Empathy: What does ever dog owner know?

[coberst]

Empathy: What does ever dog owner know?

 

Letting your dog out side when necessary demonstrates our ability to empathesize with other creatures.

 

There are various definitions of empathy given by various individuals but almost all of them point to the same meaning. Empathy is defined as the ability to understand the feelings, thoughts, and beliefs of another person. Empathy is often characterized as the ability to “walk in the shoes of another”, i.e. to acquire an emotional resonance with another.

 

In his classic work about modern art, “Abstraction and Empathy”, Wilhelm Worringer provides us with a theory of empathy derived from Theodor Lipps that can be usefully applied to objects of art as well as all objects including persons.

 

“The presupposition of the act of empathy is the general apperceptive activity. Every sensuous object, in so far as it exists for me, is always the product of two components, that which is sensuously given and of my apperceptive activity.”

 

Apperception—the process of understanding something perceived in terms of previous experience.

 

What does in so far as it exists for me mean. I would say that something exists for me when I comprehend that something. Comprehension is a hierarchical concept and can be usefully considered as in the shape of a pyramid. At the base of the comprehension pyramid is awareness that is followed by consciousness. We are aware of many things but we are conscious of much less. Consciousness is awareness plus our focused attention.

 

Continuing with the pyramid analogy, knowing follows consciousness and understanding is at the pinnacle of the pyramid. We know less than we are conscious of and we understand less than we know. Understanding is about meaning whereas knowing is about knowledge. To move from knowing something to a point when that something is meaningful to me, i.e. understood by me, is a big step for man and a giant step for mankind.

 

My very best friend is meaningful to me and my very worst enemy must, for security reasons, also be meaningful to me. The American failures in Vietnam and Iraq are greatly the result of the fact that our government and our citizens never understood these ‘foreigners’. We failed at the very important relationship—we did not empathesize with the people and thus failed to understand our enemy. It is quite possible that if we had understood them we would never have gone to war with them.

 

If we had empathy with Germany in the 1930s would we have stopped Hitler before he forced us into war?

 

If we had empathy with Germany before August 1914 would we have prevented WWI?

 

Do you agree that we understand our best friend and that we must also understand our worst enemy?

[HydrogenBond]

One can understand and empathize with your friends or your enemies. The difference is a friend will be open and an enemy will put on a poker face to hide some of the data. One can only empathize with the data available, with a good enemy strategist leading you where he wants you to empathize. The friend gives a wider bandwidth that allows both general and specific empathy. The enemy will narrow you to specific. But he will not show all his cards.

 

Empathy is also subjective. A person can like someone at one time, then hate them at another time, without any fundamental change in that person. This is common in divorce (this is only an easy to see example). One sees what they want to see and will empathize at that level, at that time, turning subjective specifics into general empathy. Many people missed the boat on Hitler, because of a combination of the subjectivity within their own empathy and a good strategy by the enemy.

 

Chamberlain was probably a nice guy and would empathize in the positive. Hitler, might have been able to sense this and said, I will take a little land and stop. But underneath the gears were turning. It may have been better to have someone along who is was more paranoid and/or militant to empathize down a different subjective line. Such a person would look for data based on what is the best strategy if I was in his shoes, since he is not showing all his cards, yet.

 

A dog is man's best friend. The dog is very honest and easy to empathize with, both in specific and general ways. Humans are sneakier, because they can control body language to hide what they are feeling. They can also use words to make data ambiguous so the data can be be cherry picked via the subjectivity in empathy. Fido will not wag his tail and bark playfully if he is angry, but a human can. It is acting 1.0.

 

A good salesman can read the person's empathy filter and tell them what they want to hear and then stack the deck. Guys do this with females. If she is nurturing, a wise guy may put on the sick puppy act. She may have to look for subtle clues to see the cards he might be hiding. If he is in full control of body and verbal language, he can come out clean to her others filters, until he doesn't call the next day.

 

When the stakes are higher, such as war and peace, acting is even more polished because empathy filters are sharper and done as teams. One can't rely on what you hear or see, but need another way to shift for clues. There are often groups of profilers trying to fill in the blanks trying to see the hidden cards. They empathize various scenarios so one is ready for anything. But even profilers/advisors can have their own hidden cards, profiling the big boss's subjective filter, stacking the deck in ways he wants to see, to help with promotion. This is politics 1.0.

 

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of nice people who project what is inside. Empathy allows one to see and feel, what they see and feel. From there one can help others, from a position of calmer detachment.

[coberst]

I suspect that the concept of empathy is foundational for comprehending the concept of morality. If we ever do develop a science of morality I suspect that empathy will be a good place to begin.

 

I think that it is important to be able to distinguish among the words empathy, sympathy, and compassion.

 

Webster says empathy—the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it—the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experiencing of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner

 

Webster says sympathy—an affinity, association, or relationship between persons or things wherein whatever affects one similarly the other.

 

Webster says compassion--sympathetic consciousness of other's distress together with a desire to alleviate it.