The dictionary is only a first approximation to a concept, or range of concepts, that is/are central to an extremely complicated discussion in philosophy of the human sciences. The thinkers in my list have quite different ideas about understanding other people.
These range from the extreme Wittgenstein-Winch position that (to put in Wittgenstein's terms) a form of life can _only_ be understood from the inside. If they are are right, and I don't think they are or that Brian thinks so either (otherwise he wouldn't bother to try to explain), empathy across forms of life or whatever the demarcation is is impossible.
On the other end -- well not all the way over, all the way over is, for example, behaviorism, on which there is no "inside" or anything that it is "like" to have a lived experience, but set that aside -- on the farthest end on which someone thinks there is something like an inside to a "form of life" to understand, you have, e.g., Weber, who thinks that social scientific explanation involves both causal explanation linking events to causal condition and verstehen, understanding, roughly an attempt at grasping the lived experience of others whose values and assumptions may be utterly different from yours.
However, even on Weber's view, the idea that the lived experience of a form of life (Wittgenstein's term, not Weber's) is basic in that it is what one attempts to grasp in Verstehen, in empathetic understanding. It is therefore in a sense "foundational," although I would not use that word, rather I'd say that the lived experience has a central role in social understanding, it's leaving out something necessary for an adequate (Weber's term) appreciation/explanation/account of whatever action one is interested it.
And if one doesn't have the inside lived experience and there is someone who does -- we can't ask the ancient Greeks, because there aren't any, but straights can ask gays, for example -- one has to be very careful about dismissing the insider's appraisal of your efforts at understanding what it's like.
So Miles is worse than wrong to blow off Brian; he's not only arrogant and condescending, he's willfully ignoring vital evidence that is necessary to a grasp of the issues he purports to be concerned with. And he doesn't have the excused that he's a behaviorist and doesn't believe in the lived dimension of life, which would be a different sort of failing.
I'm not saying that the insider's version has to be accepted tout court. Obviously that would make no sense. First, there is not one "insider's" version. Gays, for example, range from Brian to Roy Cohn (Joesph McCarthy's hatchetman, later a crooked New York lawyer and fixer, a right wing goon) along a couple of the many possible dimensions. Second, it's not settled who counts as an "insider" of what. The idea of a form of life is itself contested. Third, almost all of here here, me included, believe in the reality, in fact the pervasiveness, of ideology, the sort of twisting of consciousness that can lead people of embrace their own oppression, among other things, and that can be a basis for a critique of a self-conception of a lived experience. (One can go off into Hegel here, but let's not and say we did.)
Is empathy easy? Certainly not. Surely there is a "natural" capacity for it, whatever exactly that means, but there's a "natural" capacity to learn a language, play chess, do higher mathematics, write music -- that that means that we have inherit the biology and psychology that allows us to do these things. But that doesn't mean doing any of them is easy or that doing any of them well isn't something that, whether or not there's something like formal training involved, nonetheless requires discipline, effort, talent, and education.
I actually think that the actual exercise of our capacity for empathy is among the hardest things any of us can do, in part because people are far more complicated and intricate than just about anything else, quantum mechanics is child's play in comparison; but more deeply because it requires that we come out of ourselves and pay attention to other people.
Empathy requires that we overcome out own equally natural selfishness, self-centeredness, solipsism, fight out own assumptions that our assumptions are right and natural, set aside our tendency to assume that others are just like us and if not they are stupid,. bad, immature, whatever.
Most people never get near empathy (and there is solid evidence that men are a lot worse at it than women, btw). I don't hold myself up as any model; I am desperately aware of my own failings and my relatively recent occasional approaches to empathy, attained rather late in life, have only underlined for me how fragile and difficult it is.
The extreme difficulty of empathy is one reason that good accounts of other people are so rare, and the relative paucity of good social science, history, imaginative fiction, is evidence that empathy is really hard.
In a political context there is an added issue or a different context. If we are talking about understanding the experiences and action of our potential allies or would be constituencies, we would do well not to take them as mere objects of explanation, like bugs under a microscope or even the ancient Greeks, whom we can strive to explain but with whom we cannot interact. Therefore respect and humility is in order and the operative assumption is that we are talking to agents who act and think for themselves and who are no more or less entitled than we to chip into any discussion of the terms of our cooperation. That makes dismissing self-judgments of lived experience an even more dangerous enterprise than if we didn't care what the others think of us. But we do, so that changes everything.
--- ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
> On 17 Jun, 2007, at 10:03 PM, andie nachgeborenen
> wrote:
> >
> > (Empathy in general is really hard because it
> involves
> > paying close analytical and sympathetic attention
> to
> > others. As you and the other people who are
> blowing
> > off Brian are showing -- I mean, that empathy is
> > hard.)
>
>
> The dictionary says empathy means "the ability to
> understand and
> share the feelings of another". I think that is
> fairly natural in
> human beings, and would be hard to overcome (other
> than for
> sociopaths) -- the overcoming probably requires a
> lot of smartness
> and analytical attention ;-). Empathy, as defined
> above, seems to not
> just include, but be primarily about the case where
> one human being
> is able to understand without direct experience the
> condition of
> another. Whether this is possible through theorising
> or through
> defining traits of humanity, I am not sure.
>
> --ravi
>
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