Epistemic Injustice and Epistemic Trust

Draft. Do not quote without permission. Submitted to the journal Social Epistemology, August 2011.

Miranda Fricker has introduced in the philosophical debate the insightful idea of epistemic injustice to address a series of asymmetries of power within the “credibility economy” of a testimonial exchange. In this paper, I will focus mainly on the first kind of epistemic injustice she discusses: Testimonial injustice. According to Fricker: “The basic idea is that a speaker suffers a testimonial injustice just if prejudice on the hearer’s part causes him to give the speaker less credibility than he would otherwise had given” (p.4). Although she acknowledges various sources of testimonial injustice, she concentrates her analysis on what she considers as the core case of this kind of epistemic injustice, that is, when identity prejudices bias the hearer’s acceptance of a speaker’s word. Here, I will challenge two main points of her account: (1) I will argue that the ways in which our credibility judgements are biased go far beyond the central case of identity prejudices and (2) that the weight we give to our prejudicial biases crucially depends on the stakes of the testimonial context.

1. The Moon Landing Case: Why do you believe it?

One of the most well known variants of conspiracy theories is that no man stepped on the Moon in 1969 and that the entire Apollo program - which realized six landings on the Moon between 1969 and 1972 and was shut down in 1975 – was a fake. The initiator of the conspiracy theory was Bill Kaysing, who worked as a librarian at the Rocketdyne company - where the Saturn V rocket engines were built – and published in 1974 at his own expenses the book: We never went to the Moon. America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle[1]. After the publication, a sort of movement of sceptics grew and started to collect evidence about the alleged hoax. According to the Flat Earth Society, one of the groups who denies the facts, the landings were staged by Hollywood with the support of Walt Disney and under the artistic direction of Stanley Kubrick. Most of the “proofs” they provide are based on an accurate analysis of the pictures of the various landings. The shadows’ angles an are inconsistent with the light, the American flight blows even if there is no wind on the Moon, the tracks of the steps are too precise and well-preserved for a soil in which there is no moisture. Also, isn’t it suspicious that a program that involved more than 400,000 people for 6 years was shut down abruptly? And so on. The great majority of people we consider reasonable and accountable (myself included) usually dismiss these claims by laughing at the very absurdity of the hypothesis (although there have been serious and documented responses by the NASA against these allegiances). Yet, if I ask myself on which evidential basis I believe that there has been a Moon landing, I have to recognize that my evidence is quite poor, and I have never spent a second trying to debunk the counter-evidence cumulated by these people. What I know about the fact mixes confused child’s memories, black and white old TV news and deference to what my parents told me about the landing in the following years. Still, the cumulated evidence doesn’t make me hesitate about the truth of my beliefs on the matter. That is because my reasons to believe that the Moon landing has taken place go far beyond the evidence I can gather about this fact. I trust a democracy such as the United States to have certain standards of sincerity and accuracy, I have beliefs about the possible interests that US could have had in mounting a hoax (competition with USSR, display of technological superiority…), and don’t find them compelling to justify such a immensely costly operation. I can also reason about the very possibility of keeping the secret of the hoax for a program that involved more than 400 000 workers… Also, I have prejudices about a certain stereotype of information - conspiracy theories - that make me doubt about the credibility of their promulgators. In a sense, I am paying an epistemic injustice towards these people, judging them less credible not on the basis of my “epistemic superiority”, rather on the basis on an alleged superiority in values and beliefs about how a reasonable society conducts itself. My prejudices cause me to give to the conspiracy theorists less credibility that I would otherwise have given them.

Am I right or wrong in committing this injustice? And is my prejudice working just as a sort of social perception of this category of people that weakens my trustfulness in what they say, or is it a more complex attitude in which a mixture of stereotypes, societal beliefs, values, deference to various epistemic and moral authorities (my parents, my community of peers, the United States) and a bit of rational inference?

This example illustrates the two main points I want to address here. The amount of trust we allocate to our interlocutors depends on many factors: a complex of judgements, heuristics, biased social perceptions and previous commitments we rarely take the time to unpack when we face the decision to accept or reject a piece of information. The accuracy in pondering these factors and the epistemic vigilance[2] we invest in monitoring the information that comes from others depend on various orders of stakes that can raise or lower according to the context of the exchange.

Take another example, that in Fricker’s perspective, could be cast as a case of a prejudicial dysfunction that creates a credibility excess. I read on a pack of cigarettes: Smoking kills. I am inclined to believe that it is true. On what basis do I believe this? I often start my classes in social epistemology by gathering reasons students have to believe in it. I have come up with three main sets of reasons students systematically give: (1) It is true that smoking kills because I know people who smoked and were seriously ill. (2) It is true because I, myself, was a smoker and my health was much worse. (3) It is true because there exists scientific evidence that has established the fact. Of course, no one of these three classes of “reasons” is an appropriate candidate to justify my belief that smoking kills. (1) is based on a spurious sample of people (people whom I know) that is statistically irrelevant., (2) is based on introspection and (3) is based on a blind deference to scientific authority: usually, if I push my students further, they confess they have never read scientific articles on the subject matter, but just make the hypothesis that they must exist in order to justify the anti-smoke policy. Of course, if I push even further, I sometimes obtain a more satisfactory answer, like: printing a text on each pack of cigarettes means having access to a special privilege of communication, that is conceded in very special circumstances: it is obviously an obligation of the tobacco company to put it on each pack: no company would voluntary advertise its product by saying that it kills. In Europe, this is a legal obligation that has been introduced at the beginnings of the Nineties (1991 in France). The fact that the obligation is legally reinforced by the Ministry of Health, justifies the inference that, given that the Ministry of Health has the objective of preserving the health of the citizens of its country, the messages should be based on sound scientific evidence. So, it is our trust in the benevolence of our institutions, in this case the various European Ministries of Health, that makes us believe that smoking kills.

As the examples show, credibility deficits and credibility excesses are not just based on prejudices - even if there may be a prejudicial component in the credibility assessment – but on complex values, cognitive inferences and emotional commitments that are at the basis of our epistemic trust[3].

I define Epistemic trust as an attitude with two basic components: a default trust that is the minimal trust we need to allocate to our interlocutors in order for any act of communication to succeed, and a vigilant trust, that is, the complex of cognitive mechanisms, emotional dispositions, inherited norms, reputational cues we put at work while filtering the information we receive[4]. Let me try to make this distinction clearer. I do not see the relation between default trust and vigilant trust as an opposition between a Reidean (non-reductionist) attitude towards testimonial information and a Humean (reductionist) attitude. Default trust and vigilant trust are deeply related: in most epistemic situations we do not choose to trust: we just don’t have the choice. Thus, a default trustful attitude towards communicated information is possible insofar there exist cognitive mechanisms, emotional dispositions, inherited norms, etc., that make us epistemically vigilant. In a sense, we may say that we “trust our vigilance”: that is why we can take the risk of a default trustful attitude: because we have developed (at various levels: evolutionary, cultural, institutional, etc.) various heuristics of epistemic vigilance. Default trust and vigilant trust are deeply related in many interesting ways through more of less reliable strategies[5]. We do not constantly check these strategies, and trust ourselves in relying on robust enough heuristics. Sometimes we are right and sometimes we are wrong. We take the responsibility to check the reliability of our epistemic vigilance when the stakes are high. For example, in normal situations, the stakes related to the Moon landing for my life are quite limited. But if I were an American citizen and were called to vote on the possibility of re-opening the Apollo program, which would imply a huge public investment of money, then I’d be probably more vigilant about the veracity of the facts and the feasibility of the program.

Sometimes we can raise our vigilance by a closer inspection of the data, sometimes by interrogating ourselves about the sources of our trust or mistrust, and sometimes by refining our cognitive heuristics. Take another example. In the Oscar-awarded movie Slumdog Millionnaire, Jamal is a poor guy from the slums of Bombay who, for a series of fortuitous events, ends up participating into a popular TV show: Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire? This gives him the chance, if he answers correctly to the last question, to earn 20 millions rupees, an enormous amount of money in India, equivalent to almost half a million dollars.

The last question is about baseball: Who was the best baseball champion of all times? Although Jamal had answered correctly to all the previous questions because they were somewhat oddly related to his past, he doesn’t have a clue for this last question. The answer’s options are four: A, B, C, D. He can use a “joker” and reduce the choice of answers from four to two. He does it and ends up with two possible answers: B and D. The suspense is really high: he can either earn 20 millions rupees or loose all money he won until that moment. The whole country is watching him. Before his final answer, a commercial break is scheduled. The presenter, a TV star, goes to the toilets. Jamal is already there. He writes the letter B on the mirror of the toilets and leaves. Jamal sees the letter. Is B the right answer? Should he trust the presenter? When they come back and the presenter asks him to choose between B or D, he says, convinced: “D”. “Are you sure?” asks the presenter. “Is it your last word?” Yes, he is sure. And he is right. The answer is D, and now he is a millionaire. Why didn’t he trust the presenter? He didn’t have any cues about the answer, and the presenter knew it. Wouldn’t have been more reasonable to trust him? Whatever reasons he may have had for mistrust him, he has surely reasoned a lot before answering. That is to show that he has used some heuristics in order to be vigilant in a situation in which he had no information. His heuristics go far beyond mere prejudice, even if they can contain some prejudicial element. For example, a possible interpretation of his choice is the following. During the commercial break, when the two meet at the toilet, the presenter tells him that he also was a guy from the slums and became rich and famous. Maybe Jamal’s heuristics is something like “Do not trust people like me” or “Do not trust people that come from the slums”. In a sense, there is a component of prejudice in his choice: people from the slums are unreliable, they would do whatever they can to mislead you, etc. etc., but that is not the whole story. The philosopher Alvin Goldman has suggested that his heuristics was perfectly rational: he just didn’t believe it could be in the interest of a TV presenter to make the TV spend 20 millions rupees[6]. But no matter why he has come to decide to answer: “D”, what is important for my point is that he reasoned about his choice and used various heuristics, prejudicial information, inferences and emotional cues to come up with what he decided to say.

To sum up: The common denominator of all these various examples is that we have to reason in different ways to come to trust or not what is said. These are examples of testimonial beliefs, things that we believe because we trust the source of information.

Still, we do not passively trust, rather, we use various inferential strategies to work out a vigilant attitude towards our informants and the content they inform us about. The central case of testimonial injustice, prejudicial injustice - that Fricker presents in her book- is among these inferential strategies. Although its importance in the credibility economy, especially of the face-to-face communication is undeniable, I consider it as part of a set of multiple strategies, whose reliability and justification varies in context, that we make us epistemically vigilant of the social world around us.

In the second part of this paper, I will try to detail some these strategies, and explore the conditions under which we make an epistemically responsible use of them[7]. When we are actively vigilant, when we are aware of the heuristics and biases we are using in order to filter information, we can take a responsible vigilant attitude, at least in two ways:

1. External Vigilance:

a. I take an epistemically vigilant attitude towards the information I accept trying to unpack the practices, principles, etc. I endorse in order to accept it (how I trust, which heuristics do I use, which norms)

b. I try to pry apart “valid” practices and heuristics from those that are based on psychological biases, internalized norms of authority and conformism, moral commitments and emotional reactions.

2. Internal Vigilance

a. I take a certain “distance” from the objects of my beliefs, and situate them within a genealogy and a social history of their emergence and impact in my cognitive life.

b. That is, being epistemic vigilant towards my own beliefs is a way of maintaining a “critical stance” on the reasons, the institutional biases, the social pressures that make concepts, biases and prejudices emerge and thrive in my way of thinking. If I take the time to ask myself: “Why people should trust what I say?” I take a responsible vigilant stance towards my epistemic practices.

