hospital staff, who are left with all these unprocessed feelings. In such cases, heartfelt remorse, not guilt, is the more healing response. So what Boothman got on to was this process of having the medical staff meet with the victim, or the victim’s family, if possible, and just say in plain language what happened all along the way: Own up to it, but also show how you feel about it. 

This particular case involved a young man named Ahmed. He came into the University of Michigan hospitals having repeated nosebleeds. We can just stipulate that the staff acted as responsibly as possible. But while they were conducting tests and deciding what to do, Ahmed suddenly died. The staff was left feeling awful, and Ahmed’s family was absolutely furious and upset. 

Boothman arranged for the hospital staff to meet with the family. And at first, it wasn’t working very well. The family was very angry and making threats. Their lawyer calmed them down, and said, “Let’s hear what they have to say.” So the staff explained exactly what happened, and told the family they felt awful about it. They started crying, and the family responded and started crying as well. At the end, they’re falling in each other’s arms and sharing their grief, but also then sharing their joy about Ahmed’s life, looking at photographs and the like. I think it’s just an excellent example of how remorse can heal in a way that guilt can’t.

You take an interesting turn at the end of the book where you talk about the history of slavery in this country, its long and damaging legacy, and how the country might be healed. Before we talk about that, what compelled you to delve into this subject? 

Darwall: Well, I grew up in Jim Crow. I was born in Virginia, and a few years later we moved to Texas. Most of my schooling was in San Antonio. My high school was not officially segregated, but effectively segregated. At the Majestic Theater downtown, Black people could not sit in the floor seats — they had to sit way up in the balcony. So I was steeped in all of this, and I’ve always been very, very interested in it. Then when I came to Yale as an undergrad, that was the time of the civil rights movement. 

About 10 years ago, I started to read a lot about slavery and Reconstruction and so on. I had this idea to teach a course on the morality of reparations. I was pretty humble about doing it because I am a white guy, and an old white guy at that. But it was great. I’ve taught it twice. So that’s how I got into this subject. 

You make a strong case for reparations in that chapter. But then, to come back to your previous point that remorse can heal in a way that guilt cannot, you argue that true healing for both Black and white Americans can only come about through repeated heartfelt connections. Would you give an example of what you mean? 

Darwall: An example I use in the book is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The thing that was genius about that is the way it healed a lot of really open wounds about the war. The war tore the country apart. But the amazing thing now is that there isn’t division about it. I do believe that most of our country’s divisions stem from the time of the war and the protests about civil and related rights, but I don’t think they are about the war itself anymore. And I think the main reason for that is we were able to process that in the presence of that memorial. It’s very abstract. It’s about the individuals who died in the war. 

I was opposed to the war and had no use for people who went to Vietnam. I thought that was morally terrible. But I went to the memorial and I cried. There were these families who lost someone processing the pain and suffering. And there you are, and you’re a human being, and you’re susceptible to empathy and emotional contagion. And you find yourself starting to cry. That’s how you begin to process that kind of thing. I think we have very little that can play that role in the case of slavery and its legacy institutions. I think it’s got to be a whole bunch of stuff. Memorials can play a big role, but I don’t think you do that by itself. You’ve also got to take responsibility, and that involves reparations.