Love and Empathy:

Foundation of Culture, Ethics, Politics

My love partner for 50 years said to me: “did I tell you that I love you today?” She recites that almost every day. It has become our ritual. But yesterday she added a question. A philosophical one which was quite unusual for a get-it-done social worker. “What is love anyways?”

That question ranks with truth, freedom, happiness, good, and consciousness which in my philosophy cannot be fully and objectively explained. Described perhaps but not defined. It’s kinda like: you know it when you feel it. Way inside your body. If you analyze or try to prove any of these notions, they dissipate and raise more questions. “The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of” (Pascal).

In an earlier meditation, I tried unsuccessfully to define consciousness from which I claim all the big questions of Truth, Freedom, Justice, and Love arise. I concluded that consciousness can be pointed at, elicited, and expanded, but not objectively defined because it is not an object or thing in the outer world. It is a pre-reflective, pre-objective, invisible phenomenon.

Okay. Stop the presses. I’m cutting the pages I wrote earlier to get down to what I really want to say about empathy and love as foundation of human culture, knowledge, ethics, politics, existence itself.

The pages I just crumbled up and threw in the waste basket below consist of a lot of my philosophical verbiage. (No, I didn’t say garbage though you might have.) They explain the marvelous capacity of human knowledge, how consciousness expands, how empathy happens, and how empathy becomes love and the foundation of thought, ethics, and politics. Well, you can look in the bottom waste basket for that, if you want.

What I really want to say is that our natural, social, political world is in grave danger. And we human dominators of the Anthropocene age are in trouble. And we are the cause of much of it. We need to reject saviors, superheroes, gods, exceptional revelations, or apocalyptic events to bail us out of our mess. We need to take responsibility — not shame and blame, but our ability to respond.

We have the ability if we just acknowledge and use it. And it is the empathic and transcending dimensions of consciousness that make it so. I do not know if God or the Universe intended our transcending, empathic human spirit. But I do believe that if we nurture the consciousness that accompanies our connection to the world and to others, that is, if we grow our embodied-soul, personally and collectively, we will achieve what has been achieved only in very small steps in the short time of human experience — just long enough that we know we have this Nature and/or God-given possibility.

I think that soul-growing in all its dimensions of self and other selves (empathy), of selves and things in the world that are visible, objective, and verifiable (thinking), of reaching beyond the visible through doubt and inquiry to new insights (transcending), of action for others towards infinity and universality. In other words, personal, collective, unconditional love.

My brief history of soul-growing:

1. In the child’s emergence from the womb, she is held by a fondling flesh whom she feels and hears cooing and calling her name. She feels her own flesh as part of and separate from the other one who holds and nurses her.

2. She is directed by the other one to outside them both — to light, to sound, to taste, to smell, and eventually to the name of something else.

3. She plays with others who play with her, and they become her home, the world she lives in. She moves her eyes and mouth, fingers, and arms as the others do.

4. She mimics them and follows their gaze to other things and other people and feels her own self as being and doing. She feels other things and persons as selves like her.

5. She identifies with others and the other whom she discovers are the ways to become, to grow in body and spirit, to find meaning amid chaos, to love without conditions, to create a beloved community in which to thrive.

I feel — and so I am. (Je me sens donc je suis)

I am my body and soul in one.

I feel my body sensing and naming things

I express what I sensed using pictures, words, stories, and sing..

I feel two souls in our bodily dance.

I am We and We are me. Enhanced.

I know the truth when you confirm that you sense it too.

I feel who I am becoming in sensing things and feeling you.

I feel my direction towards being me at last.

I feel when I veer from my chosen path.

I am with you, opening to all below and above.

I become myself and you, the world in love.

Love is the expansion, transcendence, and mingling of consciousness with you in this world, not our previous world, not our future wished-for world. Love is here and now with you. Nowhere/no-time else.

Love unites the “je me sens” with the “je sens” and “je sais”

— — — — —

Note: My French uses “je sens” for “I sense in the world” and “je me sens” for “I feel in my embodied soul.” The visible and the invisible.