Note that the dose of vigilant/default trust we activate in filtering what other people say depends on our own aims, as I hope it is shown by my previous examples. Most of the knowledge we happen to acquire through communication “falls” on us even if we don’t need it. As Samuel Johnson wrote: “If it rained knowledge I’d hold out my hand; but I would not give myself the trouble to go in quest of it” [8]. That is to say that we do not activate the same vigilance in each situation and are not requested to be responsible about our accepting or diffusing knowledge in the same way on each occasion. Even if I do not have a serious explanation on why I do believe that smoking kills, to the extent that my belief doesn’t have harmful consequences for others (like discriminative attitudes towards smokers and so on) I am entitled to believe it on trust without further inquiry. But if the stakes are higher in endorsing a belief, I should be vigilant about the mechanisms that make me endorse it and re-transmit it.

Now, what are these mechanisms? What does make us trust? I will detail here seven different sources of trust that we may monitor in ourselves and in others when we trust or present ourselves as a trustworthy source of information:

1. Inference on the subject’s reliability

2. Inference on the content’s reliability

3. Internalized social norms of complying to authority (“He is my master, thus I believe what he says…”)

4. Socially distributed reputational cues

5. Robust signals

6. Emotional reactions

7. Moral commitments

For each of these sources of trust, I’ll try to indicate some underlying social, cultural and cognitive mechanisms that sustain them. Let us start with the first.

1. Inferences on the subject’s reliability

Among the most common heuristics that make us often commit some kind of “epistemic injustice”, there are bundles of inferences we make on the subject’s reliability as a source of information. I think that Fricker’s central case of testimonial injustice, that is, prejudice, falls into this category. But it doesn't exhaust it. Here is a possible list of inferences on the subject’s reliability:

1.1. Contextual signs of reliability

We may infer the reliability of our informant by simply rapidly judging her better epistemic position: If I call my sister to know how is the weather forecast for Milan, the city where she lives, I trust her because I am able to infer her contextual reliability on the subject matter, given her better epistemic position. If I follow on Twitter someone who is based in Cairo and reports about the aftermaths of the revolution, I do it because I think he is in a better epistemic position than I am[9]. Another example of contextual sign of reliability can be having the appearances of a “local” if I am asking directions in a town that I do not know. Of course, I may be wrong about these signs: My sister can give me just a superficial information about the weather by looking out of the window, while by searching with Google I can have a much more detailed forecast, the guy in Cairo can be strongly ideologically biased and send on Twitter only information that contributes to a certain distorted vision of the situation, and my local informant can be as foreigner as I am, but just “look” as a local. But in all these cases, it seems at least prima facie reasonable to make these inferences.

1.2. Previous beliefs (among which prejudices)

The social world doesn’t come to us as a tabula rasa, but as a complex landscape, with a variety of statuses, positions, hierarchies and various kinds of cultural information. All our “folk sociology”[10] plays a role in assessing the default’s reliability of our informants. The heuristics Jamal uses to assess the reliability of his informant - the presenter - is a folk-sociological heuristic of the kind I am listing here: “Do not trust someone who comes from the slums”. Prejudices are heuristics of this kind. They can have a strong perceptual component, as Fricker points out (such as skin color, accent, or visible signs of belonging to a certain cultural identity), but not necessarily. I remember I came up with a lot of interesting generalizations about the character of Estonian people when I met a colleague who came from the University of Tallin, to end up discovering he was from Ecuador, working in Estonia. Many inferences can be more folk-psychological, like the fundamental attribution error, a well-known bias in social psychology according to which people tend to attribute causes of behaviour to the character of a person instead of attributing to the situation they observe[11]. They all work as “quick and dirty” heuristics to assess the credibility of an interlocutor.

1.3. Acknowledged expertise

Our assessment of the subject’s reliability can be based on her past record, and her earned expertise on a certain subject matter. Sometimes we control these records, like for example when we trust a friend who has been trustworthy in the past. Sometimes we base our own assessment of other people’s expertise on other people’s judgments and on various reputational cues I will analyze in a separate section.

2. Inferences on the content’s reliability

Some contents are straightforwardly credible, like a self-evident sentence such as: “I am not illiterate”. Some others are impossible to believe such as someone saying: “I am mute”. Thus content provides cues for credibility[12]. Of course, in most cases, cues for credibility are more complex to detect and require an inferential effort on the side of the hearer.

2.1. The pragmatics of trust

In previous works have argued for a “pragmatic” approach to trust, that is: the dose of default trust we are willing to invest in an informational exchange follows some pragmatic rules. In line with Gricean and post-Gricean approaches to pragmatics[13], I claim that our default trust is related to the relevance of what the speaker says: If she is not relevant to us, that is, the effort required to interpret what she says is not balanced with the cognitive benefits we may acquire by listening to her, our default trust decreases. Relevance of what is said is an important cue of content reliability. In previous works, I gave some examples of this adjustment between relevance and trust. Take the case of a mother who is systematically late to pick up her children at school. The teacher is really annoyed about this. On day she feels so guilty of being late, that she comes up with a complex justification for the teacher: “I was in the underground and it was stopped for half an hour for a technical problem, then, while I was going out, I met an old friend who told me he had been seriously ill…” The teacher finds the explanation too long: too many details that are not relevant for her. Her default trust decreases as long as the mother goes on with her complex story[14].

2.2. Sound arguments as a cue for trustworthiness

Mercier and Sperber (2011) have argued that the very capacity of human reasoning has a function of epistemic vigilance, that is, to produce convincing arguments whose structure is credible for the hearer[15]. We make inferences about the reliability of content, sometimes biased inferences, as in the case in which we judge more reliable a piece of content because it confirms what we already believe (a bias psychologists call “confirmation bias”).

To sum up, content bears signs of credibility that depends not only on evidence, but on the way it is structured and transmitted.

3. Internalized social norms of complying to authority

3.1. Deference to authority

Our cognitive life is pervaded of partially understood, poorly justified, beliefs. The greater part of our knowledge is acquired from other’s people spoken or written words. The floating of other people’s words in our minds is the price we pay for thinking. Most of the time we accept these beliefs in a “deferential” way: that is, even if we do not understand them perfectly, we think we have reason to accept them because the speaker is an authority for us. Consider this case. At high-school in Italy many years ago I heard my teacher of Latin say: “Cicero’s prose is full of synecdoches”[16]. I had a vague idea of what a synecdoche was, and ignored until then that one could characterize Cicero’s writing in this way. Nevertheless, I relied on my teacher’s intellectual authority to acquire the belief that Cicero’s prose is full of synecdoches, and today have a more precise idea of what my teacher was talking about. Or consider another example. I used to believe that olive oil is healthier than butter as a condiment. This was for me commonsense and I never thought it was possible to challenge it, since I moved from my country of origin, Italy, to France, and I realized that my stubbornness in believing this was based on ancient and almost unconscious commitments to the authority of my culture, deference to my mother and grandmothers, not on any particular evidence[17].

One of the main reasons we have for trust someone or strongly hold a belief is related to our deferential relations to various authorities, such as family, culture, mentors, institutions, etc. For example, many “folk-epistemological” beliefs about food, healing practices, education, are entrenched in ancient loyalties we are committed to since our childhood. These “unreal loyalties”, as Virginia Woolf used to call them, are very difficult to challenge: We pay a price to our identity when we change our mind about them.

3.2. Natural pedagogy

Some psychologists claim that we are “wired” to learn cultural information from authorities, and trust them even when we do not fully understand what they are telling us[18]. Contexts of cultural learning would then be those in which we trust someone because of his or her position of epistemic authority on us, independently of the nature of the content of the information we are about to acquire. Csibra and Gergely (2009) call this disposition a “natural pedagody”, that is, a capacity to allocate a higher default trust to some informants in accordance to the position of authority they have towards us. This is typical of learning situation, especially in infancy: in this perspective, children should not be seen as gullible: their disposition to trust is an heuristic that allow them to learn faster than what they could learn by trials and errors or by trying to wholly understand the meaning or the function of what they are learning.

3.3. Conformism

Conformism is not only the vice of those who uncritically conform to the custom, but also a powerful cognitive strategy to minimize risks in accepting new information. In social psychology, the study of influence shows that people tend to comply with the dominant view[19].

Evolutionary social psychologists such as Boyd, Richerson and Henrich, have more recently argued that conformism could be an evolutionary strategy: they claim that humans are endowed with a “conformist bias” that make them easily adopt the dominant views, thus quickly acquiring the social information available[20]. The “Twitter Mind” of followers/leaders is built on a robust heuristics that make us spare time in gathering reliable information: the more a belief spreads and is held by authorities, the safer is to trust in it.

3.4. Social Norms

Trust and trustworthiness are also claimed to be social norms[21]. There are people, institutions or practices that we are expected to trust if we comply with the norms of our group. Bicchieri et al. (2011) have experimental evidence that show that our normative expectations on other people’s behaviour are on trustworthiness and not on trust: we do not expect others to trust, but to be trustworthy in some circumstances[22]. There are nonetheless cases of epistemic trust that are based on normative expectations on both sides: speakers are expected to be trustworthy and hearers are expected to trust. Take the publishing format of peer-reviewed journals: given that papers that appear in those journals are inspected by reviewers before publication, we, as members of the academic community, are expected to trust peer-reviewed journals and colleagues who publish on them are expected to be trustworthy (i.e. not cheating on data, not plagiarize other authors etc.)[23]. Credibility economies thus can be regulated by social norms of trust and fairness we are willing to comply to in an epistemic community.

4. Socially distributed reputational cues

Reputation is usually defined the social information our patterns of actions leave around[24]. It can crystallize through time into “seals of approval” or “seals of quality” that become easily readable labels of reliability. In a narrower, epistemic sense, a reputation is the set of social evaluative beliefs that have been cumulated around a person, an item or an event. For example, a doctor’s reputation is the set of positive or negative beliefs that have spread around her conduct. The way in which these reputations are formed and maintained is very context-dependent and is also influenced by the formal dynamics of social networks, that are often used to model reputation. For example, in the case of doctors, the fact of being the doctor of a well considered friend raises the reputation of the doctor as a “good doctor”.[25] Reputations have an epistemic value as a cue of reliability. They are social information that can be used as a proxy of trustworthiness. In absence of direct information we rely on these proxies to assess the reliability of a person, an item or a piece of information[26]. The use of reputational cues as social cues of trustworthiness and the dynamics that affect, positively or negatively, reputations, as well as the biases that underlie these dynamics (i.e. notorious effects such as the well known Mathiew effect in social networks) are an exciting new field of research that has a potential huge relevance for the understanding of the credibility economies.

5. Robust signals

Among the strongest cues of reliability we use to assess the credibility of persons and items of information, there are robust signals, that is, signals that are difficult to fake. The theory of signalling is a body of work in evolutionary biology, economics and sociology[27] that interprets some animal and human behaviours and strategies as signals aiming at communicating information about oneself to the social surrounding. The most reliable signals are those that are difficult to fake, that is, that are too costly to be easily mimicked by others who don’t possess the quality the signals are supposed to indicate. The best way to seem someone who speaks English with an Italian accent is to be Italian. The best way to signal that you are a credible scientist is to be credible: publishing in a top journal such as Nature is a robust signal because it is very difficult to fake. In communication, we make use of robust signals as proxies to assess the reliability of our informants. Of course, the “robustness” of robust signals can be faked as well sometime, and the criteria on which we judge a signal as costly may be manipulated. But it is a strong heuristics we rely upon.

