Empathy and Social Behavior

Empathy and Social Behavior

Abstract

Definition

Empathy is the ability to reconstitute itself, like a simulation, on an intellectual level as on an emotional level, what happens in the experience of others. (Georges Adamczewski, 2005)

Description

Everyone talks and writes about empathy nowadays, not just presidents who speak about "feeling your pain" or appointing empathie federal judges, but scientific writers, talk show hosts, journalists, and most of the rest of us, too. Scientists tell us about mirror neurons in the brain that might underlie empathie processes and about the various ways in which apes and other nonhuman animals are capable of empathy. And studies indicate that human males are less disposed toward empathy than human females because only the male brain is bathed in testosterone in utero and because the higher testosterone levels that males tend to register throughout their lives are associated with a greater aggressiveness that gets in the way of empathy.

But these studies and this work and all the words from others typically don't make clear what the ethical and broader philosophical implications about empathy might be, and those are precisely the issues I want to address, however briefly, in this article.

One of the first characteristics of empathy is to be thinkable and practicable as soon as it is admitted, in one way or another, the inability of human beings first. Every experience of self, others and the world is unique and I cannot perceive or feel the experience of others as it develops within its own universe. At most I have echoes, smell, clues that come to me in fragments, through a language which, by definition, planed singularities and differences (Beilock, Catherine & Thomas, 2004).

Second feature, the reconstitution of the universe itself of others elaborated by successive approximation, not a single shot of magic ear. Empathy is a process that progresses through attempts, trials, errors and corrections. It does not understand that drives intellectual and emotional empathy. Others is like a puzzle which we try to decipher the configuration and figures. Gray areas in addition to early thinning, widening the distance to each approach.

Hence the following feature, difficult to integrate, but essential: there is absolutely no empathy, understanding other's total. In some ways, progress in the understanding of others is simultaneously advance the incomprehension of others. The enigma will not be erased by an act of empathy, the mystery remains unsolved.

As a result, empathy does not know the other, but simply to discover each time I meet him. It's not because I think some get close to the strange world of others that I can train and develop an acquaintance. Empathy develops in the flow of becoming, and therefore in the present of presence: I reconstructed the other, this is not what it is or who qualified by nature, but what is reconstituted from what it expresses and silent, here and now (Beilock, Catherine & Thomas, 2004).

Method

Alerts

Empathy is not an ability to feel emotions and feelings of others. It would be a comforting illusion to believe ...