I am defining empathy so as to differentiate it from sympathy and antipathy.
If we use the simpler method of projecting how we know ourselves - also prone to emotional and egotistical hyperbole - then we are simply and easily understanding other in relation to his circumstances; placing ourselves as we know ourselves, in their place.
This is indeed compassion and sympathy, and in rare cases, if we hate ourselves or what we were, then it may produce antipathy.
But that's not empathy.
We failed to truly know other, but only know self in their place.
Empathy is difficult because it is a matter of degree. We gradually adjust our projection to the other's essence, as we've understood it over long periods of observation, to see them, and not ourselves in their place.
We are all alike, but this does not mean we are clones - not even teins are absolutely alike.
Because you are trapped in projections.Arcturus Descending wrote:Aegean,Arcturus Descending wrote:I am defining empathy so as to differentiate it from sympathy and antipathy.
Empathy
the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner
That is also how I would interpret and experience empathy. How does your sentence: "Empathy is about cold, hard, objective, reasoning" relate to the above? I am not grasping it.
Yes, but not all who drink the same water are the same. Divergence is what separates one from another - it is what is different that distinguishes one from another.Arcturus Descending wrote:I do not believe that in order to experience empathy for another we would have had to drink from the same cup of experience.
It all depends on whether you pity yourself or hate yourself for being as you are.Arcturus Descending wrote:Pity is kind of a negative word to me. So, what you wrote above, is that your idea of what sympathy defined here is all about?
How does "real" compassion and sympathy produce antipathy? Negative projection can of course.
Arcturus Descending wrote:That IS projection. But that is usually triggered by an unconscious negative feeling. What does that have to do with empathy, compassion or sympathy?
words - semiotics - either connects us to reality or they connect us to our own emotions and reactions towards reality.Arcturus Descending wrote:Oh, in what way?
Words really are such hidden things, are they not?
One does not hate one’s enemies, in a way where the emotion overpowers him.
One is thankful for them, for without disease, the pleasure of ease is impossible;
without death, life is impossible;
without weakness, strength is impossible;
without discontentment, contentment is impossible.
One does not hate one’s enemies, in a way where the emotion overpowers him.
Do you not consume other life forms?I imagine that you are speaking of all of the little ways in which our bodies die everyday even without our being aware of it to keep us healthy. If you are not speaking of that, then you are putting the cart before the horses.
Strength = measure of weakness.Not necessarily. But something would have to go hand in hand with weakness in order to make strength possible. On its own, weakness gets nowhere.
Yes....you must break what you may overcome, or die.The further down one can fall, the greater the capacity for transcendence.
Yes...only modern thinking is unbalanced. More positivity overcompensating for the negativity they can no longer endure.The balance of the yin and yang of life.
Aegean wrote:Well, friends and fiends, the day is nigh and the cock shall call the faithful to their yearly routines.
I shall depart, as I promised - a last parting gift of absence.
But I shall return, on the 21st of every month, hoping to find something to comment on, departing on the 22nd.
Until next year.
May you all have a healthy and fortuitous annus.
But I shall return, on the 21st of every month
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