6. Emotional reactions

Sometimes we trust others for no reason, just because something deeply emotional tells us to let us go and give our confidence to a stranger. That old woman who reminded me of my grandmother and to whom I confided my pains of love in a train; that young, smiling boy whom I asked to take care of my kids while I was trying to fix the car in the middle of nowhere in Sicily… No reasons, no heuristics: just a strong, emotional reaction that here we can let ourselves go. Well-known experiments by the psychologists Willis and Todorov (2006)[28] found that a fleeting exposure to faces was sufficient for forming judgments of trustworthiness, and that further exposure simply reinforced the rapidly formed judgments. The “first impression” effect is something we often use in assessing the credibility of others and it is based on deep emotional reactions.

7. Moral commitments

It is difficult not to trust those towards whom we feel a normative commitment, as it is difficult not to honour their trust. As in the case 3 - trust as a social norm - sometimes we trust others because we are morally committed to them, even if we do not have reasons to trust them. A mother who trusts her addicted child not to take drug anymore just because she has promised to trust her, doesn’t have any evidence on which she bases her trust, but she is morally committed through her promise. A child who believes her father to be sincere and honest may trust him just because she is morally committed to respect a certain hierarchical relation with him, therefore not to challenge his ideas and point of view. Sometimes challenging our moral commitments to trust some people and ideas in our community can have a too high price and disrupt some fundamental beliefs in our identity. That is why it is so difficult to get rid of these commitments, these “unreal loyalties” as I called them, using Virginia Woolf’s expression, in § 3.

Conclusion

Credibility economies are regulated by many different biases, institutional processes and cognitive strategies that end up in distributing trust among the participants into a communicational exchange. I have tried to detail some of these mechanisms, and claimed that the central epistemic injustice, that is, testimonial injustice based on prejudice that Fricker is pointing to in her book, is one among this variety of mechanisms. Trust is an epistemic commodity. The dose of trust and distrust that makes us cognitively fit to our societies is a nuanced mixture of sound and unsound heuristics we should be more aware of.

References

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[1] Cf. B. Kaysing (1974/1981) We never went to the moon, Desert Publications, Cornville, Arizona. I thank Achille Varzi for an insightful conversation at Columbia University, NY, in May 2010 about trust and the case of Moon landing.

[2] On the notion of epistemic vigilance, see D. Sperber, G. Origgi et al (2010) Epistemic Vigilance, Mind and Language, vol. 25.

[3] On the notion of epistemic trust see Origgi (2004, 2008, 2011).

[4] Cf. G. Origgi (2010) Default Trust and Vigilant Trust, paper presented at the EPISTEME conference, Edinburgh, June 19^th, 2010.

[5] Cf. Sperber et al. cit (2010).

[6] Cf. Personal communication with Alvin Goldman after my presentation of the same example during the EPISTEME workshop in Edinburgh, June 19^th 2010.

[7] On the idea of “Epistemic Responsibility” see G. Origgi, this journal: “Epistemic Vigilance and Epistemic Responsibility in the Liquid World of Scientific Publications”.

[8] In J. Bowell (1791) The Life of Samuel Johnson, book V.

[9] Cf. On this point Richard Foley, (2001) Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others, Cambridge University Press.

[10] On the notion of Folk Sociology, cf. L. Kauffman & F. Clément (2007) “How Culture comes to Mind” Intellectica, 2, 46, pp. 1-30.

[11] Cf. L. Ross, R. Nisbett (1991) The Person and the Situation, MacGraw Hill, New York.

[12] Cf. Sperber (2010) cit., p. 374.

[13] Cf. P. Grice (1990) Studies in the Ways of Words, Harvard University Press; D. Sperber, D. Wilson (1986/95) Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

[14] Cf. G. Origgi (2008) “A Stance of Trust” in M. Millàn (ed.) (2008) Cognicion y Lenguaje, Universidad de Cadiz, Spain, ISBN: 9788498281873.

[15] H. Mercier, D. Sperber (2011) “Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory”, Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 34, pp. 57-111.

[16] This example is a reformulation of a Francois Recanati’s example in his paper: “Can We Believe What We Do Not Understand?” Mind and Language, 1997, that I have discussed at length in another paper: “Croire sans comprendre”, Cahiers de Philosophie de l’Universite de Caen, 2000. The problem of deferential beliefs was originally raised by Dan Sperber in a series of papers: “Apparent Irrational Beliefs”, “Intuitive and Reflexive Beliefs” Mind and language, 1997.

[17] On commonsensical beliefs and deference to authority, cf. G. Origgi (2008) “What is in my Common Sense?” Philosophical Forum, 3, pp. 327-335.

[18] Cf. Csibra, G. and Gergely, G. (2009) “Natural pedagogy”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13, 148–53.

[19] For a classical study on this issue, cf. S. Milgram (1974) Obedience to Authority, an Experimental View, New York, Harper and Row.

[20] Cf. Boyd, R. and Richerson, P. J. (1985) Culture and the Evolutionary Process, Chicago: Chicago University Press; Henrich, J. and Boyd, R. (1998) “The evolution of conformist transmission and the emergence of between-group differences”, Evolution and Human Behavior, 19, 215–241.

[21] Cf. J. Elster (1979) Ulysses and the Syrenes, Cambridge University Press; C. Bicchieri (2006) The Grammar of Society, Cambridge University Press.

[22] C. Bicchieri, E. Xiao, R Muldoon (2011) “Trustworthiness is a social norm, but trust is not” , Philosophy, Politics and Economics, 00, pp. 1-18.

[23] For an analysis of epistemic vigilance in the case of scientific publications, see G. Origgi (2010), cit., this journal.

[24] Cf. J. Coleman (1990) Foundations of Social Theory, Harvard University Press, part II, ch. 12.

[25] For a social network analysis of reputation, see Kenneth H. Clark (2010) Reputation, Oxford University Press. For an epistemology of reputation, see my “Designing Wisdom Through the Web: Reputation and the Passion of Ranking” in H. Landermore, J. Elster (eds) (in press) Collective Wisdom, Cambridge University Press.

[26] Swedberg defines proxies in the following way: “Human beings are able to make important judgments about some topic X, by relying on some proxy sign or proxy information about X, that we may call Y.1 In some cases we go so far as to base our acts exclusively on Y, assuming then that it properly reflects X. This means that we have confidence in Y” (Swedberg, 2010)

[27] Cf. A. Zahavi (1977) “The cost of honesty”, Journal of Theoretical Biology 67: 603-605; D. Gambetta, M. Bacharach (2001) “Trust in signs”. In K. Cook (ed.) Trust and Society, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 148–184. One could claim that the sociological 1899 classic by Thorstein Veblen, The Thory of the Leisure Class, in which he advances the hypothesis that conspicuous consumption is a way of signalling status, lays the foundation of the contemporary signalling theory.

[28] Cf. Willis, J., & Todorov, A. (2006) “First impressions: Making up your mind

after a 100-ms exposure to a face” Psychological Science, 17, 592–598.

L'empathie est-elle une compétence sociale ?

Draft. Do not quote without permission. Submitted for the book: "L'empathie" edited by Alexandre Gefen and Jean-Marie Schaeffer.

Gloria Origgi – CNRS – Institut Nicod

L’Empathie est-elle une compétence sociale ?

Parfois, les choses se mettent à avoir une délicatesse monstrueuse à laquelle on ne s’attendait pas.

Herta Müller, La bascule du souffle, p.82

Considérons la situation sociale suivante. Je suis à l’aéroport, j’attends impatiente de pouvoir m’enregistrer sur mon vol. Une voix sèche, métallique annonce d’un haut-parleur qu’une grève improvisée des contrôleurs aériens menace mon départ. Les gens autour de moi s’agitent, on ne sait pas si notre vol pourra décoller. Les personnes se pressent autour du comptoir d’enregistrement, posent des questions au personnel. L’anxiété augmente, la file devient désordonnée, les émotions des passagers se font de plus en plus fortes, visibles. Une dame d’un certain âge à coté de moi panique : elle trébuche, perd l’équilibre, je l’aide à se relever, elle pleure : c’est la première fois qu’elle prend l’avion et elle se sent perdue. Ses états d’âme me pénètrent, la situation de stress m’a rendue transparente, je suis fatiguée, fragilisée, je ressens les émotions de la dame, elles résonnent en moi, comme si c’étaient les miennes. Elle est petite, frêle, menue, ses sanglots aigus prennent toute la place dans mon cerveau, je n’arrive pas à me concentrer sur ce qui se passe. Il y a un bébé un peu plus loin, qui répète les mêmes deux syllabes depuis le début du désordre : « Ba –dou, ba-dou, baa-dou » : son mantra devient le mien, mon attention se focalise sur ses deux syllabes, c’est une bascule dont je suis le rythme : mon corps, ma respiration se balancent. Je lâche prise sur les états d’âmes de ma voisine. La situation est de plus en plus difficile, les gens ne savent pas quoi faire, chacun cherche une stratégie : essayer de monter sur un autre vol, passer devant, protester tous ensemble. Moi, je suis dans la bascule avec l’enfant, « Ba-dou », je tremble avec la dame, tout ça devient insupportable, je veux du silence, je veux rentrer dans moi-même : les sanglots de la dame commencent à m’énerver, ainsi que la bascule linguistique du petit, je crie : « Silence ! »

Pour retrouver le calme, j’allume mon iPod, je mets les écouteurs aux oreilles, je choisis une sélection de musique classique : Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Mahler. Mais la musique est - elle aussi - trop intense : Bach parle, Mozart rigole, Beethoven tonne, Chopin pleure, Mahler creuse. J’éteins la musique, je suis épuisée, le destin de mon vol m’est indifférent, tout ce que je voudrais en ce moment serait de rentrer chez moi en silence. J’étais trop empathique.

Cette illustration initiale introduit la question que je pose dans le titre de ce chapitre : considérée aujourd’hui comme l’une des expressions essentielles de notre cognition sociale, l’empathie ne semble pourtant pas toujours faciliter nos interactions sociales.

Sans nier la valeur des recherches sur les liens entre l’empathie et les compétences sociales de notre espèce, je voudrais avancer ici une perspective différente basée sur l’analyse de trois cas qui me semblent montrer une possibilité d’extension de cette expérience au delà de l’interaction sociale : (1) l’empathie avec les choses ; (2) l’empathie avec la nature ; (3) l’empathie avec soi-même.

Mon propos ne vise pas à questionner la conception scientifique contemporaine de l’empathie, ce qui serait bien au delà de mes compétences. J’essayerai plutôt d’adresser la nuance normative qui me semble émerger de certains traitements de l’empathie en termes de compétence sociale. Il me semble que des lors que l’empathie est vue comme un ingrédient essentiel de notre cognition sociale, on a la tendance à réduire cette expérience aux interactions avec les autres personnes, et à donner une valence socialement « positive » aux réponses empathiques (qui seraient liées à l’altruisme, la coopération, etc.)[1]. Les expériences en psychologie et en neurosciences sont construites souvent à partir de cette vision restreinte de l’empathie et visent à mesurer les réactions empathiques face aux situations de stress émotionnel devant l’expérience (très souvent, douloureuse) d’une autre personne.[2] Je voudrais avancer ici une exploration philosophique, à l’aide d’exemples littéraires, d’autres formes d’expérience empathique, que j’ai énumérées dessus, et qui me semblent essentielles pour comprendre la nature spécifique de ce phénomène.

