New Manifesto of Arts: Empathism

Long ago, we couldn’t turn over a European newspaper without coming across the belligerent philosophy or manifesto of a nascent contemporary artists’ or writers’ movement. The key movements of the 20th century—Dada, Surrealism, Futurism Fluxus, Suprematism, and many more—all started with formal declarations of intent written by artists, not critics, and often in polemic and provocative prose. In contrast, today’s artistic or literary groups like “slam poetry,” “inked voices,” “conceptual art,” “relational aesthetics,” “bio art,” and “new media” refer to overall trends in contemporary art and literature as unabridged rather than unfolding explicit set of writers and artists who are professionally or socially allied with each other. Moreover, these relations are more frequently broiled up by critics than by artists themselves. Hitherto artists continue to write, that are so tantalizingly primed for circulation conveying solid lexes of their innovative artistic ideas.

With the level of babble around modern-day art from magazines and journals to blogs and social media, it’s no marvel that artists sense the necessity to rope in on their own behalf or cultivate the empathy which echoes the capacity to become effectively awakened by the valence and passion of others’ sentiments, feelings and emotions. Also develop an Empathetic understanding of other artists and society, which demands the consciousness of the emotional state of another person, group of people or society as a whole. This Empathetic concern will reflect the motivation to care for someone’s welfare. And, in fact, it’s a specifically fitting thing to do, since these artists’ and writers’ works are progressively concerned with disintegration, dispersal, regionalization, dematerialization, and a host of other centrifugal forces that impend to glide off the sensor of the conventional approach of observing art. Not only these works but art and literature needed texts to tie it with Intellectual empathy which, like the paradigm of perspective, is the ability to put oneself into the mind of another person and envision what that individual is thinking or feeling.

For example, the key term in the revolution of novel reading from an ethically dubious waste of time to an activity educating the role-taking mind’s eye, empathy, appeared in English as a translation of ‘Einfühlung’ in the early 20th century. But with the principles, morals, values and philosophies expressed in the New Manifesto of Arts written by Menotti Lerro and Antonello Pelliccia in 2018, a new literary, artistic, philosophical and cultural movement born in Italy in 2020 within the ‘New Cultural Triangle of Ancient Called The Empathic Movement or Empathism.

It appeared dreadful, in the time of the gigantic self and physical and psychological conclusions due to the great pandemic that has inevitably affected human life, giving life to a new artistic-literary movement, proficient of unifying artists of all disciplines in the name of a Total Artist and of an essential interdisciplinary vision potential of understanding the scrappy truths that contemporaneousness can offer. But this manifesto places empathy, the necessity to feel near, at the epicentre of the self, in contrast to earlier opinions as secluded artists. It shows that any creative or moralistic research cannot be detached from a progression of identification with people’s real-life stories. This vista of connotation suggests a public elevation of the artistic society pouring from the evolution of individual and community according to moral resolutions facilitated by an esthetic dimension: viz., Art.

This Manifesto, recognised by critics, was the speech made on the occasion of the founding of the Contemporary Arts Centre Center in Cilento, southern Italy. Menotti Lerro, an Italian Artist asked several noted artists to sign the “Empathic Manifesto”, to join in their peculiar expression of the “Arts” in a less idiosyncratic way and many friends who then poured all their knowledge and art into the Empathic Movement and “decentralization of culture” took place, already in this peculiarity made founders unstated that they were ensuing an innovative discourse.

Empathism aims to promote the arts through emotions and emotional intelligence through the arts. This literary movement, this way too, desired to give power of speech to the hushed masses, particularly to those who live in mountainous villages that are hardly able to offer their exquisiteness beyond their borders. Furthermore, many great contemporary artists went in person to the new reality and from there they made their voices heard towards the world. Empathism proves that art and poetry have no borders and can arise and amassed anyplace especially where it is utmost desired.

