Good morning everyone,
I hope you had a wonderful, restful weekend. Today we’re kicking of our weekly theme: empathy. This topic is a part of our core mission statement, so taking a moment to understand it from multiple perspectives should be an enlightening experience.
We’re going to ground ourselves first in a psychological or scientific version of this phenomenon, and move out into other philosophical perspectives as the week goes on.
Let’s dive in!
Thought
Without empathy, we would be like ants or fish or lizards, aware of each other as bodies in space, but with no sense at all of the inner lives of each other.
—Dr. Rick Hanson
Application
According to Psychologists Daniel Goleman and Paul Ekman who have studied this topic at length, there exists within us three primary types of empathy: Cognitive, Emotional, and Compassionate.
Cognitive empathy is the ability to imagine—not yet to feel or understand—the experience of another. It’s the capacity we have to stop and consider, to create solidarity in our mind’s eye, wondering what their experience is like. Empathy is also different than sympathy in the sense that sympathy is a shared experience based on identification with another’s feelings. For example, if I had broken my leg or climbed a mountain, I could have sympathy for another who had a similar experience.
Emotional empathy is almost created sympathy. Once we can imagine what an experience for another is like, it’s pulling on our past, similar experiences to hypothesize what they might be feeling right now. This is a powerful skill when leveraged correctly.
Finally, Compassionate empathy is a drive or motivation that moves us from imagination to action. It’s when we are motivated to step in and celebrate a victory, comfort a loss, or help in a crisis.
Together, this process is unique to human beings and allows us to not only share information in ways that are profoundly different from other animals, but also to share feelings and states of being.
Empathy is the skill that enables us to put our philosophy and sense of compassion into action.
Backstory
This breakdown of empathy stems from the work of Daniel Goleman and Paul Ekman as mentioned above. Paul Ekman in specific was a psychologist obsessed with understanding and mapping our emotional range. He cataloged facial expressions, discovered hidden meanings in our gestures and non-verbal actions, and peeled back the layer on a sort of universal language.
Interestingly, this work has a lot of overlap with our previous study of language in that Ekman posits a universal, innate language (albeit nonverbal). And he would conclude that empathy has to do with our ability to understand and imagine the other’s state of being via communication.
And this ability to communicate our feelings and sense of being between each other moves us beyond general compassion to specific connections with one another. But the question is, who do we empathize with?
According to Dr. Rick Hanson we have essentially two categories—to empathize vertically and horizontally.
Horizontally, we can identify with a range of experiences and sensations amongst many types of people. Whereas vertically we can identify with certain emotions—anger, happiness, joy, sadness, grief—at different depths when we encounter those emotions. And that depth ability largely has to do with our own perception and personal experience with a specific emotion.
The reason this idea is important for us is how it directly proves the way in which self compassion and discovery is directly correlated to making the world a better place.
When we practice understanding our own anger, extending ourselves compassion, fully processing grief, or forgiving ourselves for a mistake, we are also creating capacity for that emotion in empathy. This means we are capable of not only understanding others’ states of being, we can extend them empathy and even support them in times of trial or accomplishment.
This type of range and depth enables us to treat each other in the way that ethical constructs, religions, and faith traditions engender us to act. In many ways, becoming aware of our own emotions so that they can be extended in empathetic practice is at the heart of virtually every ethical framework. Weather it’s Virtue Ethics or Deontology, empathy enables us to intuitively behave in the manner that our highest ethical standards call for.
This makes the adage, “become the change you want to see in the world” that much more relevant.
Until tomorrow friends,
Matt
References:
https://takecasper.com/2020/06/empathy-1/
https://www.rickhanson.net/empathy/
https://www.paulekman.com/about/paul-ekman/
Empathy