Bref excursus historique

En dépit des ses origines classiques, le mot empathie est introduit dans la philosophie et psychologie contemporaine par un élève britannique de Wilhem Wundt, Edward B. Titchener (1867-1927), dans l’effort de traduire le mot allemand Einfühlung, “sentir dedans”, qui circulait déjà au XIXème siècle dans la littérature consacrée à la philosophie de l’art et l’esthétique. Contre un certain positivisme dans l’esthétique allemande de l’époque, qui fondait l’expérience esthétique sur les données sensorielles, l’empathie avait été introduite comme une sorte de « sixième sens » une capacité à résonner avec l’objet esthétique, comme s’il était capable d’éliciter en nous un état émotionnel profond, évoqué par un détail, un mouvement, une note, et de nous mettre ainsi dans le même état que l’auteur de l’œuvre avait ressenti lors de sa création.

Dans la psychologie philosophique du début du XXème siècle, l’empathie prend une ampleur plus vaste : elle est la capacité de ‘sentir les autres’, de se mettre dans leurs états émotionnels, une forme d’imitation spontanée qui dépasse la cognition et est ancrée dans les structures profondes, motrices de notre système nerveux. Un geste, un mouvement, une expression de douleur, nous font vibrer, en nous plongeant dans le sentir de l’autre. La philosophie de la même époque, en particulier la phénoménologie, trouve dans la « faculté empathique » une voie de sortie au paradoxe de l’esprit d’autrui. Comment être sûrs que les autres sont munis, comme nous, d’un esprit, d’un enchevêtrement de pensées, d’idées, d’émotions, de sensations, de souvenirs de la même façon que nous sommes sûrs d’avoir nous-mêmes une vie mentale ? La solution cartésienne classique postule une asymétrie profonde entre nous et les autres : la connaissance de ses propres états mentaux serait directe et infaillible, tandis que l’accès aux états mentaux des autres serait indirect et inférentiel : je vois leur comportement, j’en déduis des intentions et des plans d’actions semblables à ceux qui motivent mes propres actions. La phénoménologie objecte à cette vision une appréhension immédiate de l’esprit des autres, qui ne passe pas par l’inférence. Edith Stein définit l’empathie : « une type d’acte expérientiel sui generis »[3] et Edmund Husserl la définit : « Une appréhension analogique »[4] , bref, une expérience à part.

Une science de l’empathie ?

Les neurosciences contemporaines, ainsi que la psychologie sociale, reprennent cette tradition en voyant dans l’empathie la faculté qui nous permettrait de sentir les autres comme agents, porteurs d’états intentionnels : même dans l’expérience esthétique, l’empathie ressentie avec l’œuvre serait une façon indirecte de nous mettre en contact avec l’intentionnalité de l’auteur et ses états d’âme (Batson, 1991 ; Decety & Ickes, 2009). L’empathie rentre donc aujourd’hui à plein titre dans l’ensemble des compétences qui fondent notre cognition sociale, c’est à dire la capacité humaine et d’autres espèces à lire le monde comme un monde d’êtres animés, ayant un esprit, des intentions et des émotions (Singer & Lamm, 2009). En compagnie d’autres fonctions cognitives et réponses émotionnelles, comme la compassion, l’imitation, la sympathie, la théorie de l’esprit, l’empathie serait à la base de nos compétences sociales, comme l’altruisme, la coopération et la coordination. Ancrées sur des découvertes neurologiques importantes - comme la découverte des neurones miroir, complexes neuronaux présents dans des aires motrices du cerveau, qui s’activent de lors qu’un sujet voit une certaine action ou qu’il fait cette même action[5] - les approches scientifiques contemporaines de l’empathie la considèrent comme une réponse affective immédiate à un état émotionnel, perçu ou imaginé, d’autrui. De Vignemont et Singer (2006) proposent la définition suivante :

Nous empathisons avec les autres lors que nous avons (1) un état affectif (2) qui est isomorphe à celui d’une autre personne, (3) qui est provoqué par l’observation ou l’imagination de l’état affectif de l’autre personne et (4) nous savons que c’est cet état affectif dans l’autre qui provoque le notre. [p. 435]

C’est une sorte de coordination affective avec les autres, une contagion émotionnelle qui requiert une synchronisation avec la source de notre émotion (tandis que dans beaucoup de phénomènes de contagion, nous assumons l’état émotionnel des autres sans savoir qui en est la cause). Selon plusieurs études, l’empathie comporterait une activation partagée des aires cérébrales en jeu dans des expériences sensorielles de douleur, de goût ou de dégout[6]. Ceci est montré dans le cas de la perception réelle d’une expérience comme dans le cas vicaire où on demande aux sujets de s’imaginer quelqu’un dans une situation émotionnelle particulière. Cette dimension de « sentir avec » les autres demande donc de partager beaucoup avec eux : mêmes expériences sensorielles, mêmes structures physiques. Il se peut que, du point de vue strictement neuronal, l’empathie soit ancrée à cette capacité de synchronisation émotionnelle avec un état perçu ou imaginé. Dans le reste du chapitre, j’aimerais néanmoins donner des exemples d’expérience empathique qui ne trouveraient pas une place évidente dans une description du phénomène en termes de structures et représentations partagées. Il se peut que les cas que je vais décrire, tirés surtout de la littérature, soient des sortes des dysfonctionnements émotionnels. Comme dans l’illustration qui ouvre ce chapitre, parfois le monde autour de nous résonne en nous avec trop d’intensité. Pourtant, j’espère éclairer une partie de cette phénoménologie qui me semble importante pour saisir le sens même de son nom, empatheia, en grec, qui ne signifie pas « sentir avec », mais « sentir dedans ».

Sentir les choses

Dans le roman d’Herta Müller, prix Nobel de la littérature en 2009, La bascule du respire, Léopold, le protagoniste est incarcéré pendant cinq ans dans un Lager soviétique en Ukraine. Les prisonniers peuvent de temps en temps se promener, le plus souvent pour demander l’aumône, ou échanger un morceau de charbon contre de la nourriture, dans le village ukrainien à coté du camp. Léopold frappe à une porte du village. Une femme âgée ouvre, lui donne de la soupe. Il fait froid, la soupe chaude fait couler le nez du jeune homme. La femme lui raconte qu’elle aussi a un fils dans un Lager, en Sibérie. Sa tendresse, sa générosité sont en réalité à l’égard de son fils, dont elle ressent l’expérience atroce à travers l’aspect émacié de Léopold. Léopold mange la soupe, la chaleur de la soupe, de la maison, de la dame est trop intense : l’intimité qu’elle lui impose avec son fils lointain le met mal à l’aise, il a le sentiment d’être deux personnes à la fois. La femme remarque son nez coulant, va chercher un mouchoir et, en le lui donnant, lui fait signe de le garder. Le mouchoir est blanc, propre, brodé, d’une beauté banale et émouvante en même temps. Un objet qui aurait été ordinaire dans la maison de sa famille, devient un morceau de douceur, de décor et de gentillesse. Il sort de la maison ému, n’ayant pas eu le cœur d’utiliser le mouchoir. Il le regarde et scrute le ciel autour de lui : « La beauté m’attrapa dans le mouchoir […] Le ciel courait, nuages avec leurs oreillers fourrés. Puis la lune précoce regarda avec le visage de ma mère ». La beauté du quotidien, effacée jour après jours par l’expérience effrayante du Lager, l’attrape dans le mouchoir : il sent dans cet objet comme si l’objet était lui même : le monde autour de lui dévoile une dimension émotionnelle nouvelle, il sent le ciel, les nuages, la lune au visage de sa mère. Comme Rainer Maria Rilke dans la première élégie de Duino, il se rend compte de cette « vibration qui nous emporte, nous console, nous aide »[7]. Il n’utilisera jamais le mouchoir, qui restera pendant les dernières années de son emprisonnement dans sa valise, comme une relique, protégé de la laideur du camp.

Certes, on pourrait penser que la résonance émotionnelle avec l’objet est en réalité avec un monde perdu, avec sa mère, dont le visage fait surface sur la lune. Mais on ne peut pas nier que l’expérience empathique avec les choses autour de Léopold a été provoquée par cet objet, qu’il peut éprouver à travers lui - dans lui - un monde d’émotions qui lui sont niées dans le camp. C’est un sentir dedans, une façon de toucher l’intimité des choses qui nous remet en contact avec un monde de sentiments.

Pourquoi la douleur des animaux nous fait souffrir ?

Dans le plus beau livre de l’artiste et écrivain Alberto Savinio, Ville, j’écoute ton cœur[8], il y a une description particulièrement touchante du naufrage de Nietzsche dans la folie : « L’acte qui déclara Nietzsche fou c’est qu’il avait embrassé un cheval, dans l’hiver du 1889, dans une rue de Turin. Mais ce cheval, Nietzsche ne l’embrassa pas en tant que « fou » : il avait vu le conducteur du char battre le cheval à sang. Dans cette étreinte il ya toute la passion réprimée de Nietzsche, tout son besoin d’amour, lui, non-aimé, toute sa pitié envers les hommes, les animaux, l’univers, les étoiles : tout son instinct de mère. Dans les Hommes de la Poésie, dans ces hommes qui sont aussi femmes, dans ces créatures qui portent sur le visage visible, le masque invisible et ambigu de l’Hermaphrodite, il y a aussi un mystérieux instinct de mère : et ils considèrent toutes les choses comme s’ils les avaient accouchées : Il faut comprendre leur intolérance et la pardonner. Qui peut savoir ? La « folie » de Nietzsche est peut-être sa raison suprême, sa plus haute lucidité, d’autant plus douloureuse car elle est en désaccord avec notre raison »[9].

Nietzsche sent la douleur du cheval, en ce moment il est le cheval battu, mal-aimé, souffrant. En dépit d’une vaste littérature neuroscientifique sur l’empathie chez les animaux[10], on trouve très peu d’études scientifiques sur l’expérience, pourtant assez banale, d’empathie que nous pouvons ressentir avec des êtres d’autres espèces. Voici un exemple personnel.

En me promenant dans les rues de Brooklyn dans un après-midi ensoleillé, j’ai entendu un bruit léger, presque étouffé, de quelque chose qui tombait du haut. C’était un petit oiseau qui avait tombé du nid, vieux de quelques heures à peine, sans plumes. Je me suis penchée, je l’ai regardé : il était encore vivant. J’étais pressée de rentrer à Manhattan, et j’ai poursuivis mon chemin. Mais l’image du petit oiseau me poursuivait. Alors, je me suis retournée, je l’ai pris dans les mains. Je ne savais pas quoi faire : impossible de le remettre dans le nid, quelque part en haut dans les arbres. J’ai pris d’une poubelle une tasse de café en carton, pour le mettre dedans. Mais je n’ai pas pu. L’idée de ce petit animal blessé dans la froideur d’une boîte en carton me serrait le cœur. J’ai demandé de l’aide à des ouvriers sur un chantier dans la rue. Ils m’on indiqué un cabinet vétérinaire pas loin. Je suis rentrée avec mon petit oiseau dans les mains. Il bougeait la tête, comme au ralenti, comme s’il ne comprenait pas d’où venait la douleur qu’il devait ressentir dans son corps menu. La vétérinaire américaine, pragmatique et efficace, m’a dit que ce n’était pas un cas de sa compétence et il fallait contacter le service de protection des animaux sauvages. Elle a cherché le numéro, l’oiseau s’agitait dans me mains, je sentais ses mouvements frêles dans les paumes de mes mains, son assistante est allée chercher une petite boîte avec du coton pour le mettre dedans. J’hésitais à le poser dans la boîte, je sentais que, si j’avais laissé le contact, il n’aurait pas pu survivre. Je l’ai posé enfin, en essayant de combattre l’empathie absurde que je sentais avec lui. Il a courbé le cou, un minuscule flot de sang est sorti de son bec. Lors que la vétérinaire a fini de parler au téléphone, il était mort. Je l’ai laissé dans sa boîte, son cercueil improvisé, je suis sortie du cabinet sans forces, comme si sa mort était la mienne, comme si sa peur d’être au monde depuis quelques heures était ma peur ancienne, primordiale, la peur que j’ai du ressentir à ma naissance.

