Empathy and its Side Effects

From my study of phenomenology, neuroscience, and evolutionary anthropology, from my career in dealing with individuals and communities, from my reading of literature from Homer, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Updike, and Morrison, and from my avid watching of Star Trek: the Next Generation — I am somewhat joking about that last one — , I have come to the conclusion that all human beings can be put on a range of empathy. The scale goes from high to low or from empathy (feeling in the other), to sympathy (feeling with the other), to apathy (unfeeling the other).

The highest empaths we call wise, holy, or great. The lowest empaths we call egotists, sociopaths, or narcissists. Most of us range in between. The wise and the holy and the great-souled, the high empaths, are often seen by the apaths as weak, gullible, soft, and losers in the wolf against wolf game of life.

We are born with the capacity to get into other persons’ ways of seeing and experiencing the world through speech and other symbolic behavior. And yet we have to learn to use it. That capacity can be nourished and developed through exercise, observing, imitating, responding, recreating the symbols or memes of others. And especially active listening. This is the kind of listening where you not only pay attention to the person speaking, but you enter into the person’s speaking activity. You allow yourself to be carried along by the person’s pattern, intentionality, and style. You experience yourself producing and pronouncing the sentences and moving towards the speaker’s end.

That capacity can also be diminished, retarded, and even destroyed through physical disability, brain harm, and denying the circumstances and conditions that foster its exercise. Here is where education, parental love, nourishment, shelter, safety, health, friendship, respect — and the lack thereof — play big roles.

Empathy literally means “feeling inside” other persons. Some neuroscientists postulate “mirror neurons” to explain the phenomenon. Some theologians give a more spiritual explanation of immaterial souls able to pass through bodies or be linked by some super-soul. The phenomenological study of speech and other modes by which our human bodies interact in the world is my preferred way of understanding empathy. Such study identifies the subjective or conscious aspect of human symbolic activity.

When our conscious body shapes our environment into a world through symbolic behavior, we communicate not only objective forms but the subjective forming — the conscious activity in making these forms. When we more fully encounter others, it is not just the words they speak nor the pictures they paint or the formulas they write, we co-live with them their activity in doing so. Our body undergoes the movements of the dancer or pole-vaulter. Our body undergoes the stream of the writer putting her words together. We take on or live out the others’ bodily experiences of shaping their worlds.

That ability to feel with and even in the other is nourished by exercise. Through reading, watching, attending lectures, marching, singing, playing, conversing, lovemaking, and, above all, thinking and learning others, we take on the others’ projects, intentions, orientations in and to the world — even if just for the moment. That gives us the opportunity to see what fits, to question and critique. The art critic hones his ability to go with the flow of the artist and so to understand it from within. A liberal education in particular is the means of honing this ability whether it is in the classroom, traveling, visiting, and so meeting and engaging others’ present and past towards their future.

You reading my words right now are struggling with me to make meaning. While focusing on my words and syntax, you are also confronting the context from which they come including the whole English language, including my past experiences, including the mentors who have influenced me, including the values and attitudes which guide me. You are struggling to feel my intentions. All that is invisible, i.e. in the background, unfocused. But it is there. And by traveling along my torturous path to the end, you are feeling with and maybe even inside me as I write these words.

Thinking requires empathy and empathy requires engagement with others different from yourself. In empathy you encounter others as agents, subjects of their behaviors rather than objects of yours. You do not reduce them to a name or a side or a category. You sense their unique capacity, their creative imagination, their independent value and dignity. Therefore, you treat them with respect.

There are negative and positive consequences of being empathic.

You feel pain. You feel grief when a person loses someone he loves. You feel anger when a person suffers unnecessarily. You feel depression when you cannot do anything to relieve people of their unnecessary pain. And the higher you are on the empath scale the more you suffer. You suffer with the refugee families seeking asylum at the border. You suffer with people dying of opioid addiction because of Big Pharma’s greed. You suffer when families are evicted or go hungry for lack of income. You suffer when persons are sick and cannot get health care. Pain with others, then grief, then anger, then anxiety, then a sense of helplessness and depression.

Then perhaps a life of blame, anger, or fear of others, of them, enemies on the other side. Then perhaps a search for personal relief by escape or withdrawal from the pain of living. Or then perhaps. . .

Solidarity and action.

Solidarity and concerted action are born of shared grief and anger. But instead of blaming others, the empath feels with others in wider circles and higher intensities to understand them and think with them about the conditions that are holding them back from personal and public happiness and working together to shape these conditions for all of us. The true meaning of politics.

This can only be done by touching them and touching others who have touched them, eye to eye, ear to ear, body to body. For we are ensouled bodies in varying stages of consciousness pursuing the happiness that can only be fully achieved through each other.