The Experience of Empathy

Traditionally empathy has been defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. I have my doubts regarding this explanation of empathy because I am resistant to the idea that one can ever understand the feelings of another, even if those feelings arise in response to a similar situation, say, the death of a loved one. And then, how could a person who has never experienced the death of a parent understand and share the feelings of one who has suffered such a death. Even within a nuclear family the death of any one member would affect individuals differently depending on the specific relationship each had had with the deceased. Understanding another’s feelings or certainly sharing the feelings in such cases would be problematic at best and impossible at worst. Or impossible at best and problematic at worst. Furthermore, in cases such as this and other circumstances similar and dissimilar, understanding suggests to me an active appropriation of the other by the one who asserts that they understand the feelings expressed by the one whose feelings are concerned. “I know how you feel” assumes fully the feelings and attendant context of the other as if those feelings could be packed up and transferred onto the one who claims understanding. And as for the ability to “share” the feelings of another . . . well, that seems to me to be quite impossible since the feelings to be shared of the one originally experiencing those feelings are a private matter and occur in a context that only the experiencer can know. The only sharing that might take place would be merely linguistic but then differing definitions would complicate and obviate the capacity to share feelings unless precise concurrence of definitions was realized which never actually could occur.
            Empathy is not the ability to understand and share the feelings of another but rather is the capacity to listen to the expression of those feelings. Empathy consists in active listening. And I think that this listening occurs with the posing of a question. There are two questions that I have experienced in this regard: the first I learned from Arlo Guthrie, who sang in “World Away From Me,” that upon his return home his children jumped out of bed and wondered, “Did you think of anything on down the line?” And a response to that question requires not only some active listening but a complete and complex narrative that might keep the children up late.
            And the second question that inspires empathy and which requires good listening is one I began to pose to others almost forty years ago: I would ask, “What are you reading?” Sometimes I already knew what my children were reading because I had purchased the book for them, but the question allowed for an interesting conversation about their experience with the book. Sometimes they didn’t appreciate the book as had I; sometimes they resented the question itself.  And at times I might have experienced just a tinge of jealous annoyance at a rejection of a reading I favored, yet I remained calm and listened, asking too many pointed questions to their liking but never failing to address me honestly and fully. I believe that they recognized that I was listening. In 2022 Roland Baines’s granddaughter in Ian McEwan’s novel Lessons, wonders to him “Und was liest du, Opa. And what are you reading?”  I am unashamed to say that I asked the question first.
            I think the questions “What are you reading? Or “Did you think of anything on down the line” represent the essence of empathy: I am ready to listen is explicit in the questions. And as for me, the question I have posed to others has led me often into experiences I would never have enjoyed if the question had not been asked. The question served as an entrance into a relationship and often has led me into an experience of intimacy. And I have offered to others empathy. I know that there are other questions that might do the same, but I am content with the two I have offered here. 
            And what are you reading?

            Did you think of anything down the line?