This is the same confusion of psychology and sociology that you wandered into a few weeks ago. Psychology (e.g., subjective understanding of lived experience) cannot explain social facts. Full stop. Sure, to understand a person's lived experience, verstehen is crucial; however, if we want to understand social systems and social structure, knowing the psychological characteristics of the participants is just irrelevant. It's exactly analogous to saying that people are made of atoms, therefore any valid analysis of society must be based on physics.
There are different levels of analysis here, and assuming we can understand the structure of society by analyzing subjective experience is the worst sort of category error (as Ryle might say).
Wittgenstein is appropriate here, in a different way than you suggest. When Wittgenstein wants to analyze language, he does not accept the common-sense views of how language works (e.g., the "picture theory" of language). Instead, he ruthlessly rejected that common-sense view of language to get at a more interesting and thorough analysis of language use. The fact that his view of language conflicts with common sense is irrelevant to the validity of his claims.
Again, I want to emphasize that I am not "blowing off Brian"; his own experience is important, and mutual empathy is a noble goal. However, subjective experience is not a logically coherent basis for understanding social relations. --And this just occurs to me: why is it an insult to claim that X is not a good tool for analyzing social relations? Sure, analyzing social relations is important, but there are many good things in the world that have nothing to do with that onerous task!
Miles
>
> 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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