Dr Katja Haustein, Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature, has given a lecture entitled ‘How to Live Alone with Others: Notes on the Ethics of Tact’, for the University of Kent’s Think Kent series, which is now available on YouTube.
Tact, like compassion, is a derivative of empathy. To be able to empathise with another presupposes a capacity for identification. It involves for the self to be able to feel what the other feels so as to find a way to alleviate their state of distress. Although tact, like compassion, is based on nearness, its purpose is, ultimately, to generate distance. Being tactful means: to respect and to protect the intimacy of the other and in this way to preserve their dignity.
In Katja’s talk, she draws on the theories of tact by Helmuth Plessner, Theodor W. Adorno, and Roland Barthes, to explore the following question: ‘what distance must I maintain between myself and others if we are to construct a community without collision, a sociability without alienation, based on an idea of individual freedom that may imply solitude but not isolation?’
The Think Kent lectures are a series of TED Talk-style lectures produced with the intention of raising awareness of the research and teaching expertise of Kent academics and the international impact of their work.