Pondering Pig # 3

[PigNewton]

 When contemplating empathy, one quickly realizes the multidimensionality of the issue. Today I would like to discuss how fear correlates with how we experience empathy in everyday life.

 When witnessing suffering, we are suddenly struck with a sharp, dark and paralyzing fear. In a snap. We avert our eyes and pray not to be noticed. . . but also not to notice. With a pocket full of rationalizations, we justify our negligence to help alleviate another’s suffering. We feel shame, guilt boiling down into our unconsciousness which gnaws at our sense of confidence in our identity. We feel great pain watching suffering occur and genuinely want it to end. We do this, not because we feel someone else’s pain, we only ever feel our own. We do this because we simply want our own suffering to end. This unassailable truth will always make ignoring suffering easier and better to experience than confronting the seemingly monolithic cause of the suffering.

 What are your thoughts?

[ancientmule]

man, trying to explain the rationalization of others pain and trying to make them feel better and avoiding our own way of solving the pain that we are into, is hard for me in english. So more simple way of saying is that sympathize for the other is more easy to face than sympathize for your own issue, the demons that we all have are big and scary..

[Raskin]

I truly feel pain from others sufferings..i have put myself at great risk to stop someone from getting hurt 3 times in my life..guess depends on the person...I do not think of me

[PigNewton]

I truly feel pain from others sufferings..i have put myself at great risk to stop someone from getting hurt 3 times in my life..guess depends on the person...I do not think of me

I don't doubt your pain and there are certainly people, like yourself, who put themselves at risk for helping. I question the underlying motives of such behavior and usually find it's rooted in a sense of superiority. I think this topic is crucial to understanding oneself and one's place in the seemingly chaotic cosmos. 

 

I like your picture!

[Raskin]

..those 3 fires I started worked....yesssss i'm the hero!! gee you are intuitive

[PigNewton]

..those 3 fires I started worked....yesssss i'm the hero!! gee you are intuitive

 

 You're perceptive to pick up on my intuition. Thank you. Usually when we feel defensive about something, it's because we're close to realizing a very unsettling truth. That's what Philosophy is about: Truth.

[Olufanz]

the key are the so called mirror neurons. they make you actually feel the pains you see. they fire not only when you do a task, but also when you watch others doing the task.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron

 

also a lot of what we call empathy and personality seem to be part of the prefrontal cortex. it is well described that so called psychopaths or pathological narcists have less activity in that region of the brain.

and if i remember correctly empathy can also be trained and learned.

[Platonic]

I don't doubt your pain and there are certainly people, like yourself, who put themselves at risk for helping. I question the underlying motives of such behavior and usually find it's rooted in a sense of superiority. I think this topic is crucial to understanding oneself and one's place in the seemingly chaotic cosmos. 

 

I like your picture!

I personally don't think it has much to do with superiority. We feel empathy because it's evolutionary interesting for our species. If we feel each other, we help each other. If we help each other, we have more chance of survival. Also, many people expect something back. This kind of empathy is also evolutionary interesting for the individual.

 

Levinas has said some very interesting things about empathy as well.

"My ethical relation of love for the other stems from the fact that the self cannot survive by itself alone, cannot find meaning within its own being-in-the-world, within the ontology of sameness." (source)

He also calls God (he's a theist philosopher) the Infinite Other. To me the believing in God is for many people some abstract form of empathy (I am not stating anything about God's existence, will not go into that discussion). Some people would say looking for God is looking for youself. I would say, with Levinas, that our longing for something entirely different than ourselves brings us to God/Allah/JHWH/Vishnu.

Imo the loneliest people are those who believe we do everything for ourselves. They have a valid point, but it's a lonely feeling and I don't like it.

 

In any case, very interesting subject pignewton

 

Edit: more directly to your question, I would say we feel empathy with the other, not because they are equal, but because they are different. If they would be exactly like ourselves, the use of their existence would not appear to us. Because this person is different from us, we experience his vulnerability. Example, if we point a gun at someone's face and see the fear in the Other's eyes, we do not want to kill him because we experience how valuable this person is. We would not experience this same value if we saw ourselves looking at us in fear.

 

 

tl;dr: what you call "superior" is what I would call "different".

[Panda#]

 When contemplating empathy, one quickly realizes the multidimensionality of the issue. Today I would like to discuss how fear correlates with how we experience empathy in everyday life.