Wastebasket: a phenomenological reflection.

How consciousness, intersubjectivity, empathy, and transcendence work.

To define something as real is to cut out a piece of data that is continually flowing in our experience. I name, categorize, objectify, distinguish a thing by putting boundaries or borders around it. Then, I put it with or under other things we see, hear, taste, smell, feel as out there apart from me while they nourish, help, or threaten my existence as I feel it. We humans do this through language and other symbols or images most of which we have learned from others in our contact.

In my earlier meditation, I discussed consciousness using the language of my mentors because that language makes sense to me and to others in my circle. I know that still others use different languages or spend no words at all on this inner feeling that accompanies our knowledge and action in the world. We do not analyze our inner awareness unless there is a conflict between our beliefs or behaviors and our inner feeling. With conflict we might take notice.

It is the intersubjective aspect of consciousness that’s at stake here — sometimes called entropy or compassion. Sometimes called love. Without that dimension, consciousness is diminished and even obliterated. I cannot have a world in which to become and exercise my human existence until I have been brought into the world of my caregivers, teachers, and miracle workers by feeling their ways of being and acting in the world. I get inside them by listening, watching, but above all reliving their existence. I do this by engaging physically in conversation through exchanged bodily built and exchanged images. I first glimpse and then recreate their imagination. Thus, I feel their consciousness and my own.

Without corporal interaction with others, I would not have gained, nor would I retain, human consciousness. When Einstein was asked what the most important human capacity for science is, he responded that “imagination is more important than knowledge.” Consider his mind experiments: two trains passing each other to explain relativity, a curved space time for gravity. The human ability to use images is important for science, but also for art, religion, language, poetry and prose, common sense, philosophy — human existence itself. Shared images, shared expressions, shared souls. And crucial for the speech and action of politics where we make a common living space and time.

The present conflict in world and international order is due to a limitation and absence of imagination. It is due to the proclivity to harden or absolutize images which in some religious traditions is called idolatry. A righteousness in which others are wrong and what we believe and do is right. The failure to imagine undermines the transcendence of consciousness. It stops the

ever-continuing inquiry and reform of our beliefs.

But most of all it is the absence of empathy. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Love your enemies. Take on the mind of the Christ or the Buddha or the Prophet with compassion for all. Hear all the Axial-Age teachers who revealed a new humanity.

Evolutionary anthropology teaches that homo, a relatively physically weak and threatened species migrating from place to place on planet earth, through some weird combination of organic mutations naturally selected and then produced genes that favored the ability to construct and use images and analogies to communicate with one another. Thus, sapiens found a powerful way for defense and dominance in their environment.

Humans saw that trenches created by floods and earthquakes were lines of defense against predators and began to name and build walls. Caves became shelters and homes. Blown seeds were collected and spread on the ground. Neighboring animals were harnessed to carriages for means of transportation. Horses pulled their carriages and carriages became horseless. Plows pulled by oxen became tractors. Dangerous wolves became man’s best friends.

Pragmatic phenomenology, in dialogue with social psychology and neuroscience, teaches how human communication created a spirit world that inspired the natural world. In time, especially post enlightenment times, natural scientific thinkers transcended the dualism of matter and spirit. They understood the body as corporal soul; they discovered the soul as a conscious body. An organism neurally integrated to achieve a sense of self. In interaction with other selves.

In Homo-sapiens’ confrontation with objects appearing and named in their material environment, an invisible realm also appeared. Humans became aware of themselves and others in action not as material objects to be manipulated but persons with souls like them — i.e., agents feeling their own behavior in the world. At first, the inner experience of themselves as agents gave rise to a notion of immaterial beings somehow inhabiting their bodies and separable from matter. Or a notion of pan-psychism of the material universe, a universal consciousness. An imagination still useful for some today.

