By ANDREW STARK
It was all a bit confusing. When President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, he declared her capacity for "empathy" to be among her most vital and valuable qualities. Democratic Sen. Herb Kohl, for his part, praised Ms. Sotomayor's "sense of compassion." Her opponents, meanwhile, like the conservative analyst Diana Schaub, argued that "pity" had no place in the courtroom. For Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, it was "sympathy" that didn't belong there.
Only within a charged debate over a judicial nominee could terms like empathy, compassion, sympathy and pity get bandied about quite so interchangeably. In normal life, the terms carry profoundly different meanings, and happily so: It says something about the core of our humanity that mankind possesses such a diverse palette of fellow feeling.
One way of grasping the range of such feeling is to view our world from the perspective of the animal kingdom. For such an undertaking there are few better guides than Frans de Waal, a biologist at Emory University who studies altruistic behavior among primates. In "The Age of Empathy," Mr. de Waal takes aim at all those economists and biologists who, over the centuries, have argued that human beings are essentially a selfish, cut-throat species, interested in nothing but individual survival and success.
Mr. de Waal makes his case indirectly, offering evidence not of human but of animal altruism—Bengal tigers that nurse piglets, bonobo apes that help wounded birds to fly, seals that rescue drowning dogs—and then asks rhetorically: If animals are so innately caring, can humans be any less so? Mr. de Waal's stories of animal behavior are nothing short of fascinating. Who would expect that a rhesus monkey will forgo the opportunity for food if pulling the chain that delivers it will electrically shock a companion? Mr. de Waal is perfectly happy to agree with the philosopher Thomas Hobbes that "man is wolf to man," as long as we remember that wolves are creatures who comfort one another after outbreaks of aggression.
Such stories from the animal kingdom may well imply that we humans are naturally more altruistic than we think. But Mr. de Waal does not stop there. He sees a deep equivalence between humanity's fellow feeling and the animal version. "The story of empathy," he writes—referring to the emotional awareness of how one would feel in a fellow creature's situation—"means that even our most thoughtful reactions to others share core processes with the reactions of . . . elephants, dogs and rodents."
The Age of Empathy
By Frans de Waal
Harmony, 291 pages, $25.99
Is this so? A chimp may exhibit empathy by licking another's chimp's wounds, but surely humankind's "most thoughtful reactions" go well beyond this. Like debaters rating a judicial nominee, Mr. de Waal at times blurs the distinction between empathy and other, more evolved, reactions to the distress of others.
Imagine that your old college roommate recently lost $50 million with Bernie Madoff. If you happen to be a poet who has renounced all material pursuits, you might have difficulty summoning up much empathy. To feel what your friend feels, you're going to have to bring to mind something that causes you as much pain as the lost millions causes him: say, having the poem you've been working on for 10 years rejected by the New Yorker. There is a word for this strategy, whereby we feel what another feels not by imagining ourselves in his situation but by imagining ourselves in circumstances that might produce his feelings. The word is "compassion."
Compassion gets a bad rap because it is redolent of sentimentality or the triteness of the method actor who, in order to choke up for a scene when his wife leaves him, recalls the time when his school friends stuffed him in his locker. Yet compassion expands humankind's emotional reach. Kuni, the bonobo ape that spread a wounded bird's wings and sent it flying, might have had a rudimentary cognitive sense of what birds are supposed to do. But there is no reason to believe that Kuni is imagining how she would feel if she were no longer able to swing from trees.
Empathy and compassion do share one quality, though. In both cases, what we are responding to are our own painful feelings or difficult situations, which happen to have been brought to mind by our exposure to those of another. But human beings are also capable of sympathy and pity—two states of mind that are considerably more impressive and, for the purposes of comparing humans and other primates, more distinctive.
When we sympathize with someone anguishing over the loss of $50 million, we do not feel his pain as if it were our own. Yet we are still able to summon up a response of concern and care. Pity is like sympathy, except that it responds not to the distraught feelings of someone else but to his dire situation. Thus we can pity someone who, though in a dire situation, is too deluded to feel distraught (which is why Mr. T said "I pity the fool," not "I sympathize with the fool"). With pity, too, we are capable of responding with care and concern without having to imagine ourselves in similar circumstances.
Mr. de Waal offers no conclusive argument that animals are capable of shifting their focus in such a way: to the feelings and situations of others and away from their own. So, yes, a chimpanzee that licks another's wounds could, as Mr. de Waal says, be empathizing: sensing that it could be he who is in his companion's place. But by suggesting that human fellow feeling is merely a variant of this innate animal response—by claiming that "leveling waves" are effacing the differences between humans and animals—Mr. de Waal goes too far. In his quest to rescue humankind from the charge of innate selfishness, he isn't generous enough: He sells us short.
Mr. Stark is the author of "The Limits of Medicine."
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