the nature of empathy

to imagine is to construct in one’s mind. there is always a kind of separation of the imaginer from the imagined, in the way that sometimes, when one is dreaming, the dreamer observes the dream.

absolute empathy/understanding can only take place in the space before imagination, a space of pure feeling. that absolute empathy/understanding ceases to be empathy/understanding (which requires a subject and object) because it has become Enlightenment.

imagination, however, is the tool by which we move our pre-imagined understandings closer to that absolute.

language provides a good example. i am not fluent in french, yet i know some french words.

when i hear “avec” i know it means “with.”
when i hear “peut-être” i know it means “maybe.”
when i hear “je suis” i know it means “i am.”

but “with” is transparent to me, while “avec” is mediated, cloudy.

when i draw on the word “with,” i experience the word as though it does not symbolize the meaning of “with”…rather, the meaning and the word are one.

i understand “avec” by way of analogy, through its relationship to “with.” i say to myself “‘avec’ connects to the same meaning in the head of someone who speaks french that ‘with’ connects to in mine.” this is the significance of saying “‘avec’ means ‘with.’” if i were fluent in french i could still say, “‘avec’ means ‘with.’” but i could just as truthfully say “‘avec’ means ‘avec’.”

when i consider the president, or my mother, or the chinese, or the french, or billerica memorial high school students, or eddie izzard, or the protagonist in a movie i’m watching, or one of my friends (and i empathize with these people to widely varying degrees), i understand them as people through analogy, through their relationship to me. and conversely, i understand myself as a person through my relationship to them.

i seem to exist looking out at/touching the world through a body. when i type, i cannot see my own face. i look down at my hands. i will sometimes walk by a mirror and feel stunned by my own image. i do not imagine myself as a face. yet a face, i have…as the mirror reminds me. often, when i think, i do not say to myself “i am thinking”…i simply think. similarly, i feel–forces and chemicals in me move–before i say “i am feeling (anger, joy, disgust etc.)” yet there is never a time when i find myself looking down at another person’s typing hands, through their eyes. when i consider other people, i imagine their faces. when eddie izzard says “i am thinking”, i imagine that what he calls “thinking” must refer to something in him that is like what i have learned to call “thinking” in myself. i imagine talking to others, or perhaps i practice what has so often been called empathy: i “imagine myself in their shoes.”

that is why “thinking” means something different in each of the following sentences:

“eddie izzard is thinking.”
“i am thinking.”

that is why “a person” means something different in each of the following sentences:

“he is a person.”
“i am a person.”

for those of us who are fluent in english and not french: “[he is] a person” is to “avec” as “[i am ] a person” is to “with.”

i realize that other people must similarly imagine me in this way. that to everyone except me, i am a face. i am an Other.

intellectually, i understand that others’ “with” is actually “avec.” intellectually, i understand that others may look down at their own hands. but all of this takes place in the realm of imagination.

i am the observer and interpreter.

i am the referent.

in the world as it is i am the referent and i am not. we are all referents. we are separate and we are not. to truly honor and do justice to Others, i must strive, asymptotically, for fluency, for feeling, for pre-imagined appreciation of the meaning literally behind their faces, which i imagine (and i use the word deliberately) will close the gap that separates me from all others.

i (insofar as “i” exist) must strive to close the space between “[he is] a person” and “[i am ] a person.”