Dans le roman Disgrâce, de J.M. Coetzee, le protagoniste, un professeur cynique et désabusé, après avoir vécu une série d’expériences familiales et personnelles très dures, se retrouve dans une situation particulière, il aide une vétérinaire dans la campagne sud-africaine à infliger l’euthanasie à des chiens abandonnés. Après des journées entières à tuer les chiens, il a appris à ne rien ressentir, à se concentrer sur leur mort pour qu’elle soit le moins dure possible, à leur donner : « ce qu’il n’avait plus difficulté à appeler avec son propre nom : de l’amour ». Après une journée où ils ont abattu vingt-trois chiens, il reste le temps d’en abattre un dernier. La vétérinaire voit le professeur hésiter. Il lui dit qu’il peut l’épargner encore pendant une semaine. Mais il sait que le temps viendra. Le manque de conscience de ce qu’attend l’animal bouleverse l’homme : « Ce que le chien n’est pas capable de comprendre, ce que son nez ne lui dit pas, c’est comment quelqu’un peut rentrer dans une chambre ordinaire et ne jamais en ressortir. Quelque chose se passe dans cette chambre. Quelque chose qu’on peut pas mentionner : ici l’âme est arrachée du corps ; elle est brièvement suspendue dans l’air, en se tordant : puis elle est aspirée loin et tout est fini »[11]. « Tu le laisses aller ? » demande la vétérinaire. « Oui, je le laisse ».

La tension émotionnelle qui parcourt tout le roman éclate dans cette image finale. Le lecteur qui avait tenu le coup pendant le viol de la fille, pendant les violences subies par le protagoniste, lâche toute prise, et sent la violence de la mort de ce chien comme si c’était la sienne. Un chef d’œuvre de la littérature qui est joué sur un transfert d’empathie vers un animal. Difficile de penser qu’on mette en œuvre dans ces cas un « partage de représentations » : difficile de se représenter ce que le chien se représente, ce qui n’empêche de ressentir une profonde union émotionnelle avec lui.

Peut-être c’est « l’instinct de mère » évoqué par Savinio au sujet de Nietzsche qui est en jeu dans ces expériences. Le « sentir dedans » par excellence est l’expérience de la maternité, de deux êtres qui partagent le même corps pendant neuf mois et qui sont liés par ce même ressenti du monde, qui se prolonge après leur séparation. Ce qui ne ferait pas de l’empathie une émotion typiquement féminine, bien qu’il y ait des études qui montrent une réponse empathique plus développée chez les femmes par rapport aux hommes.[12] On a tous senti dans un ventre, on est tous fils d’une séparation d’un corps qui était le notre et en même temps d’autrui. Peut-être cette expérience empathique initiale, de sentir le corps d’un autre, en dépendre pour notre survie, mais en étant si différents, est à l’origine de l’empathie : un adulte qui bouge dans un monde complexe avec dans son ventre un être in fieri, qui ne respire pas, ne mange pas avec sa bouche, nage au lieu de bouger… et en même temps les deux sont liés profondément : partagent le même système sanguin, sont faits l’un de l’autre.

L’autobiographie comme empathie envers soi-même

Je me suis interrogée souvent sur la valeur esthétique de l’autobiographie littéraire. Par cette expression, j’entends l’autobiographie écrite par un écrivain, donc j’exclus les autobiographies d’hommes politiques ou d’autres personnages publics dont les « beaux gestes » sont censés jouer un rôle exemplaire pour les lecteurs. Pourquoi serions nous portés par les enfances des écrivains, les détails sur la bonne française de la famille Nabokov, ou les secrets de la langue allemande par le jeune Canetti qui ne partageait pas cette langue avec ses parents ? Découvrir que l’enfant Nabokov avait une aptitude pour les mathématiques, que sa mère lui peignait des gouaches pour stimuler ses capacités visuelles, nous dévoilerait-il quelque chose sur l’artiste, sur ce qu’il est devenu ? Mais est-ce cette dimension de découverte de la personne derrière l’artiste qui nous touche, qui nous fait résonner dans son enfance ? Je crains que non. Ce dont l’écrivain est capable – et c’est pour ça que je distingue l’autobiographie littéraire d’autres genres d’autobiographie – c’est de re-énacter en nous des états semblables, de nous faire revivre l’expérience enfantine non pas comme souvenir, mais comme réactivation, synchronisation diachronique avec un de nos états émotionnels passés, et enregistrés quelque part dans notre amygdale. A travers la description d’un détail de l’enfance de l’écrivain, ou du narrateur, comme dans le cas de La Recherche du Temps Perdu, nous empathisons avec (éprouvons de l’empathie vis-à-vis de) nous mêmes, sommes replongés dans une configuration émotionnelle ancienne, un plan d’action endormi en nous mais toujours là. La madeleine du narrateur de La Recherche est un synchronisateur magique entre un état du présent et un état du passé : le narrateur est en phase avec son ancienne émotion, est dans cette émotion.

Dans La langue sauvée, Elias Canetti raconte le souvenir d’enfance de l’incendie d’une maison: « Les flammes l’avaient presque entièrement ravagée, des poutres s’écrasaient à l’intérieur dans un jaillissement d’étincelles. Le jour déclinait, dans la pénombre croissante le feu paraissait de plus en plus clair. Mais ce qui me faisait une impression bien plus forte que la maison embrasée, c’était les gens qui s’agitaient autour. Vu de si loin, ils avaient l’air tout petits, tout noirs. Ils étaient nombreux et couraient en tous sens […] Ce spectacle, que je n’ai jamais oublié devait se confondre plus tard avec les tableaux d’un peintre, de sorte que je ne saurais plus dire ce qui fait partie du spectacle initial, ni ce que les tableaux sont venus y ajouter. J’avais dix-neuf ans quand je me retrouvai à Vienne devant les tableaux de Brueghel. Je reconnais aussitôt les nombreux petits hommes entrevus dans l’enfance, près de la maison en feu […] La phase de ma vie correspondant à l’époque de la maison en feu trouvait un prolongement immédiat dans ces tableaux, comme si les quinze années qui les séparaient n’avaient pas existé. Breughel est devenu mon peintre préféré, mais je ne l’ai pas fait mien, comme beaucoup d’autres choses plus tard, par l’observation et la réflexion. Je l’ai trouvé en moi, à croire qu’il m’attendait là, depuis longtemps déjà, sachant que je finirais par le rejoindre. »[13]

Les tableaux de Breughel le transportent automatiquement vers son enfance. Son empathie avec le peintre c’est l’empathie avec lui-même, comme si la peinture lui donnait un accès direct à un état de lui-même, resté intacte dans ses sensations depuis des années. Les paysages encombrés de petits personnages du peintre flamand sont dans Canetti depuis son enfance : son plaisir à les regarder c’est le plaisir de retrouver un état de soi ancien, une intimité profonde, une empathie avec soi même qui va au-delà de la réflexion et même de la mémoire.

Pour conclure la section, je ferai l’exemple de ma propre expérience autobiographique. En 2008 j’ai publié en italien l’histoire de mon enfance sous la forme d’un dictionnaire des mots, d’expressions utilisées par ma famille et dans mon milieu milanais dans les années ‘70[14]. C’était un exercice en partie motivé par une exigence de retrouver une intimité avec ma langue maternelle, après plus de seize ans à l’étranger. Je l’avais commencé comme une espèce de recherche étymologique sur chaque expression bizarre, idiosyncratique. Comme une archéologue, je cherchais dans ma mémoire certaines façons de parler de ma famille, ma mère, mon père, le langage secret entre ma sœur et moi. C’était un exercice presque linguistique. Je téléphonais à ma sœur le soir pour lui demander si elle se rappelait d’une certaine façon de parler, de ce qu’elle signifiait. Mais lentement, le paysage de mon enfance a émergé : les visages, les expressions, les conversations de ceux qui n’étaient plus là, ou de ceux qui avaient tant changé depuis, défilaient devant moi comme des acteurs sur la scène d’un théâtre. J’avais du mal à me souvenir d’un mot par lequel mon père m’appelait quand j’étais très petite, trois ou quatre ans, avant le divorce de mes parents. Je tournais en rond en essayant dans la tête des mots différents, proches, mais je sentais que ce n’étaient pas celui que je cherchais. Puis, soudain le mot m’a saisie : j’écrivais d’autre chose à mon ordinateur et le mot est arrivé dans mon esprit : Gattazzo, quelque chose comme « gros chat » : la voix de mon père sifflait dans mes oreilles, le souvenir de ses lunettes noires et de l’odeur acre de sa pipe, quand il me prenait dans les bras en m’appelant « Il mio gattazzo ! », la peur que sa voix forte et son odeur de tabac suscitaient en moi étaient là, à nouveau, comme si la petite fille que j’essayais de reconstruire dans ma mémoire avait été en fait toujours là. Je sentais moi même à cet âge là, j’accédais aux sensations de cette gamine, c’était moi et autrui en même temps. J’ « empathisais » avec cette fillette : ce n’était pas de la compassion pour son enfance difficile, ni l’émergence d’une représentation de moi longtemps refoulée, comme nous apprend la psychanalyse. Je sentais dans elle, j’étais elle.

Conclusion

C’est que j’ai essayé de présenter dans ce chapitre c’est tout simplement des illustrations d’une émotion d’harmonie avec les choses et les êtres qui me semble parfois aller au delà de la saisie du monde social autour de nous. Il se peut que mes exemples soient trop distants du sens central que le mot « empathie » a aujourd’hui dans la littérature philosophique et psychologique. Il se peut également que je décris des cas limites, dans lesquels une situation de détresse personnelle nous amène à « trop sentir », à accorder une dimension empathique à des expériences qui devraient solliciter d’autres types d’émotions. J’espère néanmoins que le sens profond du « sentir dedans » qui me semble central dans cette expérience puisse résonner dans le lecteur à travers ces exemples.

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[1] Les travaux en cette direction proviennent surtout de la psychologie sociale. Voir Batson, C. D. (1991). The Altruism Question: Toward a Social Psychological Answer. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

[2] Decety, J., & Jackson, P. L. (2004). The functional architecture of human empathy. Behav. Cogn. Neurosci. Rev.,3, 71–100; Decety, J., & Lamm, C. (2006). Human empathy through the lens of social neuroscience. ScientificWorld Journal, 6, 1146–1163 ; Singer, T., Seymour, B., O’Doherty, J., et al. (2004). Empathy

for pain involves the affective but not the sensory components of pain. Science, 303, 1157–

1161.

