In shaping a teeming and generally senseless group of people into something resembling a society, empathy is probably the most important social adhesive. It is, for our purposes, the ability to discern and understand the feelings of others. It is a direct symptom of a kind of internal language to which most humans are naturally privy. As a result, it is a concept most strongly associated with communication.
To be able to truly communicate the depth of one’s own feelings, or even just a simple idea, another person would have to become or have been that other person in some capacity, for we all speak only the personal languages of our own experience. These experiences often seem to have a great deal of crossover with other humans. This may be seen as the tragedy of language in that complete communication is always an illusion, but for practical purposes it matters little.
The origins of empathy are probably founded in the same source as many of the social virtues. Understanding each others’ emotions and motives promoted and strengthened a group’s social harmony and ultimate prosperity. It is a fairly standard argument found today and is not really a primary concern of mine. Possessing that explanation gives little in the way of understanding the workings of empathy, which is what my real concern is.
How do we become empathetic people? The answer lies chiefly in two things, the scope of human emotions we have felt during the course of our lives and our ability to access that feeling in the annals capable of recalling it. There is also another more difficult, yet ultimately crucial, skill to acquire that enables us to be empathetic: our ability to synthesize and contextualize our own feelings into an experience that is similar to someone else’s. This type of activity is what often plays the major role in surmounting our language barriers, both in emotional language and the more humdrum kind we use every day. Cunning empaths can see what experiences from their own lives must be amplified, altered or added to the emotional brine in order to achieve the desired effect and must always attemps to broaden their scope of understanding human emotion.
There are limits to this activity, however. These limits mostly have to do with the person’s ability to draw on a relevant experience and implement it appropriately. Not everyone can just empathize with someone who survived the Holocaust or Hurricane Katrina. There are elements that characterize extreme experiences which many humans living in undisturbed catatonia have not the depth to understand. This is why attaining a broad array of life experience, not just of what is pleasant or easy, is so vitally important in any real empathetic endeavor.
If you want to understand those who have felt such strong life experiences, you have to find the appropriate emotions-despair, frantic survival, fear of death or maiming-and contextualize it in the appropriate way. Some people may fail at this, and that is OK. Failure itself is not a problem, so long as you realize your failures. We can either gain skill or become bad at things by habituation through failure. The worst thing is thinking you have succeeded when you have failed, for this will not only be a detriment to your furthering your emotional skill, it will also ensure a distorted and typically condescending view of the emotional subject. This is why perspective is the most crucial element of all, without knowing what these emotional depths are like, you can never know if you are simulating them well.
Another thing to be aware of is the fact that the strength of these feelings is also very important. Let’s say you have felt the emotion “despair.” That does not give you any license to extrapolate the much stronger feelings of despair, just that one level of despair you have felt. You must have felt strong feelings of something to extrapolate strong feelings, for the strength and weakness of a feeling is a relationship that also must be understood separately from the category of a feeling.
Some strong emotions will provide information to transcend others and extrapolate for their strength and weakness. Others will not and the information will only become available through direct experience.
If you are more sensitive to external conditions and more prone to an emotional response, you may be empathetic in accordance with that increased scope of emotional experience, perhaps giving you the best way to grow empathetic, but something that is a really irritating encumbrance in dealing with the general absurdities of the world.