[lit-ideas] Re: Socratic Congress

I never meant to insinuate that empathy or sympathy are of any necessary moral
worth. Such emotions, intuitions or "sympathies," as Adam Smith liked to term
them, may not be principle-governed and, as such, would not be justifiable on
either epistemic or moral grounds. 

Regarding Eric's question below on whether my distinction bears an actual
difference: 

I don't believe that one's efforts to imagine what another is feeling, living,
believing is efficacious in attaining its goal, since we have little reliable
access to the inner lives of others. (There are challenges to this claim and I
am willing to face them should they show themselves.) 

For philosophical and political purposes, I believe it is sufficient for us to
remain within our own material and psychological skins, and ask how we would
feel, or what we would believe, were we we in the predicament of the other.
Does this help?

Walter O
MUN


Quoting Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>:

> WO: I understand empathy to be not the capacity for 
> imagining oneself as another but rather as the capacity to 
> project one's self into the circumstances of
> another and understanding what things look and feel like 
> from that perspective-unto-the-world. I doubt it's possible 
> to imagine oneself as being an other, as Eric puts it.
> 
> 
> Eric: What's the difference between *imagining* oneself as 
> another and *projecting* oneself into the "circumstances of
> another and understanding what things look and feel like 
> from that perspective-unto-the-world"?
> 
> Seems like a meaningless distinction to me. To imagine 
> oneself as another is to imagine the circumstances. "Emma 
> Bovary" is Flaubert imagining himself as Emma Bovary. "Hadji 
> Murat" is Tolstoy imagining himself as Hadji Murat. 
> Prokofiev's "Classical Symphony" is, to a much lesser 
> extent, Prokofiev imagining that he is Haydn.
> 
> 
> WO: Interestingly, Hannah Arendt, following Immanuel Kant, 
> refuses to identify this capacity for imagination with what 
> we normally understand the capacity to be: empathy.
> 
> If you can't distinguish capacity A from capacity B, are you 
> able to produce the performances of either one?
> 
> 
> Eric: Everyone has their own "genius" (god of one's 
> character) and not everyone's personal genius inclines them 
> to empathic imaginings. Es gibt:
> 
>       Evil genius. Bin Laden imagining the chaos of New Yorkers 
> being incinerated.
> 
>       Imaginative empathic genius. the inventor of micro-loans.
> 
> 

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