[3] Cf. Stein, E. 1917/1980. Zum Problem der Einfühlung, München: Kaffke Verlag.

[4] Cf. Husserl, E. 1963. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

[5] Cf. Gallese, V. 2001. “The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8: 33-50.

[6] Lamm et al. 2007a; Singer 2006; Singer et al. 2004

[7] Cf. R.M Rilke Elégies de Duino, trad. de Jean-Pierre Lefebre et Maurice Regnaut, p. 35.

[8] A. Savinio, Ville, j’écoute ton coeur, Editions Gallimard.

[9] Cf. p. 13, edition italienne, Ascolto il tuo cuore città, Adelphi, Milan.

[10] Cf. S. Preston et F. De Waal (2002) “Empathy, its ultimate and proximate basis”, Behavioural and the Brain Sciences, 25, pp. 1-72.

[11] Cf. J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace, Vintage, UK, 2000, pp. 219-220. Ma traduction.

[12] Cf. Singer et Lamm, cit.

[13] Cf. E. Canetti, La langue sauvée, dans Ecrits Autobiographiques, Albin Michel, Paris, 1978, pp. 30-31.

[14] Cf. G. Origgi, La Figlia della Gallina Nera, Edizioni Nottetempo, Roma, 2008.

Filosofia per i piccoli

Copyright Il Fatto, Saturno. Do not quote or reproduce without permission

La filosofia non ha certo la reputazione di un sapere per ragazzi. I pochi insegnamenti che contemplano una formazione filosofica sono destinati agli studenti degli ultimi anni del liceo o all’università. Ciò ha sempre avuto una giustificazione pedagogica: la mente del bambino non sarebbe adatta all’istruzione filosofica. Secondo Jean Piaget, i bambini sarebbero privi delle strutture cognitive adeguate per “pensare il pensiero”, ossia per riflettere sulla loro stessa attività concettuale. Inoltre, dato che scopo dell’istruzione è dare certezze al bambino e instillargli concetti chiari e distinti con cui leggere il mondo, la filosofia sembra una pericolosa insidia, un continuo rimettere in questione i fondamenti stessi della realtà e della conoscenza.

Eppure quale genitore non si è trovato davanti a domande imbarazzanti dei propri figli, come: “Ma se Dio è dappertutto, come fa a essere dove sono io?” oppure “Se una cosa è uguale a se stessa, come fa a essere uguale a un’altra?”

La psicologia più recente, pace Piaget, sostiene che i bambini siano capaci di utilizzare categorie concettuali astratte ancor prima di apprendere il linguaggio. I lavori sullo sviluppo cognitivo di Susan Carey, Elisabeth Spelke, Alison Gopnik (si veda il suo libro: Il bambino filosofo, 2010, Bollati Boringhieri) mostrano centinaia di esperimenti in cui i bambini ragionano con categorie astratte, come oggetto, identità, causa, effetto, etc. dai primi giorni di vita.

Non sarà dunque una vecchia concezione dell’infanzia, e un antico riflesso autoritario che premia le certezze contro il dubbio a escludere i bambini dal mondo della filosofia? A giudicare dal successo dei libri di Oscar Brenifer e Jacques Desprès, sembrerebbe di sì. Oscar Brenifer è un filosofo che propone ateliers di filosofia per i bambini. I suoi libri, illustrati da Jacques Desprès e pubblicati da ISBN, sono dei veri e propri esercizi di stupore filosofico: un oggetto è uno o è una moltitudine di particelle? Una persona sola può esprimere una verità oggettiva? Il libro dei grandi contrari filosofici è organizzato intorno ad opposizioni concettuali: uno/molteplice, finito/infinito, essere/apparenza. Il libro dell’amore e dell’amicizia mostra come possano esistere punti di vista diversi su questi due sentimenti fondamentali, e Il libro del bene e del male affronta le grandi questioni etiche.

Tra i libri per bambini che vanno per la maggiore in Francia, Les Philofables di Michel Piquemal (Albin Michel), parabole filosofiche che guidano il bambino nel mondo del dubbio, del paradosso e dello spirito critico.

Come scrive Roberto Casati nella sua bella Prima lezione di filosofia (Laterza, 2011), lo sforzo di negoziazione concettuale a cui la filosofia ci costringe, la capacità di venire a patti con le proprie certezze per comprendere gli altri, è un esercizio che non ha età.

The Italian Way of "Give it Away"

La Gradisca

Now that the abnormal behaviour of the human male - especially if powerful and internationally renowned - has become a global political issue, it is important that nations share their insights on how this strange species, the male, reasons and acts. A first cue may come from examining his language. Take the Italian case. One cannot deeply understand the Italian male without a closer inspection of a basic expression that characterizes his talk: Give IT Away. Each time the Italian male faces a specimen of the other sex, the female, especially in work settings, his first legitimate question is: “The lady in front of me must have given it away to someone in order to deserve her job”. For example, I write articles for the cultural supplement of an Italian newspaper. As an online comment on one of my first contributions about the destiny of French philosophy, I have received the following question: Miss, could you please let me know whom did you give it away to in order to obtain the job at the newspaper?

Now, the reader may wonder what the mysterious it of the expression refers to. The Italian original version of the expression is Darla via, which is easier to interpret, given that the pronoun la attached to the verb dare (to give) has a feminine inflexion. The mysterious it thus refers to the sexual female organ, the vagina, given away, according to the Italians, usually in exchange of some favour. And here is the paradox of the expression: To give away evokes the release of a free act, a freeing from an obligatory economic exchange. “Give away economy” refers today to a disinterested way of distributing goods, especially software, in which the giver doesn’t expect anything in exchange. But the disinterested sexual economy evoked by the expression: Darla via doesn’t exist in the mentality of the Italian human male: women don’t give it away, rather, they give it in exchange of some favours: money, jobs, career upgrades, etc.

The contradiction may be explained by a fundamental ambiguity that the Italian male attributes to the Italian female: on the one hand, women are like pitiful Madonnas, who give away the best part of themselves just for compassion, as an act of pure love. The emblematic character that embodies this imaginary generous female is the Gradisca in the Fellini’s autobiographical movie Amarcord. Gradisca, the village beauty, just kindly offers herself and fuels the dreams of the young men of, usually forbidden and affordable at last, sexual pleasures. On the other hand, the man who indulges in the warm pleasure of the reassuring Madonna, wakes up abruptely from his dream to face a frightening whore, the Puttana, who actually was not generous and loving, but was asking for something in exchange.

So, the Give away economy of Italian sexual life is a betrayal, according to the male: women just bewitch men with their Mediterranean spell and then end up with the usual demands.

Darla via is a central expression of the Italian way of thinking. Travellers to Italy, as well as diplomats should be aware of it in order to understand the phenomenology of the Italian everyday life.

DKS: Non ci resta che ridere

Era stato oracolare Stéphane Guillon, nella sua cronaca irresistibile su radio France Inter, il 17 febbraio 2009, in cui prendeva in giro i costumi libertini del presidente del Fondo Monetario Internazionale, invitato della trasmissione 7 à 10 proprio quella mattina: “Misure eccezionali sono state prese in redazione per la visita di Dominique Strauss Kahn: la presentatrice indosserà un burka e un piano di evacuazione di tutto il personale femminile è previsto, se la situazione fosse fuori controllo. Armadi, spogliatoi e luoghi bui sono stati sigillati e le signore sono pregate di non passeggiare per i corridoi…”. Lo sketch, che potete vedere su You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QekWZCN1Xc4 non era piaciuto Strauss Kahn, ed era costato il posto al povero Guillon, accusato di aver oltrepassato i limiti e di aver mancato di rispetto al serio e rispettabile ex-ministro dell’economia francese.

Salta fuori ora che quel che Strauss Kahn faceva nel 2009 al Fondo Monetario internazionale erano noccioline rispetto a quello di cui è capace. Altro che relazioni extra-coniugali, si può fare di meglio, come saltar fuori nudo dalla vasca da bagno di un hotel di lusso di NY e mettere le mani addosso alla cameriera, o aggredire (come fece nel 2002) la giovane scrittrice francese Tristane Banon, all’epoca ventenne, figlia di una compagna deputata socialista. Strauss-Kahn accetta la proposta di intervista della Banon, le dà appuntamento in un appartamento vuoto, le salta addosso e l’intervista finisce a pugni e graffi sul pavimento, roba da far sembrare i nostri bunga bunga riunioni da oratorio…

Insomma, siamo ben al di là delle scappatelle, e entriamo nel regno della psicopatologia. Ovviamente la bella moglie Anne Sinclair difende il marito a spada tratta, e le donne del suo partito, da Ségolène Royal, a Martine Aubry, richiamano all’ordine, alla decenza (sic!) e si appellano alla “presunzione di innocenza”.

Che dire? Mettiamola così. Se “ogni donna siede sulla propria fortuna”, come ricordava il buon Ostellino in un articolo di qualche tempo fa sul Corriere della Sera, sembra che il maschio più fortunato è e meno riesca a stare seduto….

Perché andare all'università?

Uno spettro si aggira per gli Stati Uniti: e se l’università non servisse più a niente? L’idea dell’anno che fa discutere l’America su giornali, blogs e televisione è la seguente: a che serve indebitarsi fino ai denti per passare quattro anni al college? Da quando l’aria dei tempi ha invaso anche l’ultimo baluardo della ragione - l’accademia - trasformandolo in un business a tutti gli effetti, con metriche di competitività, managers, joint-ventures e politiche di espansione, un dubbio si è infiltrato nella mente del consumatore americano di conoscenza: ma varrà la pena di spendere una media di trentamila dollari l’anno, di ritrovarsi indebitati alla fine degli studi, per stare quattro anni in un hotel di più o meno lusso a fare sport, uscire con le ragazze e bere birra con gli amici?

Da sinistra e da destra, dall’esterno e dall’interno del sistema, il nuovo business universitario americano è sotto il fuoco incrociato di intellettuali, giornalisti, drop-out di successo e milionari che incoraggiano i giovani a investire il loro tempo e i risparmi dei loro genitori in un modo più utile.

Così James Altucher, imprenditore, venture capitalist, e editorialista del Financial Times, snocciola dalle colonne del suo blog (http://www.jamesaltucher.com ) le 8 alternative al college, tra le quali: gettarsi subito nell’arena e cominciare un’attività imprenditoriale. Unica regola da sapere: comprare a poco e vendere a molto. Secondo Altucher, anche se tutto va male, dopo quattro anni si saprà molto di più di dividendi, strategie commerciali, prestiti bancari etc., di quanto qualsiasi college avrebbe potuto insegnarci. E si rischia pure di aver fatto qualche soldo…Oppure: viaggiare, lavorare per un’organizzazione di beneficienza, scrivere un libro, imparare a fondo le regole di un gioco intelligente (per esempio gli scacchi), dipingere, imparare bene uno sport, recitare.

Gli fa eco Peter Thiel, miliardario high-tech, fondatore di PayPal e uno dei primi investitori entusiasti di Facebook. Libertario convinto, Thiel sostiene che l’istruzione imposta dall’alto non sia che inutile paternalismo, e ha istituito una borsa di non-studio (20 under 20: http://www.thielfoundation.org ) che dà un finanziamento di centomila dollari a venti ragazzi di meno di vent’anni che decidono di lasciar perdere l’università e cercare invece di mettere in pratica la loro idea più visionaria sotto la guida dei migliori imprenditori di Silicon Valley.

