h/t threequarksdaily.com Yes, I know that this does not belong on pen-l; but economists may want to consider what the University will be like once the Humanities are eviscerated.
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.4/elaine_scarry_poetry_literature_reading_empathy_ethics.php Poetry Changed the World Injury and the Ethics of Reading *Elaine Scarry* By “empathy” Hunt and Pinker—rightly in my view—mean not the capacity of literature to make us feel compassion for a fictional being (though literature certainly does this), but rather the capacity of literature to exercise and reinforce our recognition that there *are* other points of view in the world, and to make this recognition a powerful mental habit. If this recognition occurs in a large enough population, then a law against injuring others can be passed, after which the prohibition it expresses becomes freestanding and independent of sensibility.6<http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.4/elaine_scarry_poetry_literature_reading_empathy_ethics.php#6>Literature says: “Imagine Pamela, and her right to be free of injury will become self-evident to you.” The laws say: “We are not interested in your imaginative abilities or disabilities; whether or not you can imagine Pamela, you are prohibited from injuring her.” *** beauty interrupts and gives us sudden relief from our own minds. Iris Murdoch says we undergo “an unselfing” in the presence of a beautiful thing; “self-preoccupation” and worries on one’s own behalf abruptly fall away. Simone Weil refers to this phenomenon as a “radical decentering.” I call it an “opiated adjacency,” an awkward term but one which reminds us that there are many things in life that make us feel acute pleasure (opiated) and many things in life that make us feel sidelined, but there is almost nothing—except beauty—that does the two simultaneously. Feeling acute pleasure at finding oneself on the margins is a first step in working toward fairness.31<http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.4/elaine_scarry_poetry_literature_reading_empathy_ethics.php#31>
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