거울 뉴런과 문학 2: 쿳시의 『엘리자베스 코스텔로』에 나타난 공감의 인지신경과학과 그 윤리적 함의

For all ages, sympathy has been emphasized as the source of human morality, sociality, and culture. The science of sympathy made a breakthrough when the Giacomo Rizzolatti team in Italy revealed that humans have mirror neuron system, a neural mechanism that enables us to read other people’s minds and feel sympathy. Through neuroscientific research on “mirror neuron,” which is a neural basis of sympathy, and cognitive scientific research that explains the work of the mind as “embodied” cognition, this paper aims to examine the principles of sympathy and its ethical implications in J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003). Costello, the main character in this work, suggests “sympathetic imagination” as the source of our ethical behavior and asserts that there are no limits to it. However, the fact that (the silenced or animal) others do not have (human) languages symbolizes in itself an absolute limit to sympathetic imagination. This limitation suggests the limitation in rational reasoning. It reflects a cognitive neuroscientific perspective: Human beings’ autonomous ability of reasoning, which western classical philosophy emphasized as an element that distinguishes humans from animals, has, in fact, developed as a form of animalistic reason based on physical ability―in other words, the reason is something generated and refined through sensory and motor systems of the human brain and body. In this work, Costello can only sympathize with the pains of others through “embodied” language and “embodied” experience. In short, Elizabeth Costello proved the possibility and usefulness of cognitive neuroscience in literary interpretation by manifesting the leap of sympathetic imagination through an unconscious pathway called mirror neuron and its ethical potential.