Se le posizioni estreme di Altucher e Thiel provocano reazioni indignate, la questione del valore degli studi superiori resta aperta: dopo la crisi finanziaria, la crisi immobiliare, l’America si prepara ad affrontare l’esplosione di una nuova bolla speculativa: l’università. In effetti, dati inquietanti emergono da vari studi, come il libro di Andrew Hacker e Claudia Dreifus, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids (2010, Times Book), o il rapporto dell’economista Richard K. Vedder, fondatore di un Think Tank sulla sostenibilità dell’istruzione universitaria, ripreso in un articolo del New York Times dal titolo eloquente: Plan B: Skip College? I costi delle rette universitarie sono decuplicati negli ultimi trent’anni, un aumento abnorme, confrontato all’aumento dei costi sanitari (cresciuti di sole sei volte nello stesso arco di tempo) o dell’inflazione (triplicata). In più, si tratta di un business sicuro, dato che gli investimenti nell’istruzione sono gli unici che non calano anche durante la più dura crisi economica. I rettori strapagati delle grandi università americane lo sanno bene, e approfittano delle ansie ataviche della classe media che vede nei figli laureati al college il simbolo della propria riuscita sociale e la sicurezza di un futuro migliore. Cinicamente, i grandi amministratori alzano la posta di entrata nei college esclusivi, ben coscienti che la domanda si manterrà grazie all’effetto di networking di questi club di lusso, per cui i laureati delle università della Ivy League assumono solo laureati che provengono dalle stesse università. Anche le banche sguazzano nel nuovo business: i prestiti per lo studio costituiscono un prezioso prodotto e fidelizzano una clientela di giovani che si troveranno ad avere a che fare con i rimborsi per i successivi vent’anni.

Eppure i dati mostrano che la correlazione tra carriera di successo e buoni studi universitari è scarsa. Inoltre, nell’era di Internet, avere un Master non è nemmeno più una credenziale, dato che i modelli sociali dei giovani sono gli imprenditori senza laurea di Silicon Valley, da Steve Jobs a Zuckerberg. Il mito del giovane genio che inventa il futuro nel garage fa più sognare dell’impettito diplomato di Harvard con stemma sulla giacca.

Insomma, il college non è un buon investimento. Gli stessi soldi investiti in una casa garantirebbero un futuro più roseo ai poveri freshmen indebitati.

Mentre l’Europa si agita in tutti i sensi per rispondere alla sfida della competitività universitaria e si affanna a iniettare un modello aziendalista nelle nostre vecchie istituzioni, l’America comincia a scoprire che il prodotto universitario non serve a niente. Perché? Sembra ovvio, ma evidentemente non lo è per governanti e presidenti di facoltà: semplicemente, come spiega bene il bel saggio di Martha Nussbaum Not For Profit (Princeton University Press) perché le università non servono alla produzione, bensì alla riproduzione di un insieme di valori e di un corpus culturale senza il quale una società perde la sua identità. Forse è più lucido lo studente di filosofia, che non si è mai chiesto che tipo di investimento stava facendo quando si è iscritto all’università, dell’apprendista finanziere che si trova buggerato semplicemente perché ha comprato qualcosa che non si vende e non si compra. Insomma, più Kant e meno account dovrebbe essere lo slogan per salvare i campus dal nonsenso in cui si sono cacciati.

The Forum Programme

Faking it in business
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The subterfuge of the business world. Behavioural economist Dan Ariely on the posturing of bankers when it comes to big bonuses, sociologist Shehzad Nadeem on the Indian call centre workers who pretend to be Westerners, and Italian philosopher Gloria Origgi on why in business we sometimes conspire to deliver second best.
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L'oscuro disastro della filosofia francese

Cet article sur le dernier pamphlet d'Alain Badiou, L'antisémitisme partout, a été publié sur Saturno et il est en ligne sur mon nouveau blog: http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/blog/goriggi/

The Counter-Protocols

Draft. Do not quote without permission. Submitted to IRIS.

Review of Umberto Eco: Il cimitero di Praga, Bompiani, 2010.


In an old Woody Allen’s movie, The Sleeper, some scientists in the future try to reconstruct the culture of the past world through the testimony of its only survivor. They show him a series of documents, among which various videos, a centrefold of Playboy, pictures of various political men, chattering teeth and, in the end, a video of Howard Cosell, a famous American sports anchor in the Seventies: “First - the scientist says - we didn’t know exactly what it was, but then we developed a theory: when citizens in your society were guilty of a crime towards the State, they were forced to watch this”…The joke perfectly matches the last Umberto Eco’s literary effort, Il cimitero di Praga: a 523 pages-length torture that could indeed be used as a major punishment to inflict to Italian ex-pupils who still have nightmares about endless school hours dedicated to the Risorgimento, Garibaldi, the expedition of the “Thousands” and Ippolito Nievo. And if this doesn’t seem boring enough for the non-Italian reader, let’s mix it with a conspiracy theory: an intricate plot of the Christian Church and the Monarchic movements in Italy and in France to get rid of Freemasonry and the Jewish that ends up with the forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A tour de force you wouldn’t inflict to your worst enemy.

The first thing that came up to my mind while reading the book was that once you become a bestseller writer in Italy, then you probably start intimidating your editors, who don’t dare to edit the sacred words of a heavyweight author of the publishing house anymore or, worse, don’t see the point in making the effort, given that they know the book will be sold in any case. And it is true: the book has already sold more than 300 000 copies, will be translated in 40 different languages and the first edition is at its third printing. But, definitely, it is not a good book.

I am not a literary critic, so I will try to avoid appreciations of style and structure, even if I must confess I found it too long, confusing and difficult to read. Rather, I will concentrate my criticism on the content. The plot is so intricate that the author adds a “story-line” at the end of the volume that summarizes the major events in chronological order. We deal with an ignominious central character, captain Simone Simonini, a Franco-Italian adventurer and a forger, whose virulent anti-Semitism goes back to his grand-father. All characters but Simonini are real historical characters, sometimes under their own real name, sometimes under fictional names because they condense more than just one historical figure. Simonini’s grandfather was thus an historical character, one who played a major role in the diffusion of the anti-Semitic poison in the XIX century as the purported author of a letter to the French Jesuit priest Augustin Barruel. Barruel, a counter-revolutionary priest who fled to England during the Revolution, published in 1797 his Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, a conspiracy theory on the role of a coalition of philosophers, Freemasons and the secret society of the Bavarian Illuminati to overthrow the throne and the altar not only in France but everywhere in Europe. According to Barruel, the plot had been inherited by the Jacobins during the Revolution. After the publication, he received a letter by an Italian military, who claimed he got evidence that the founders of all the secret societies in Europe were Jewish.

Simone Simonini thus grew up as a convinced anti-Semite and decided to devote his life to participating in various plots and conspiracies aimed at destroying the Jewish. A lonely and sinister figure, whose only pleasure is to stuff himself of heavy French cuisine in good restaurants, Simonini has a double, the ecclesiast Dalla Piccola, whose role in the story is pretty confused (Eco says that all the characters but Simonini are real: is Dalla Piccola a real character? I tried to find some traces of his existence on the Web but end up with nothing). Under the Dalla Piccola personality, Simonini infiltrates other anti-Masonic and conservative circles, especially those religious ones who were manufacturing a document showing the horrendous anti-Christian rituals of various Masonic societies.

Although it is clear from the onset that Simonini and Dalla Piccola are one and the same person, the mystery is kept until the end of the novel, which is partly written in the form of Simonini’s journal interrupted at some points by some annotations by Dalla Piccola. An amnesia caused by a sex intercourse with a young woman, Diana, member of a Satanic sect, makes Simonini forget that Dalla Piccola is himself. Following the suggestion of a young Jewish doctor met at the restaurant - an unknown Sigmund Freud visiting Charcot in Paris - Simonini decides to heal his amnesia by writing a journal. The therapy is successful and, while retrieving the memory of the Satanic Sabbat, he ends up realizing that Dalla Piccola and Simonini are just one. The reader should be surprised, but is not.

Simonini’s journal doesn’t spare anything to the patient reader about his life and adventures: trained as a forger by the notary Rebaudengo in Turin, Simonini becomes a spy and is sent by the Savoy Intelligence to Sicily in the wake of thousand of Giuseppe Garibaldi. There he meets the writer Ippolito Nievo, treasurer and lieutenant of the army of volunteers. In order to get rid of some documentation Nievo possesses that could prove of funds bestowed by the Savoy under the table, Simonini causes the sinking of the ship on which it travels Nievo and the death of the same.

Back in Paris, Simonini begins to manufacture a fake document inspired by the feuilletons of Dumas and Sue, first to discredit the Jesuits, then turned to the Jews, which is staged in an alleged secret meeting the night of the rabbis of the various leaders of Jewish communities' Europe in the old Jewish cemetery in Prague, where they expose their plans for world domination and the destruction of Christianity. Another source of inspiration is the French pamphlet written by the satirist Maurice Joly, a Dialogue in Hell between Macchiavelli and Montesquieu, depicted as two diabolical plotters aiming at overthrow the power of the French Monarchy. The document circulates in different hands and under different forms, growing and transforming itself in the final Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Simonini, though, won’t be the author of it, because he sells the material to the Russian Secret Police and delivers it to an agent named Matvei Golovinskij.

While writing his masterpiece forgery, Simonini goes on with side activities as a spy and a counter-revolutionary. He provides the fake documents to condemn captain Dreyfus, then takes part into various terroristic acts to end up with the making of a bomb that will probably conclude his evil career: The journal stops on the date of his last terrorist mission…

Eco’s prowess is the manufacturing of a “fake” with a collage of real existing characters and documents. To make things more confused, Eco fabrics a sort of “counter-fake”, that is, the mirror-side of one of the best-known frauds of our history: the fabrication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. His anti-hero Simonini is at the center of an orthogonal (and fictional as well) plot, aimed at destroying Jewish, revolutionaries and Freemasons. But, of course, as the Protocols are fake, Eco’s fabricated plot is fictional: even if it is based on real characters and documents that reveal the presence in our history of these feelings and fantasies, the international conspiracy against the Jewish, the Jesuits and the Freemasons orchestrated by the Catholic Church is as imaginary as the Protocols are. Suffocated in a Google-erudite archipelago of real facts, books and characters, the simple truth that unfortunately there are no complot-based serious explanations of the major tragic events of our history, seems to sink down. Conspiracy theories have never made good novels, although we all know that they work very well for airport best-sellers. And they are historically untenable, an interesting subject today for sociologists, psychologists and experts of folklore.

So, what all this effort for? I hate ad-hominem arguments, but if I tried to find the most charitable explanation of why a well-thought and sophisticated intellectual such as Umberto Eco has written Il cimitero di Praga, and imposed on his readers the horrendous Captain Simonini, I would be tempted to say that the feeling of being a forger must have floated in the author’s mind, as it is probably the case for all talented and successful people: hence the fascination of writing a story from the “wrong-side”. Eco is an academic who has used his erudition and intelligence to write novels: he must have felt sometimes to be novelist among academics and an academic among novelists. This feeling of misplacement could have motivated this strange literary experiment, perhaps an exercise in perplexity which leaves the readers perplex as well.

