Empathy and the Uniqueness of Human Beings
In issue 52 of Philosophy Now, Ramsey McNabb describes the conundrum:
To deny that empathy is possible is a problem, since it is highly valued in the fields of ethics, medicine, education, and elsewhere. Without empathy for others, it is not clear why we would ever be motivated by anything other than selfishness. Indeed, a person with a complete lack of empathy might rightly be classified as an amoral sociopath. In medicine, empathy for their patients’ experiences (symptoms, feelings) enables doctors to diagnose and treat them more effectively, and with greater compassion. Empathy enables teachers and other educators to grasp the particular problems and needs of students.
This is the common understanding of empathy, but as McNabb explains, there is another view which is not unreasonable and which has some currency:
On the other hand, the impossibility of empathy, and the importance of uniqueness of experience is a highly treasured ‘truth’ in current education and social justice theory. To presume to know how another person feels is to strip that person of his or her separateness and uniqueness. It is especially offensive to people who have been victims of one form or another of oppression when members of the privileged group claim to know how they feel.
For example, Diana Meyers states: “The metaphor of putting oneself in the other’s shoes is misleading, for it is a mistake to assume that the other feels the same way as one would oneself feel in the same circumstances.” See her ‘Difference, Empathy, and Impartial Reason’, Subjection & Subjectivity: Psychoanalytic Feminism & Moral Philosophy, (Routledge, 1994). Also, in 1992, when Bill Clinton made his infamous “I feel your pain” comment, many people were offended and criticized him for his declaration of empathy.
So, does genuine empathy exist and serve as a basis for social interaction, or is it just a sham and something which only serves to devalue the uniqueness of human experiences? I think that the former is true — the latter only appears to be the case if we take the concept “I know who you feel” to too great of an extreme. I may not know how you feel to the same extent that you know, but that does not preclude genuine understanding.
People might justifiably feel offended when someone presumes to “know” how they feel if there is good reason to think that they couldn’t possibly have the sorts of experiences upon which such mutual understanding is possible. We are all human, but sometimes being human isn’t enough — some things you actually have to experience in order to understand (or at least experience something very similar).
Thus, expressions of false empathy are certainly possible, but this doesn’t mean that all expressions of empathy are false. To suggest that they are goes too far in the other direction, even to the point of denying that our common humanity is meaningful for the purpose of mutual understanding. The fact that we are both human may not always be enough, but it does count for something.
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Comments
Several decades ago I learned that sympathy was understanding another’s feelings and “putting yourself in the shoes of another” and that empathy was actually feeling what another feels. True empathy defined that way was impossible and was the subject of sci-fi or fantasy stories. I think that the meaning of empathy has evolved and sympathy has fallen into disuse.
I always understood sympathy to be a feeling of compassion towards another individual, or just a general feeling “bad” for them, whereas empathy was the closest approximation to feeling what that individual felt. It’s on a higher level, and thus can probe deeper into the depths of that person’s experience.
I think we should be careful to overgeneralize the “ineffectiveness” of empathy. In fact, perhaps the last comment made touched on this point; that this article hasn’t really grasped the true nature of empathy. To say that empathy somehow attacks or threatens an individual’s uniqueness (presumably the recipient of the empathetic feelings) is too general. If the recipient of the empathetic feelings perceive it as so, that is their choice. As a side note, empathy doesn’t have to imply one person trying to communicate with another person; empathy can be isolated.
I think it’s true that in any given situation, you can never feel what another person is feeling. The complexity of emotion is obvious. With each person usually having approximately 100 billion neurons in their brain, how can we really say “I know what you feel”? We can’t, if we’re talking numbers. Technically, each emotion of joy I feel will likely in some way be different from the next. Yet we still label it “joy.” In that sense, empathy is effective because it is somewhat of a mental/emotional heuristic.
“To presume to know how another person feels is to strip that person of his or her separateness and uniqueness.”
In rare cases, I believe this to be true. Its such a general statement, that it should probably be elucidated upon. Again, why define your uniqueness by the manner in which some other person tries to understand you? That seems rather selfish. Why not define your uniqueness by, oh I don’t know, your personality?
I’m a trainee person-centred counsellor and developing empathic skills is central to my training. Empathy is understanding (or at least trying to understand) how a person feels, how they perceive events. As a counsellor I have to get inside the client’s frame of reference and leave everything I have experienced to one side. This is where phenomonology is very important.
True empathy (and advanced empathy) takes a period of time to develop with a client, and I believe that in everyday life it’s difficult to achieve. It takes a certain kind of relationship in which certain conditions are offered (Rogers’ core conditions of congruence, unconditional positive regard and empathy) to have true empathic understanding of another. I believe that this kind of relationship is very rare in everyday life, but is one that is offered by person-centred counsellors.