My mind immediately leaps to the constant stream of "We just need to UNDERSTAND the people who voted for trump! They feel LEFT BEHIND by the changing world! Calling them names is what caused them to vote for trump to begin with!" Bullshit we've been force fed for the past decade.
It also reminds me of a tweet I made that got me a week long suspension. "Save your empathy for the victims."
I don't think of my empathy as good or bad because it is a part of me. Its not something that I view as a trait that makes me more moral. Its more an aspect of how I work and must be managed. For instance I don't watch historical movies that have violence or torture or even emotional pain. I enjoy fictional movies that include all of those things. The non fiction just traumatizes me it is not transformative I automatically think about the harm that everyone involved has suffered and will continue to live with. I automatically empathize with any pain that motivates the aggressor and the victim and I want to fix it. For me, my empathy and understanding actions others take because of their pain makes me want to fix it by taking away the pain. Sometimes, like for example with addiction, fixing it by trying to take away the pain can make everything worse. I don't empathize with my perceptions of the stereotype of people, the sex worker, the disabled person, the Trump supporter, the addict. I empathize with what individuals tell or show me how they feel. It may be the scientist part of me but I am ok with being uncertain and accepting that I have an imperfect understanding and can be wrong. At least that's how science is supposed to work. To believe that I know what someone else's experience is sounds narcisstic. I experience what is communicated to me as their experience. I hope this makes sense and maybe my understanding of what empathy is is wrong but that's my take on it.
Interesting points. As usual you break down the ideas and think through the details with a clarity few engage. After reading this I think of empathy acts the way a model does for engineers or scientists. It is a useful tool for understanding the world but should not be mistaken for reality itself. The world itself takes precedence over the model.
We know the limits of our own pain and suffering, we know our tolerance for it, and often we also know of ways we can reduce it. But when we imagine someone else's pain we don't know these limits. We can imagine a sort of suffering-without-limit, and I think this can make our awareness of the suffering of others terribly compelling, in a profoundly dysfunctional way.
::Have empathy for your dedicated blogger, and consider becoming a paid contributor so I can keep writing about the limits of empathy and/or other things. It’s $5/month, $50/year.::
But, if empathy isn't real, then we'd be betraying your principles by giving you money, Noah!
::ba-dum-tss!::
This sounds similar a post I wrote shortly after the election, where I pointed out that empathy was bad when it was self-directed, and used an old PEANUTS cartoon about Charlie Brown saying he always felt sorry for himself because he was so "tender-hearted"!
I would say in response to your post that empathy can be both authentic AND imperfect, because it comes from people who are imperfect, tribal, and exclusionary. Perfection in anything is a goal to strive for, not to believe you have achieved....
...except for being a Perfect Asshole, on which thanks to President Elon Musk and his puppet Donald Trump? The Republican Party has achieved *satori*.
Number of questions here. Foremost is: what's the line then between sympathy and empathy? While I agree that all things, including empthy, can lead to either positive or negative outcomes, generally speaking it's sympathy that causes us to act in favor of a "side" - we ask "where do our SYMPATHIES lie?" You can sympathize with Israel or Palestine, but tend to emphathze with the situation at least in terms of human cost and non-empowered civilians.
It's not that empathy exonerates blame or guilt, it's simply a recognition of the emotion or experience beyond that concern. You can empathize with all humans commanded to march into a war while still recognizing that one country actively invaded the other. Because our imaginations allow us to understand (at least to a certain impressive degree) what it must be like to be conscripted or propogandized into believing you have an enemy, even if that has never happened to ourselves personally.
That may be "imagination" in terms of being able to theoretically place ourselves in another person's POV, but the feeling it elicits is not. The emotions that imaginary stories garner within us aren't imagined feelings, even if they are elicited by imaginary characters. It's not religious to emotionally respond to a recognizable situtation, whether real or performative. Fiction tends to maneuver our emapthies to get a specific repsonse - we're shown Laurie Strode as a suffering, largely helpless person, while we're intentionally given little to nothing of Michael Myers' story.
Maybe instead of "real" or "good" or "bad" versions of empathy it's just narrow or fuller versions of empathy. We can always choose to only understand or pay attention to one side or one person in a larger situation. The empathy we have there may be real, but like with fiction, it's calculatingly narrowed so we can convince ourselve to take decisive action. (Though that brings us back to the question of sympathy vs. empathy.)
I think the efforts to distinguish between sympathy and empathy are largely just semantic games. There's no consistent dividing line, and I think it's generally just used as a way to keep "empathy" pure (or sympathy pure) which, as I've discussed, I think is a bad idea.
Emotions are real, but the sense that you're feeling someone else's emotion—that's imaginary. You can imagine what other people are feeling, but I think it's important to remember and acknowledge that your imagination isn't truth; you don't know what they're feeling. The best way to find out is not through empathy; it's just to ask them!
Sure, but as you've already pointed out, you can ask two people and get two different answers about a single situation or subject. It'll still come down to: are you taking all pov's into consideration as you encounter them or just an anecdotal, narrow slice and deciding that's all you ever need.
(Also, this entire article is a semantics game - you're arguing word choice and contextual use.)
And the sense that you're feeling someone else's emotion - or sharing in it - isn't entirely imaginary. That would argue that we can't commiserate with each other, even if a sadness is only befalling one person. I get that you're arguing we can't literally feel precisely what another person is feeling at any given moment, but that's giving empathy a more granular defintion than it actually has. It just means undertanding and sharing in the feeling, not becoming an exact carbon copy.