But much before the Empathic literary Movement, this interdisciplinary concept of Empathy, typically deliberated in social and psychological frameworks, played a vital role in absorbing literature as well. This notion is known as narrative empathy. Narrative empathy is the sharing of feelings, sentiments and perspective-taking persuaded by reading, watching, hearing, or visualizing accounts of another’s situation and condition. It is the effect of reading literature on the reader. As defined by Taylor et al. in 2002–2003, individuals experience narrative empathy when they can feel (emotional empathy), take the perspectives of (cognitive empathy), or experience a simulation with the likeness thereof of a character within that narrative.

Taking an account of empathy in literature, two core perceptions can be observed, Learning empathy through literature, or narrative empathy. Narrative empathy plays a role in the aesthetics of construction when authors experience it, in intellectual stimulation during reading, in the aesthetics of response when readers experience it, and in the narrative poetics of writings when proper approaches offer it. And then connects the depiction of empathy on the big screen through cinematic empathy. Whenever we watch a film, it has been created and skilled on the foundation of the “circuit of empathy”, a class-conscious system of diverse kinds of empathetic dealings, working at all the mental domains like perceptual, sensorimotor, cognitive and emotional levels to create an aesthetically literary and cinematically inter-subjective experience.

Present audiences empathetically clench, with their susceptibility, the senses of understanding that surpasses the essentials of the film and contributes to the progression of creating a sense of the Self, the Other and the World.

Most researchers believe that literature can arouse and conjure empathy within people, intensifying their sense of compassion and kindness for fellow humans and augmenting their sense of humanity is common. However, to encompass that idea to the animals is possibly less innate. But there are examples of literature that invoke compassionate thoughts of the human-animal bond like the life path of Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, the rough life of Jack London’s White Fang, and the eventual demise of Hazel from Richard Adams’s Watership Down. These literary fiction pieces indeed, evoked empathy toward the animals.

Every so often, consuming literature makes us more empathetic, but narrative empathy subscales the measurement of studying which types of literature have a constructive empathetic response and which types of individuals are more likely to be affected, in Fantasy, Perspective Taking, Empathic Concern and Personal Distress. Fantasy is the person’s capability to psychologically move themselves out of the physical world and into the imaginary and fictional world, Perspective Taking is the individual’s disposition to accept other perspectives and viewpoints, Empathic Concern is like sympathy, or the individual’s capability to sense and feel the pain of others, and Personal Distress is the sharing in the pain of others.

Whether it’s looking at an acid attack victim or victim of child abuse or a friend just getting a paper cut or watching a photo of a vulture waiting for a hungry child to die, witnessing someone else’s misery can induce a profound sagacity of agony, anguish and despondency, nearly as if it’s happening to us. In the past, this might have been clarified just as empathy, but over the last two decades, neuroscientists have been able to pinpoint some of the specific regions of the brain responsible for this sense of interconnectedness.

Educationists believe this sense of feeling what other person is going through, is one of the major skills of the 21st Century. This interconnectedness has also been recognized by the new age authors, artists and poets and they started using Empathy as a core theme of their writings. The New Manifesto written by Menotti Lerro and Antonello Pelliccia, in 2018 and published in magazines in 2019 displays the need to manipulate empathy, the connections deeply rooted in our brains and bodies to produce, consume and display empathy through literature and cinema. The New Manifesto of Arts was officially published in both Italian and English languages in 2020 by Zona Publishing. It is considered the main basis of the Empathic School movement (Empathism) in Italy in 2020.

This Manifesto places Empathy in the middle of a vision of the self, in opposition to previous views of artists as confined from society. Empathism is making its way from Italian literature to English literature and it is a matter of chance whether this makes its entry into the various schools of thought in Indian oriental Languages like Urdu in near future or it has to take its course of nearly hundred years like other literary movements to get its recognition in here.

 By: Dr Rabia Naseem Mughal

The Author is Senior Lecturer in School Education Department