1580s (1570s in Latin form), "affinity between certain things" (body and soul, persons and their garments), from French sympathie (16c.) and directly from Late Latin sympathia "community of feeling, sympathy," from Greek sympatheia "fellow-feeling, community of feeling," from sympathēs "having a fellow feeling, affected by like feelings," from assimilated form of syn- "together" (see syn-) + pathos "feeling," which is related to paskhein, pathein "suffer" (from PIE root *kwent(h)- "to suffer").
Sympathy thus implies a natural connection or community as the root of the fellow-feeling. You could feel sympathy for your brother, but also a member of your church or community organization; more extended but still valid, for a fellow firefighter or veteran, a fellow American, a fellow Westerner, etc. The idea is that there is some sort of real connection that makes you recognize a likeness between yourself and the one suffering, and this causes you to share in their suffering to some degree.
Empathy, by contrast, is an art project.
1908, modeled on German Einfühlung (from ein "in" + Fühlung "feeling"), which was coined 1858 by German philosopher Rudolf Lotze (1817-1881) as a translation of Greek empatheia "passion, state of emotion," from assimilated form of en "in" (see en- (2)) + pathos "feeling" (from PIE root *kwent(h)- "to suffer"). A term from a theory of art appreciation that maintains appreciation depends on the viewer's ability to project his personality into the viewed object.
'Not only do I see gravity and modesty and pride and courtesy and stateliness, but I feel or act them in the mind's muscles. This is, I suppose, a simple case of empathy, if we may coin that term as a rendering of Einfühlung; there is nothing curious or idiosyncratic about it; but it is a fact that must be mentioned.' [Edward Bradford Titchener, "Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes," 1909]
The concept here is that a connection doesn't really exist between you and the other person: indeed, since it was coined in the service of art appreciation, there needn't actually be another person who is really suffering at all. The art is conjuring an idea of suffering in your mind, that -- according to the analogy of 'the mind' as having muscle movements -- causes it to feel, inwardly (ein/in), a sense of suffering. In this way it is an egotistical feeling, just as described: 'a projection of his personality into the viewed object.'
Empathy is really dangerous. It can cause us to interfere passionately in matters we don't really know anything about, because there's no actual connection between us and the alleged suffering. We end up drawn into other people's wars. We end up drawn into inter-family conflict that is far too dense for us to really help or even grasp. Empathy can allow pictures painted in the media, using the tools of cinema and art, to drive even mass popular movements into the streets. It can, insofar as it successfully makes us feel deep psychic pain on behalf of the alleged suffering, justify extraordinary measures in defiance of ordinary constraints on our behavior. It has, when so used, given rise to tremendous brutality.
It's better to mind your business. Be mindful, I would suggest, when you find yourself experiencing fellow-feeling: ask yourself if it is coming from a real connection between you and the suffering, or if it is one being conjured by art. Beware the conjurers.
UPDATE: The OED:
4 comments:
Thank you. I have read several pieces recently that use the two terms interchangeably, and having a clear comparison is very useful.
A perhaps unanswerable question: Do modern media and the internet (how things are presented on social media as well as in news feeds) condition us as a society toward empathy by focusing on the far-away over the close in? Even local news and newspapers have a few local or regional stories, then shift to national and international matters. We see a great deal about events in the Middle East, or those afflicted by natural disasters, but very little of what is happening in our corners of the world.
I have a suspicion, but I also am not an ideal example, because my work requires me to spend a great deal of time reading about international and national events.
LittleRed1
I don't think it's necessarily very hard to answer that question. It is an undisputed fact that all governments have learned the art of propaganda, and use it regularly on their own populations, ours included.
Media companies have relationships with governments. For example, the TV show "Jack Ryan" painted Venezuela's socialists as the good guys and their nationalists as the bad guys, in an exact reversal of reality. Why? Well, partly because the media loves socialism; but also partly because the CIA was involved in the production. So was the Pentagon.
Over in the UK, the BBC grilled a UK politician pretty hard for not watching a TV show called "Adolescence," which was about 'toxic masculinity.' However, the events it was based upon were edited to change the race and culture of the boy killer. This way, the empathy you experience for the art will create the desired effect -- not the one that reality, and subsequent sympathy, might create.
Do they do it in the news as well? Of course they do. The only real question is, to what degree are they aware they are doing it? Is the egoism of the empathy so ingrained, in other words, that they set aside sympathy in favor of nurturing the artistic empathic reaction that most suits their own ego? Are they self-aware enough to realize that they're doing it, or is it just another subconscious defense mechanism?
That part might be hard to say, and might differ from one journalist to another. When they do it so reliably in fantasy TV shows, though, we can reasonably suspect that those cases are on purpose -- especially when there's documented funding flowing from government agencies in support of them.
In Remarque's novel 'The Road Back', which is kind of a sequel to his 'All Quiet on the Western Front', the first world war has finally ended and the narrator, Ernst, is headed home with his surviving friends. On the way they pass a hospital for very badly wounded men, including gas casualties--these men will never make it home, they will die where they are. "There behind me on the stretcher my comrades are now lying and still they call. It is peace, yet they must die. But I, I am trembling with joy and am not ashamed---And that is odd.
Because none can ever wholly reel what another suffers--is that the reason why war perpetually recur?"''
Reading this passage, it seemed to that what he has identified is a *partial* reason, but by no means the *whole* reason for the recurrence of war. Indeed, it seems very likely that a significant % of the real-life equivalents of Ernst's comrades--and their equivalents in other nations--enlisted in large part because of their empathy for what they believed was being done to people...people they identified with in some way...by the enemy,
I've seen references to studies suggesting that Oxytocin...'the cuddle hormone'...can lead to hightened aggression to members of an out-group, presumably in the name of protecting members of an in-group.
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