 

 When witnessing suffering, we are suddenly struck with a sharp, dark and paralyzing fear. In a snap. We avert our eyes and pray not to be noticed. . . but also not to notice. With a pocket full of rationalizations, we justify our negligence to help alleviate another’s suffering. We feel shame, guilt boiling down into our unconsciousness which gnaws at our sense of confidence in our identity. We feel great pain watching suffering occur and genuinely want it to end. We do this, not because we feel someone else’s pain, we only ever feel our own. We do this because we simply want our own suffering to end. This unassailable truth will always make ignoring suffering easier and better to experience than confronting the seemingly monolithic cause of the suffering.

 

 What are your thoughts?

 

I would have to agree that the main reason for an individual wanting to help another who is suffering, stems from a form a selfishness if you will. People often say that doing good for others can in turn, make you happy. While I don't disagree with this, I do, however, believe that though the action taken may be selfless, the psychological undertaking behind it is, in fact, selfish. I say this because the person helping the less fortunate likely knows that doing so will result in an improved mood. Though they may genuinely not put their emotional well being as their priority when engaging in philanthropic deeds, I believe that it isn't relevant because it has become ingrained in ones subconscious that they are doing a good deed and as a result SHOULD feel good about it, thus putting them in a position of superiority, or at least one who believes they're entitled to the reward of their "selfless" actions. One can even argue, like you stated above, that they may even consider themselves better, because to be able to help someone else, one often has  to be in a superior position to start, lest the aforementioned help be deemed meaningless as it would come from someone in a similar situation as the receiver, which you could argue that they likely could have done themselves, without another's help. Homeless people don't beg other homeless people for change. Speaking of chance, just my .02. Lol

[ajnl]

I don't doubt your pain and there are certainly people, like yourself, who put themselves at risk for helping. I question the underlying motives of such behavior and usually find it's rooted in a sense of superiority. I think this topic is crucial to understanding oneself and one's place in the seemingly chaotic cosmos. 

 

I like your picture!

I'm confused about what your basis is for saying, "....the underlying motives of such behavior and usually find it's rooted in a sense of superiority."

 

A lot of research would have to be done, to be able to get to such a conclusion.

[gibson66]

I think Nietzsche would have a lot to say on the issue.

[Raskin]

well..to me when something tragic happens I think you remember it in slow motion because your brain is processing too much at one time.there is no time for rationalizing until after... everyone reacts differently under stress.this is when your core self takes over

..those 3 fires I started worked....yesssss i'm the hero!! gee you are intuitive

I was just kidding here.. this is for the sick fireman who is selfishly making himself a hero.this is an example

Edited May 12, 2015 by Raskin

[SunLight]

I would have to agree that the main reason for an individual wanting to help another who is suffering, stems from a form a selfishness if you will. People often say that doing good for others can in turn, make you happy. While I don't disagree with this, I do, however, believe that though the action taken may be selfless, the psychological undertaking behind it is, in fact, selfish. I say this because the person helping the less fortunate likely knows that doing so will result in an improved mood.

I don't think there can be selfless actions, because our will is our self. There might be some parts of our 'self' which are subconscious, and things we do consciously 'because we want' (actually, I'm not even sure if there is a difference between the 2, the existence of a freewill hasn't even been proved) but all our thoughts and actions come from our will and our self, the only difference is the way these actions affect others.

 

(Another difference, someone could say, would be the 'reason' behind our actions. For instance, if you save someone because you don't want them to suffer, or because you wanna play the hero).

 

But obviously all our actions come from our own self, and in a way you could call them 'selfish' in every case.

The problem is that human language is ambiguous. If someone asked me 'is such and such action selfish?' I would tell them 'define selfish.' Once they have a clear definition, they know automatically if it is or not. According to their definition of selfish, obviously. And provided that they can give a clear definition.

 

We do this, not because we feel someone else’s pain, we only ever feel our own.

We can't really 'feel' physically other people's pain because it's inside their minds, we can only feel what is inside ours, if we take it literally.

 

But if I see a scene of someone else suffering, and I don't like it, metaphorically I could say that I'm 'feeling' their pain, I think again it is a matter of words. This empathy is more or less developed in different individuals, just like other features/abilities are. I don't know if fear is really involved here. Maybe some people are just too 'dumb' to perceive other people's feelings.

 

At most, fear could be involved if I needed to defend someone who is being beaten by people stronger than me, and I know if I tried to help they would kick my ass hard. That could be a case with a real dilemma. But if I see the same thing on TV and I can't do anything, it's another story

[ajnl]

I personally don't think it has much to do with superiority. We feel empathy because it's evolutionary interesting for our species. If we feel each other, we help each other. If we help each other, we have more chance of survival. Also, many people expect something back. This kind of empathy is also evolutionary interesting for the individual.

Wouldn't this go against the survival of the fittest?

[SunLight]

Wouldn't this go against the survival of the fittest?

Not necessarily because a group of people helping each other has more chances of surviving as a whole.