Nine empathies, exposing empathy as the self-seeking survival strategy it’s been all along.

FREE this weekend for Kindle: Why academics get empathy all wrong:

Empathy ultimately is imagination – the invocation of the presumed mental states to be found in other people’s minds, but also the contra-factual insistence that one can experience at first hand the interior existence of another entity – and there cannot be an act of imagination that is originated by and for the benefit of anyone other than the actor himself.

You’ll note that I used the word “entity” in that definition. Of the nine kinds of empathy I want to explore, only three concern real people, the next three essentially fictional people, with the last three illuminating ideas of empathy for things that are not even alive – or not even real things!

Imagination about the completely imaginary? Who ever heard of such a thing?

A poet, of course, and I approach this as a poet, so just as we move from the most real of empathies to the most fanciful, so do we move from those empathies that are nearest to one’s own experience to those most remote – and from the most to the least actionable. I can do a lot of immediate benefit for my niece. My contributions to the ideas of self-adoration, human sovereignty, the family – and now empathy – may take a little longer to come to fruition. These are all expressions of empathy for the idea, the most fanciful, most remote and least actionable of empathies, but the one that can make the greatest and most enduring of differences in real human lives in the long run.

Changing lives? That’s the leadership of the poet.

Virtually all of philosophy, not just reductionist science, labors under the delusion – an empathy for the impossible – that people can be controlled from the outside, and can thus be impelled to betray their own interests and values. My impression is that the sole interest academia takes in empathy is to try to figure out how to build a better shmoo.

I work the other way. I know the self is the cardinal value of the uniquely-human life – the life of the abstract, conceptual, freely willing mind that matures at about age five, the actual birth of humanity in the life of a genetic Homo sapiens – and that therefore self-adoration is the cardinal virtue of the fully-human life.

How do you adore your self while your loved ones suffer? How can you be so deeply in love with them that you cannot distinguish loving from being loved? How can you plan to share a lifetime – to build a home, a family, a future – with someone you really only know by conjecture? This is why you need empathy – and why its real-life expressions are never a self-sacrifice.

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