Empathy and intersubjectivity

IF we truly want to be genuine friends and brothers and

sisters to everybody else, we need to practice empathy first.

Hopefully that gesture will elicit a corresponding similar response of

the others toward us, and so we can enter into the world of

intersubjectivity which is what loving is all about.

  

          While empathy is a one-way affair, intersubjectivity is

already a two-way, mutual affair. Things start with oneself giving

himself to the others, and what he gives is also given back to him. As

St. John of the Cross would put it, “Where there is no love, put love

and you will harvest love.” It’s a principle that works most of the

time.

  

          Empathy glues us together as a people, enabling us to enter

into one another´s lives as we are supposed to do, building up our

sense of unity and solidarity despite the variety of our conditions

and situations. And so anything that undermines it undermines us as a

people, as a society, as a family.

   

          Lack of it leads to conflicts and acrimony, poisoning and

weakening our social fabric. We need to be more aware of building up

this important aspect of our lives, knowing its true nature and

character, its authentic source of energy and its real goal. At this

time, we cannot afford to be naïve about our need for empathy,

properly understood.

  

          Our initial problem is that many of us understand empathy

more as an instinctive and emotional reaction only, and nothing much

else. When you see someone stumble and in pain, you immediately mirror

his condition by vicariously feeling the fellow´s predicament

yourself.

  

          The emotions, of course, play an important role in

developing empathy. We cannot identify ourselves with the others

through pure ideas alone, and doctrine, and all that. We have to use

the emotions also, as in giving a lot of understanding, affection,

compassion, loyalty, etc. Our interest in the spiritual and

supernatural should not sacrifice or compromise naturalness where the

emotions play an important role.

  

          But neither should empathy be just an instinctive and

automatic reaction; it has to be a deliberately cultivated trait. It

should not just remain in the emotional level; it also has to be

properly directed and driven by our conscious reason, and then by our

faith and charity.

  

          It´s this wholistic grasp of empathy that would truly help

us build the society that we deserve as persons and as children of

God. We need to do everything to attain that understanding and the

skill to live it.

  

          Thus, we have to study it not only in the physical,

biological and social sciences. It has to be studied also under the

light of our faith and religion. Actually, the latter source of

knowledge gives empathy its deepest moorings. It defines empathy´s

ultimate dimensions. The natural sciences only give us the tools and

techniques to develop empathy.

   

          The Christian faith, for example, links empathy to the whole

range of Christian charity that includes not only loving those who

love us but also those who don´t. It´s this faith where empathy breaks

free from its usual confinement in the emotion level to enter into the

world of the supernatural to which we are called due to our spiritual

nature also.

  

          It’s when we master the art of empathy that we can aspire to

create the proper condition for intersubjectivity to take place. This

is the ideal condition for all of us. But like any ideal, it is

something to be worked out with great effort. It may appear to be

utopian at first, but we have to convince ourselves that it can be

achieved. We just have to keep on trying.

  

          We have to be wary of our tendency to take things for

granted, or to be so swallowed up completely by the usual flow of

things we do that we do fail to give some thought on how to grow in

empathy and intersubjectivity.