Tutti pazzi per MadMen

Published on Saturno on March 25th. All rights reserved

Spesso, dove fallisce la scienza, arriva l’arte. Quale sociologo ci avrebbe reso il dettaglio della Parigi d’inizio secolo meglio di Proust nella Recherche? Ecco allora che un capolavoro di sociologia della famiglia s’incarna oggi in uno dei generi narrativi più riusciti dell’ultimo decennio: la serie TV. A metà strada tra cinema, soap-opera e racconto, la serie TV è oggi il prodotto culturalmente più raffinato che l’America abbia messo sul mercato. La formula è ormai ben rodata: un canovaccio scritto da un drammaturgo brillante, un casting ricercato e la regia dei diversi episodi affidata di volta in volta a registi di fama.
Così MadMen, la serie cominciata nel 2007 e scritta da Matthew Weiner, autore di The Sopranos, è alla sua quarta stagione, già uscita negli Stati Uniti e attesissima in Europa (data prevista per i fans: 29 marzo).
Ambientata negli Anni Sessanta, MadMen, espressione coniata all’epoca per indicare i pubblicitari che lavoravano in Madison Avenue a New York, racconta delle passioni, gli amori, le famiglie, le crisi d’identità di un gruppo di giovani pubblicitari, delle loro mogli, amanti e successive concorrenti, di come l’America ingenua e spietata del Dopoguerra prenda pian piano coscienza di sé.


La prima stagione ci immerge nel 1960, in piena campagna kennediana, nell’atmosfera elegante dell’agenzia pubblicitaria Sterling & Cooper. L’estetica è alla Hitchcock: i colori a contrasto, i costumi, il mobilio e qualcosa di finto, plastificato nei volti dei personaggi come se tutti nascondessero qualcosa. Come le Barbie e i Ken della nostra infanzia, i personaggi di MadMen si muovono in un mondo falsamente perfetto, mariti al lavoro con whisky e sigaretta in mano, segretarie sexy e mogli indistinguibili a casa nei sobborghi ricchi della metropoli a occuparsi di bambini altrettanto perfetti e di case altrettanto indistinguibili. Ma, dal primo episodio, e dalla sigla graficamente bellissima, in cui si vede il disegno stilizzato di un uomo in camicia bianca e completo scuro precipitare dall’ultimo piano di un grattacielo tappezzato di cartelloni pubblicitari, si accumulano le incrinature nella patina di ognuno dei protagonisti e dei formidabili deuteragonisti che fanno la forza della serie.

Tutto gira intorno alla figura di Don Draper, direttore artistico dell’agenzia e suo genio creativo. La sua carriera va di successo in successo, nell’ammirazione generale dei giovani ambiziosi che lo circondano. Le donne si accumulano, da Midge, l’artista stravagante del Village che diventerà eroinomane nella quarta serie, a Rachel, ricca figlia di un cliente ebreo, che gli fa scoprire l’esistenza dell’antisemitismo e della questione ebraica. Don è sposato con Betty, una delle mogli Barbie bionde platino del film, da cui ha due figli. Ma Don nasconde un segreto da Grande Gatsby: dai tempi della guerra di Corea, vive sotto una falsa identità per scappare dall’inferno della guerra e della sua poverissima famiglia d’origine. Anche la patina di Betty s’incrina presto: un dolore improvviso alle mani le fa perdere il controllo dell’auto e la convince a cominciare una terapia psicanalitica, sotto la stretta sorveglianza del marito, spazientito da tali velleità. Intanto in ufficio, tra le segretarie starnazzanti che sognano solo di sposare uno dei boss, si staglia Peggy, bruttina e severa, ma determinatissima a fare carriera. Durante una delle scene chiave della serie, un “brain-storming” in cui vengono convocate tutte le segretarie per provare una nuova collezione di rossetti sotto lo sguardo eccitato dei maschi creativi che ridono nascosti dietro a un vetro invisibile, Peggy osserva le altre, non sta al gioco e alla fine improvvisa uno slogan che piace ai capi. Uno di essi commenta sorpreso: “Era come vedere un cane giocare a scacchi…”.

E’ difficile spiegare dove stia esattamente la genialità di MadMen: a parte l’estetica perfetta, i dialoghi sono spesso banali, e gli intrighi tipici del serial: amori, aborti, tradimenti, passato che ritorna…Eppure la serie ci inchioda, come ci inchioda chi ci rende consapevoli di verità che erano lì, sotto gli occhi di tutti, e che nessuno aveva detto esplicitamente. Ciò che incanta della serie è lo sguardo attonito e insieme nostalgico della generazione nata negli Anni Sessanta sui suoi genitori, quel mito della famiglia borghese che i movimenti femministi e il Sessantotto hanno incrinato di fatto ma non scalfito di norma, come se ogni vita diversa da quella della pubblicità della famiglia felice fosse una derogazione, una scivolata dalla retta via. E’ il rendersi conto di quanto il mondo sia cambiato in una generazione, di come i rapporti uomo/donna, la coscienza della propria salute (le sigarette, l’alcool, il sesso libero e promiscuo senza paura dell’aids), la coscienza ecologica (concluso un picnic, i coniugi Draper non esitano e gettare gli avanzi sul prato e andarsene allegramente) siano valori che abbiamo acquisito quasi senza accorgerci. Ed è forse l’ambiguità di quello sguardo del bambino cresciuto che capisce infine le incrinature nelle vite dei genitori, che è insieme critico e nostalgico, a rendere la serie un capolavoro. Ridiamo delle sigarette a catena e insieme sogniamo di accenderne una mentre guardiamo il film, come se crescere davvero, vedere il mondo con occhi nuovi, voglia dire anche perdere per sempre il conforto regressivo dei bigodini e delle sigarette della "mamma platonica" della nostra infanzia.

Review (In Italian) of Premarital Sex in America

Published on Saturno on March 12th 2011. All rights reserved. Do not quote without permission

Premarital Sex in America. How Young Americans meet, mate and think about marriage
Mark Regnerus e Jeremy Uecker, Oxford University Press, 2011

di Gloria Origgi

Chissà perché il sesso in mano agli accademici assume istantaneamente un aspetto di fredda necessità animale, come se la scienza messa al servizio di una delle nostre attività esistenziali più complesse avesse pudore di parlare di quel che si fa a letto, o in automobile, o sdraiati su un prato d’estate sotto le stelle, come di una forma di vita profondamente umana, un’espressione culturale fondamentale che ha influenzato letteratura, pittura, musica e immaginario di tutti i tempi. No, non c’è Cantico dei Cantici che tenga, né Venere di Tiziano che commuova. Per parlare di sesso seriamente è necessario adottare il secco linguaggio della copula che sembrerebbe riduttivo pure se applicato a una coppia di conigli. Dal celeberrimo rapporto Kinsey, per chi se lo ricorda, del 1948 sul Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male e il successivo del 1953 sul Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, la pruderie dell’accademico americano richiede una retorica zoo-etologica sugli intercorsi sessuali della nostra specie, come se quel velo di scientismo mondasse l’anima e l’assolvesse da qualsiasi responsabilità per il comportamento osceno del corpo che faticosamente è costretta a portarsi appresso.

Non sfugge alla critica il recente volume dei due sociologi americani Mark Regnerus e Jeremy Uecker: Premarital Sex in America. How Young Americans Meet, Mate and think about Marriage (Oxford University Press 2011), un’informatissima inchiesta sociologica sulle pratiche eterosessuali dei giovani americani di oggi. Il riferimento al mate nel titolo, l’accoppiarsi, il copulare, ricorda lo stile linguistico dell’umano maschio e l’umano femmina del rapporto Kinsey. Ma il modello soggiacente al saggio dei due studiosi americani non è qui la zoologia, bensì l’economia. Ebbene sì: la teoria della scelta razionale, onnipresente nei modelli economici americani, per cui un agente qualsiasi, che sia un ragno, un governo, o una multinazionale, è considerato razionale se massimizza i suoi utili, ossia se cerca di ottenere al costo più basso il beneficio più alto, è approdata anche tra le lenzuola.

La sexual economics è la teoria che modellizza le relazioni eterosessuali a fine sessuale come un mercato in cui le donne vendono e gli uomini comprano. L’articolo di riferimento sull’argomento fu pubblicato nel 2004 da due economisti in una rivista accademica di psicologia con il titolo: Sexual Economics. Sex as a Female Ressource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions ed è ripresa pari pari dai nostri sociologi.

L’idea regolatrice del libro, il filo teorico che sottende la dettagliata ricerca empirica quantitativa e qualitativa, è che la scarsità di uomini presenti nei campus americani fa sì che sia per loro più facile avere accesso a prestazioni sessuali, e dunque abbassi il “prezzo” che l’uomo deve pagare per ottenerle. Il prezzo da pagare per l’uomo secondo la sexual economics è costituito dall’investimento nel “corteggiamento”: numero di telefonate per ottenere un appuntamento, numero di aperitivi da offrire prima di poter finalmente strappare un invito a cena, costo del ristorante, e dell’eventuale mazzo di fiori, costo psicologico del mostrarsi carino e interessato a una relazione a lungo termine, e così via…I principi economici suggeriscono che gli intercorsi tra i ventenni americani siano regolati dalla dura legge della domanda e dell’offerta, dalla competizione tra i venditori (le venditrici in questo caso), e le variazioni sul prodotto. Così le ragazze americane, ci dicono i due autori, sono estremamente seccate dallo sbarcare nel loro campus di giovani promiscue, perché il fatto che ci siano prodotti “a basso costo” disponibili sulla piazza, abbassa ancora più il prezzo delle loro azioni. Insomma, se arriva una bella signorina disposta a una notte d’amore in cambio di un semplice caffè, o ancor peggio, di una buona conversazione di filosofia, sbanca il mercato di quelle altre che non si sarebbero azzardate a togliersi nemmeno un guanto senza tre o quattro inviti al bar, una cena nel ristorante chic della cittadina e un paio di scatole di cioccolatini.

Se il filo conduttore teorico del libro fa sorridere, l’indagine però è seria ed informata, e ci fa scoprire che meno del 6 per cento delle giovani americane di oggi non ha avuto rapporti sessuali prima di sposarsi, che più aumenta il livello di istruzione e di guadagno delle donne, meno sentono la pressione di un rapporto stabile e di un eventuale matrimonio.
Il libro alterna i risultati di inchieste a larga scala con la descrizione dettagliata di profili personali. Incontriamo così nel secondo capitolo Cami, vent’anni che proviene da una famiglia di cattolici devoti, ma che sul campus è diventata un po’ meno devota. Come il 27% delle americane della sua età non è in una relazione stabile. Ha deciso di rimanere comunque vergine a suo modo, confessando di “aver fatto tutto tranne la penetrazione e il sesso orale”. In realtà una delle motivazioni di Cami per non avere una relazione stabile è proprio quella di cercare di rimanere vergine fino al matrimonio, come ha promesso alla sua mamma, perché sa bene che, una volta fidanzata, sarà difficile far tenere le mani a posto allo spasimante. Infatti, dati alla mano, se per le donne un’attesa di 4 mesi dal primo incontro alla prima copula sembra ragionevole, per i maschi, influenzati sembrerebbe dai video pornografici su Internet, il passatempo preferito tra un date e l’altro, tutto quel che va al di là di un’attesa di quattro minuti è tempo perso se si va in buca, o investimento costoso se si ottiene infine qualcosa.

A quando un libro che saprà parlare di sesso umano in linguaggio umano, magari non trascurando quei dettagli, come l’amore, l’incontro, l’imprevisto e quel certo non so che nel suo sguardo quella sera per cui senza nessun calcolo lui fece le valigie e scappò di casa per sempre?