Frans de Waal (1948–2024) was a Dutch-American primatologist who showed that empathy is not a late human achievement but an ancient part of the mammal inheritance. He recorded apes comforting the losers of fights, reconciling after quarrels and helping others in ways fitted to their needs, and monkeys refusing unfair rewards, and he described empathy as built from the body upwards, with a simple, automatic core shared with many other animals. Therapeutic Shamanism shares his view of animals as feeling beings and our kin, and sees deep empathy, reaching beyond the human, as something we can recover.
Who was Frans de Waal? #
A primatologist born in ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands on 29 October 1948, who took his doctorate at Utrecht University in 1977 under the ethologist Jan van Hooff. From 1975 he spent six years studying the chimpanzee colony at Arnhem Zoo, which became his first popular book, Chimpanzee Politics (1982). He moved to the United States in 1981, joined Emory University in 1991, and directed the Living Links Center at the Yerkes primate research centre in Atlanta. His books include Good Natured (1996), The Age of Empathy (2009), Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016) and Mama’s Last Hug (2019). He died on 14 March 2024.1
What did he see apes doing for each other? #
Making peace and giving comfort. Early in his career he described chimpanzees coming back together after a fight, which he called reconciliation; the idea was challenged at first and later widely accepted.2 He also recorded consolation, a bystander going to comfort the loser of a fight, and saw it so often, thousands of times, that he came to see it as ordinary ape behaviour.3
Some of his most telling examples show help fitted to the needs of another kind of being. A bonobo called Kuni found a stunned bird, carried it to the top of a tree, spread its wings and launched it into the air, which is what a bird needs and not what a bonobo would. He called this “targeted helping”, assistance geared to another’s particular situation or need.3 On dolphins buoying up an injured companion and elephants lifting a fallen one, see Do animals think and feel?
How did he think empathy works? #
From the body upwards. Empathy, in his account, does not begin with imagining ourselves in someone else’s place. It begins with bodies falling into step, running when others run, laughing when others laugh, yawning when others yawn, and with feelings passing from one animal to another. Understanding comes later. In his words, “Empathy is an automated response over which we have limited control.”4
He pictured the whole capacity as a Russian doll. At its core is an automatic process shared with a multitude of species, and around it are outer layers, such as taking another’s perspective, which fine-tune its aim and reach.5 Humans have the most developed outer layers, but our species is not the only one to help others with insight. On this view empathy engages parts of the brain more than a hundred million years old, and it is far older than us.5
He also turned the usual question round. If exploiting others were all that mattered, he asked, why would natural selection have built brains that feel distress at another’s distress? In his words, “evolution should never have gotten into the empathy business.”6
What did the monkeys show about fairness? #
That an animal will refuse an unfair deal even at a cost to itself. In experiments with Sarah Brosnan, two capuchin monkeys were rewarded for the same task, one with cucumber and the other with grapes, which they much prefer. The monkey still getting cucumber would lose interest, become agitated and sometimes throw the cucumber away.7 For de Waal this was a sign that a sense of fairness has deep roots, and he linked the human sense of fairness to our long history as egalitarians.7 See How does animism understand power and hierarchy?
Does empathy reach everyone? #
Not on its own, in his view. Empathy runs through identification. We share feelings most easily with those we identify with, our inner circle, for whom the door is always ajar. “Outside this circle, things are optional.”8 On his account the same shutting down of identification is at work in dehumanisation, and in war amongst chimpanzees as much as amongst people.8 He also warned against reading social rules straight off nature in either direction. The goals of a society cannot be derived from the goals of nature, which is the naturalistic fallacy, so the animal evidence can undo the claim that nature commands selfish competition without proving that it commands anything else.9
Do all scientists agree with him? #
No. In 2005 the anthropologist Joan Silk and colleagues tested whether chimpanzees would choose to give food to a partner when it cost them nothing, found that they did not, and titled their paper “Chimpanzees are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members”, concluding that chimpanzees are not motivated by other-regarding preferences, as people are.10 In 2011 the primatologist Victoria Horner, with de Waal and colleagues, ran a simpler token test and found that chimpanzees chose the option that rewarded their partner as well about fifty-nine per cent of the time, well above chance, a result that contradicted the earlier studies.10 How much chimpanzees care about others outside their own family is still studied and argued over, and the results have differed with the design of the tests.
How does his work sit with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely, and at more than one point. Therapeutic Shamanism already uses de Waal’s picture of intelligence as a bush with many branches, not a ladder with humans at the top.11 See Is the living world intelligent? It also sees many animals as highly emotional beings, with a range of feeling that runs from fear and anger to love, empathy, joy and awe.12
On empathy itself the two meet and then go further. Empathy goes further than sympathy, being the ability to understand and share another’s feelings, and it is embodied, emotional and visceral, close to de Waal’s bodies falling into step. For most people it is learnable, and it can even be taught. Yet in a way we do not so much learn empathy as learn to open up and reconnect, and empathy then follows. To regain it deeply we have to go beyond the human and reconnect with the more-than-human world too, and shamanism’s way of doing this is shapeshiftingShapeshifting. Becoming another being within a journey, fully enough to know it from the inside: one of the two routes to grokking, a transformation practice, and a direct experience of interconnection. Read the full answer, experiencing being the other from the inside.13 See What are transformation practices and shapeshifting?
De Waal’s limit, that empathy follows identification and narrows to the inner circle, fits this picture from the other side. Animism widens the circle of kin to take in every animal, plant and stone, and the psychologist Steve Taylor sees signs that, in the last few hundred years, people have begun to regain their empathy after the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer.14 See Who is Steve Taylor, and what is his idea of the Fall?
