![]() ![]() ![]() After he had driven off, little remained in my memory except that initial penetrating visual query. ![]() In fact, he did not seem to find it necessary to define himself in relationship to me at all! I had shared some peanut butter and crackers and a pleasant time with him, and that was that. All he had done was look me over as if asking himself, “What’s this guy about?” He did not find it necessary to locate me philosophically or politically. He had not congratulated me for carrying the banner of Beat liberation struggles onto new battlefields, nor acknowledged me as a peer, nor questioned me in any way about my revolutionary lifestyle and politics. I was a little crestfallen by this initial encounter. His voice was cultivated, and his speech was very precise and peppered with geological terms like schist, upthrusts, and substrate. His eyes crinkled pleasantly when he smiled. Gary was not overweening, and he made interesting conversation-in the parlance of the time, he was “together.” His body was muscular and lithe. His look was so clearly appraising, so without social camouflage as to be startling. ![]() He was wearing an old straw hat that shaded his eyes, and I remember him cocking his head to one side to look at me. Here’s some context for that quote Peter Coyote is remembering a visit from the poet: Yet when we fall over, we still need a hug. Dr Johnson warned of those who “pay us by feeling”. Perhaps both words are a little discredited, but this is not new and it’s an eternal debate. But so can a claim of empathy besides provoking scepticism. An expression of sympathy can be condescending. Such words are apt to be used insincerely, or to be condemned as insincere. not only do I thoroughly understand your feelings about Mr Git, but I too would like to wring his neck).īut it’s fascinating the range here of different understandings of these slippery words! But then it may also imply a sharing of opinion, which is something that empathy doesn’t claim (e.g. It sometimes means a natural emotional compassionating (which as some have pointed out, does not necessarily require empathy). Sympathy, as the maturer word, has a less circumscribed meaning. After all, a cheetah attends intently to a gazelle.ģ. Sennett’s “I am attending intently to you” is neither empathy nor sympathy (besides being clumsily expressed). (Consequently if you have not had the specific experience that the other person has had, then a claim to empathy needs to be buttressed by argument.) Also, empathy does not have to be about a bad experience.Ģ. empathy = knowing what someone is experiencing. My perception is generally Hat’s, I think. One had to ‘feel oneself into it’.? This mental process he called by the name of Einfühlung, or, as it has been translated, Empathy. 209/2 propounded the theory that the appreciation of a work of art depended upon the capacity of the spectator to project his personality into the object of contemplation. 185 All such ‘feelings’?normally take the form, in my experience, of motor empathy. This is, I suppose, a simple case of empathy, if we may coin that term as a rendering of Einfühlung. 21 Not only do I see gravity and modesty and pride?but I feel or act them in the mind’s muscles. in ‘Lee’ & Anstruther-Thompson Beauty & Ugliness (1912) 337 Passing on to the æsthetic empathy (Einfühlung), or more properly the æsthetic sympathetic feeling of that act of erecting and spreading. It defines it as “The power of projecting one’s personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation”:ġ904 ‘V. Mitleid is compassion, Mitgefühl is sympathy.Īccording to the OED, the word “empathy” arose in 1904 as an attempt to translate the aesthetic concept Einfühlung in Leitfaden der Psychologie (1903) by Theodor Lipps. Two German words in this connection make a useful distinction: Mitleid = “suffering with”, Mitgefühl = “feeling with”. I solve this problem by never using the word “empathy”. ![]()
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