In early humans, whether at the beginning of history or at the beginning of life, appears human intersubjectivity. While we all have the genetic ability for imagination and for experience of objects or things in the world, until we use that ability, we are not quite human. It is only when the human is cared for by another and takes on the persona of the other by imitating and responding to her gestures that the soul is born. By taking on the caregivers’ style, language, and point of view, the child enters the mother’s body more than it was imbedded into her body before birth. The child reenacts others’ symbolic activities shaping their worlds and develops his own style and approach of existence in the world. In that enactment the child grasps its own sense of self or soul in interaction with other souls. But developing and expanding the soul is a lifelong endeavor — Individually and collectively.

Child development specialists have studied how important the signaling and exemplifying of others. e.g., parents, siblings, teachers, and friends, bring the growing child into the language and culture of his tribe, community, nation, and humanity. Human existence is corporal and expressed in and through the body. The child has a sense of its own and others’ existence. As the child learns through action, she acquires knowledge of things and their inter-relationships in the material world. Along with knowledge of the world she senses the intersubjectivity of incorporated consciousnesses or of conscious bodies that accompanies knowledge. Human existence is a soulful body or corporal consciousness in and to the world transparent to itself “prior” to the reflection or judgment that the world and its things are present and true.

Aesthetic and religious studies also demonstrate the prereflective appearance of the invisible in post-reflective visible phenomena. When I watch the ritual of the musical dance, I participate in the dancers’ and musicians’ forms and styles on stage. When I attend the drama, I follow the director’s and conductor’s timing and beat. When I attend a museum, I draw and repaint the portrait or landscape with the artist. I am drawn into the symbolic activity of the artist or priest — body to body, soul to soul.

Intersubjectivity is a condition and dimension of human corporal existence. The perception of intersubjectivity in personal individual consciousness (the “I”) is the base of ethics and of all principles and rules of morality. The perception of intersubjectivity in collective consciousness, the “We,” is the base of politics and of all the historical principles and laws of the republic. The perception of the intersubjective is analogous to the inter-objectivity of things in the material world and the principles and laws of science. To know the visible realm and all the things that constitute it and to know the invisible realm and the conscious bodies that constitute those realms requires intersubjectivity.

There are degrees of intersubjectivity as growing consciousness develops and expands in space and time. From care giving and receiving, to friendship sharing, to falling into, committing to, nurturing, and uniting in love body and soul. This is the culmination of physical/spiritual entanglement where one individual through corporal contact enters the body and soul of another person. I experience not only my own but the others’ inner and outer experience. Personally, by listening and entering the other’s habits, character, viewpoint, value, vision of the world and in this way being in “touch” not just with her body but also her style of behavior, the character or soul of the person. Collectively, by listening to many and joining with them in their vision, their hopes, their common approach and character, we inhabit a collective soul to construct a common world that unites us.

Those who are stuck in the words of holy scriptures, who are baptized in the blood of saviors, who are bound to the temples of the gods, who confuse their beliefs with truth, I urge you back to simple basics with song master Jacques Brel.

If we only have love

Then tomorrow will dawn

And the days of our years

Will rise on that morn

If we only have love

To embrace without fears

We will kiss with our eyes

We will sleep without tears

If we only have love

With our arms open wide

Then the young and the old

Will stand at our side

If we only have love

Love that’s falling like rain

Then the parched desert earth

Will grow green again

If we only have love

For the hymn that we shout

For the song that we sing

Then we’ll have a way out

If we only have love

We can reach those in pain

We can heal all our wounds

We can use our own names

If we only have love

We can melt all the guns

And then give the new world

To our daughters and sons

If we only have love

Then Jerusalem stands

And then death has no shadow

There are no foreign lands

If we only have love

We will never bow down

We’ll be tall as the pines

Neither heroes nor clowns

If we only have love

Then we’ll only be men

And we’ll drink from the Grail

To be born once again

Then with nothing at all

But the little we are

We’ll have conquered all time

All space, the sun, and the stars

Next: how do we take responsibility of this amazing and wonderful capacity to love? We’ll, we have our own stories for that. How do we join them.