Empathy

This post is in response to K's questions about the Willful Ignorance post over there on my--hopefully--more academic blog.

K's question was: Can empathy be trained or learned?

There is no doubt in my mind that this is so. I should define empathy first, I suppose. It is an odd word that is often used when someone actually means sympathy. Sympathy--and an etymologist out there will do a better job than I--means to feel with another person. Empathy means to feel into another person. There is a subtle difference between them. The difference is that with sympathy, one creates or imagines another persons feelings. With empathy, one actually feels another's feelings.

Gasp...

Is this possible? I think so. I cannot say that I have empirical evidence. I am unsure that there are instruments of empiricism that can know such an experience. Perhaps one day. However, in my experience, empathy is possible--if often incomplete.

How we might evidence empathy is beyond the scope of this discussion. In this kind of situation, I refer to the words of those who know and do more than I. My yoga teacher, for example, says that there is all sorts of emotion flowing about in the world. With six billion people--all of them emotional beings of some kind or another--emoting all over the globe, there is a veritable ocean of feeling coursing hither and thither. Whether we notice this or not, we tap into it, swim in it, live in it, breathe it. Much of our own feeling--primarily suffering--blossoms from an unwitting empathic appropriation of the emotions of those around us and, perhaps, those far away from us.

Training empathy is a matter of recognizing that this is happening constantly based initially on the suggestion of someone you trust and then ultimately based on your own experience. Once this seems obvious--what we might call faith--then one can do other things with the understanding and the wild world of emotion out there.

Listening is a good start.

I think I will pause here and let whatever conversation happen without holding forth too much.

Thanks for asking, K.