[lit-ideas] Re: Socratic Congress
- From: "Walter C. Okshevsky" <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:35:32 -0230
Eric surely wishes to share his reflections with all of us.
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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