Kierkegaard’s ‘Joe’: The Dark Empath
You, the novel (and now Netflix show) by Caroline Kepnes uses a technique known as second-person narration, in which the narrator addresses and describes what ‘you’ do. In Kepnes’ novel, the narrator is the psychopath-stalker, Joe Goldberg, who has become a global icon for fictophiliacs (those who fall in love with fictional characters). ‘You’, for Joe Goldberg, is the woman he is stalking. From the shadows, with his trademark cap worn low, Joe follows her, noting her every move, her routine, the deviations from her routine — even what he perceives to be her state of mind. Having never met her, he is positive he knows her better than anyone else. What is most disturbing about this — apart from the many murders Joe goes on to commit — is the fact that reader/ viewer cannot help but root for Joe. He may be a psychopath-stalker, but he is a charismatic psychopath-stalker. The popularity of his character is a testament to this charisma. We use euphemisms like passion and romance to excuse his scheming — which begs the question: aren’t psychopaths supposed to be cold and emotionless? How do we reconcile these two aspects of Joe’s personality — his love and empathy with the cold, calculating psychopathy?
The answer is found in the relatively new psychological profile known as the ‘Dark Empath’. A dark empath is someone who uses empathy at the expense of others. Their behavior is similar to psychopaths (manipulative, grandiose), but their distinguishing characteristic is their ability to empathize with others (psychopaths tend to struggle with empathy and usually just mimic empathic responses that they have observed, rather than actually experiencing them). However, dark empaths differ from regular empaths in that they use their empathy in self-serving, psychopathic ways. Joe Goldberg is a good example. No one doubts his love (we know he’s willing to kill for it), or his ability to slip inside the minds of others, but in every other regard, he is a clear psychopath.
This in turn begs another question: can a dark empath truly love? But before I attempt to answer…
Recently, I was surprised to learn that there is a literary precursor to Kepnes’ Joe Goldberg; namely, Søren Kierkegaard’s Joe — Johannes ‘the Seducer’. Published as part of his compendium Either/Or, under the pseudonymous editorship of Victor Eremita, Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer tells the story of nineteenth-century Joe Goldberg. There is the same second-person narration, the same stalking, the same manipulation. The fictional editor, who claims to have found the diary in the secret compartment of a writing desk, writes that:
With the help of his intellectual gifts, he knew how to tempt a girl, how to attract her without caring to possess her in the stricter sense. I can picture him as knowing how to bring a girl to the high point where he was sure that she would offer everything. When the affair had gone so far, he broke off, without the least overture having been made on his part, without a word about love having been said, to say nothing of a declaration, a promise (Diary of a Seducer)
For Johannes, courtship is an intellectual pursuit, not an amatory one. Not only does he stalk poor Cordelia:
Everywhere our paths cross. Today I met her three times. I know about her every little outing, when and where I shall come across her, but I do not use this knowledge to contrive an encounter with her — on the contrary, I am prodigal on a frightful scale (Diary of a Seducer)
He stalks like a big cat toying with their prey: ‘In my attack, I am beginning to close in on her gradually, to shift into a more direct attack’. The pleasure he derives from this is entirely intellectualized: ‘There is actually nothing at all in my relationship with her; it is purely intellectual’. Thus every moment is slow and savored:
No impatience, no greediness — everything will be relished in slow draughts; she is selected, she will be overtaken […] One must limit oneself — that is the primary condition for all enjoyment […] Patience — quod antea fuit impetus, nunc ratio est [what was impulse then is science now] — she must be spun into my web in a totally different way, and then suddenly I shall let the full force of love burst forth. We have not spoiled that moment for ourselves by spooning, by premature anticipations — you can thank me for that, my Cordelia. I am working to develop the contrast; I am pulling the bow of love tighter in order to wound all the deeper. Like an archer, I slacken the string, pull it tight again, listen to its song; it is my martial music, but as yet I do not aim — as yet I do not place the arrow to the string (Diary of a Seducer)
‘What was impulse then is science now’. Johannes, like many before him, turns love into an art. In this regard, Johannes’ love resembles that of Stendhal (which I discuss at length in the post ‘Why We Need Distance’). As the author John Updike writes in the introduction, Kierkegaard may not have read Stendhal, but ‘he breathed the same dandyish intellectual atmosphere that produced Stendhal’s superb study of erotic psychology, On Love’. In this book, Stendhal treats love like a science and describes it, primally, as a process of embellishment which he calls ‘crystallization’: ‘What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one’ (Stendhal). Both Joe and Johannes are guilty of this sort of idealization. According to Stendhal, ‘from the moment he falls in love even the wisest man no longer sees anything as it really is. He underrates his own qualities, and overrates his beloved’.
However, in one of the greatest critiques of Stendhal’s theory of love, the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset points out that with this idealization comes pessimism (the two ‘characteristic features of nineteenth-century Europe’):
Note that, in sum, this theory defines love as an essential fiction. It is not that love sometimes makes mistakes, but that it is, essentially, a mistake. We fall in love when our imagination projects non-existent perfections onto another person. One day the phantasmagoria vanishes, and with it love dies. This is worse than declaring, as of yesteryear, that love is blind. For Stendhal it is less than blind: it is imaginary. Not only does it not see what is real, but it supplants the real (Gasset)
This, Gasset argues, is a ‘pseudo-love’. The sort of love in which ‘a human being remains attached once and for all to another being — a sort of metaphysical grafting — was unknown to Stendhal’. He mistook a strong attachment (born out of a tortuous courtship) for true love:
Stendhal devotes forty years to overcoming feminine defenses. He arduously constructs a strategic system, replete with principles and corollaries. He tenaciously works at the problem, persists and exhausts himself in the task. The result is nil. Stendhal never succeeded in being truly loved by any woman. This should not be very surprising. Most men suffer the same fate (Gasset)
Joe and Johannes also fall victim to this ‘pseudo-love’ that disappears as soon as novelty has worn off:
But now it is finished, and I never want to see her again. When a girl has given away everything, she is weak, she has lost everything, for in a man innocence is a negative element, but in woman it is the substance of her being (Diary of a Seducer)
This is why, for Johannes, the goddess Diana is his ideal. Diana, who was known to the Greeks as Artemis, was the goddess of the hunt, but she was also known for her militant chastity:
That is why Diana has always been my ideal. This pure virginity, this absolute coyness, has always occupied me very much. But although she has always held my attention, I have also always kept a suspicious eye on her. That is, I assume that she actually has not deserved all the eulogies upon her virginity that she has reaped. She knew, namely, that her game in life is bound up with her virginity; therefore it is preserved (Diary of a Seducer)
As long as this is his ideal, Johannes cannot love. The same applies to any dark empath. As long as you attempt to practice love ‘like an art or profession’ (Gasset), you are bound not to experience it. This is because love involves, first and foremost, a surrender:
the lover experiences a strange urgency to dissolve his own individuality in that of the other and, vice versa, to absorb the individuality of his beloved into his own. A mysterious longing! Whereas in every other situation in life nothing upsets us so much as to see the frontiers of our individual existence trespassed upon by another person, the rapture of love consists in feeling ourselves so metaphysically porous to another person that only in the fusion of both, only in an “individuality of two,” can it find fulfillment (Gasset)
