More on Empathy

Ezra, in “An Empathy Problem” you ask whether we can reconcile empathy’s expansiveness with making decisions about our own survival. It seems to me that this is the central conflict in which anyone finds himself who attempts to behave morally – that identifying with someone else’s needs means setting one’s own needs aside, at least temporarily. The process of empathy in itself is not itself a process of choice; it is part of the ground for making choices. And when one’s own needs conflict with the needs of others, empathy can put one, at the extreme, in the position of having to choose between one’s own survival and the survival of another. But it seems to me that the ability not to see my own survival as a thing to be pursued at all costs is part of what it means to be human. That doesn’t mean that in every situation, others’ needs should automatically supersede mine, but the ability to feel strongly the tension between my needs and theirs is essential to any functioning communal life, and also essential if there is ever to be peace between different communities.

You also assert that “empathy cannot make a bridge to what is alien or radically different.” While it is certainly easier to identify with what is like me, and while likeness often provides an entry point into empathy toward what is other, I see empathy as being, at its core, precisely about bridging to what is alien. At its most basic, empathy is a feeling-with, a feeling-for, someone who is not me. Even those who are in my community are alien at this basic level; it’s a narrower chasm, but just as deep as the one between me and an even more radical other. And if empathy is not wholly learned, it can nonetheless be expanded or shrunk by the choices we make in living. It is a kind of emotional imagination, an ability to say “what if?” While we fail constantly at building empathic bridges, I see no inherent limits to the gulfs of otherness that empathy can bridge, if we are willing to do the imaginative work required.