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.
posted by Breathing at 7:49 PM
8 Comments:
of course, to learn empathy i suppose one has to be open to the idea of it. to understand that one lacks empathy.
we've talked about it before, but I feel often like i'm on empathy overload. i really DO feel the feelings of others (and I realized, thinking this over last night, that includes good and bad feelings - real joy and happiness along with anxiety and pain and sadness).
I find it interesting that you suggest that discussion of "feelings" like empathy are not so welcome in the halls of academe. theoretical discussions may be welcome - I'm thinking of Williams and his "structure of feeling" or Eliot trying to distinguish feeling from emotion.
However - since my dissertation includes a substantial section of Mr Rogers' Neighborhood, love and empathy are going to be central themes that I can't ignore. a new question for me, when I finally get to watching old episodes of the Neighborhood - IS mr rogers trying to teach empathy?
another related question: in a religious and/or secular sense (can it be secular), what is grace?
no, there is a lot of discussion of empathy in the academe, for sure. well, not that much... and there are some intentionally empathic people in those halls as well, but most often it is a mess of unacknowledged or submersed emotion.
i am definitely going to follow up with the williams reference.
Do you think it is possible to empath through a TV?
I don't know if one can empath through a TV. it's a really good question, though.
i think one - especially if that one is mr rogers - can create the illusion of empathy (can there be such a thing??), or can model something LIKE empathic behaviors.
emapthy is not: "i know how you feel," but feeling alongside...does the viewer empathize with mr rogers?
hrm. lots to think about.
will you be in madison this summer? i am considering (and i mean it this time) a visit to wisconsin, but only if you'll be there along with sam.
i will be here all summer. that's right. ultimate, teaching, and sun. oh, an reading and prelims, and ...
i bet you are a great teacher.
today's class was about E.T., and one girl brought up the idea of empathy. she suggested that empathy was ET's "superpower" (and another girl said that empathic powers turn up in comic books as superpowers fairly often). My student argued that empathy is not a normal human condition - it's something we have to work at. so ET's abundant empathy is a mark of his alienness, his non-humanness, his Otherness.
i found this idea totally fascinating, especially when this girl seemed to suggest that we have to LEARN empathy, that it doesn't come instinctively or naturally. someone also mentioned that we learn empathy first through interactions with ANIMALS.
I wonder about the idea of empathy as "superpower," in the conventional comicbook superhero sense. this is something i need to find out more about. it's kind of funny - it means I'm a superhero, if empathy is a superpower!!!
In my mind, empathy feels like alienitude because it feels as if you are feeling things that others aren't. I agree that empathy can be learned and trained. I do think that all humans have the capacity for it, though. In fact, I think a lot of the negativity we hurl at each other is not so much based on a lack of empathy, but a perverted, suppressed, or mangled empathy.
You are a superhero.
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