My mind immediately leaps to the constant stream of "We just need to UNDERSTAND the people who voted for trump! They feel LEFT BEHIND by the changing world! Calling them names is what caused them to vote for trump to begin with!" Bullshit we've been force fed for the past decade.
It also reminds me of a tweet I made that got me a week long suspension. "Save your empathy for the victims."
I don't think of my empathy as good or bad because it is a part of me. Its not something that I view as a trait that makes me more moral. Its more an aspect of how I work and must be managed. For instance I don't watch historical movies that have violence or torture or even emotional pain. I enjoy fictional movies that include all of those things. The non fiction just traumatizes me it is not transformative I automatically think about the harm that everyone involved has suffered and will continue to live with. I automatically empathize with any pain that motivates the aggressor and the victim and I want to fix it. For me, my empathy and understanding actions others take because of their pain makes me want to fix it by taking away the pain. Sometimes, like for example with addiction, fixing it by trying to take away the pain can make everything worse. I don't empathize with my perceptions of the stereotype of people, the sex worker, the disabled person, the Trump supporter, the addict. I empathize with what individuals tell or show me how they feel. It may be the scientist part of me but I am ok with being uncertain and accepting that I have an imperfect understanding and can be wrong. At least that's how science is supposed to work. To believe that I know what someone else's experience is sounds narcisstic. I experience what is communicated to me as their experience. I hope this makes sense and maybe my understanding of what empathy is is wrong but that's my take on it.
Interesting points. As usual you break down the ideas and think through the details with a clarity few engage. After reading this I think of empathy acts the way a model does for engineers or scientists. It is a useful tool for understanding the world but should not be mistaken for reality itself. The world itself takes precedence over the model.
yes! that's exactly what I'm trying to say.
We know the limits of our own pain and suffering, we know our tolerance for it, and often we also know of ways we can reduce it. But when we imagine someone else's pain we don't know these limits. We can imagine a sort of suffering-without-limit, and I think this can make our awareness of the suffering of others terribly compelling, in a profoundly dysfunctional way.
::Have empathy for your dedicated blogger, and consider becoming a paid contributor so I can keep writing about the limits of empathy and/or other things. It’s $5/month, $50/year.::
But, if empathy isn't real, then we'd be betraying your principles by giving you money, Noah!
::ba-dum-tss!::
This sounds similar a post I wrote shortly after the election, where I pointed out that empathy was bad when it was self-directed, and used an old PEANUTS cartoon about Charlie Brown saying he always felt sorry for himself because he was so "tender-hearted"!
https://drdarkeny.substack.com/p/why-shouldnt-i-feel-sorry-for-myself
I would say in response to your post that empathy can be both authentic AND imperfect, because it comes from people who are imperfect, tribal, and exclusionary. Perfection in anything is a goal to strive for, not to believe you have achieved....
...except for being a Perfect Asshole, on which thanks to President Elon Musk and his puppet Donald Trump? The Republican Party has achieved *satori*.
Number of questions here. Foremost is: what's the line then between sympathy and empathy? While I agree that all things, including empthy, can lead to either positive or negative outcomes, generally speaking it's sympathy that causes us to act in favor of a "side" - we ask "where do our SYMPATHIES lie?" You can sympathize with Israel or Palestine, but tend to emphathze with the situation at least in terms of human cost and non-empowered civilians.
It's not that empathy exonerates blame or guilt, it's simply a recognition of the emotion or experience beyond that concern. You can empathize with all humans commanded to march into a war while still recognizing that one country actively invaded the other. Because our imaginations allow us to understand (at least to a certain impressive degree) what it must be like to be conscripted or propogandized into believing you have an enemy, even if that has never happened to ourselves personally.
That may be "imagination" in terms of being able to theoretically place ourselves in another person's POV, but the feeling it elicits is not. The emotions that imaginary stories garner within us aren't imagined feelings, even if they are elicited by imaginary characters. It's not religious to emotionally respond to a recognizable situtation, whether real or performative. Fiction tends to maneuver our emapthies to get a specific repsonse - we're shown Laurie Strode as a suffering, largely helpless person, while we're intentionally given little to nothing of Michael Myers' story.
Maybe instead of "real" or "good" or "bad" versions of empathy it's just narrow or fuller versions of empathy. We can always choose to only understand or pay attention to one side or one person in a larger situation. The empathy we have there may be real, but like with fiction, it's calculatingly narrowed so we can convince ourselve to take decisive action. (Though that brings us back to the question of sympathy vs. empathy.)
I think the efforts to distinguish between sympathy and empathy are largely just semantic games. There's no consistent dividing line, and I think it's generally just used as a way to keep "empathy" pure (or sympathy pure) which, as I've discussed, I think is a bad idea.
Emotions are real, but the sense that you're feeling someone else's emotion—that's imaginary. You can imagine what other people are feeling, but I think it's important to remember and acknowledge that your imagination isn't truth; you don't know what they're feeling. The best way to find out is not through empathy; it's just to ask them!
Sure, but as you've already pointed out, you can ask two people and get two different answers about a single situation or subject. It'll still come down to: are you taking all pov's into consideration as you encounter them or just an anecdotal, narrow slice and deciding that's all you ever need.
(Also, this entire article is a semantics game - you're arguing word choice and contextual use.)
And the sense that you're feeling someone else's emotion - or sharing in it - isn't entirely imaginary. That would argue that we can't commiserate with each other, even if a sadness is only befalling one person. I get that you're arguing we can't literally feel precisely what another person is feeling at any given moment, but that's giving empathy a more granular defintion than it actually has. It just means undertanding and sharing in the feeling, not becoming an exact carbon copy.