Among all the feelings which man has created in himself during his history, there is perhaps none which
surpasses tenderness in the pure quality of simply being human. Compassion and
empathy are two other feelings clearly related to tenderness but not entirely
identical with it. The essence of compassion is that the one “suffers with” or,
in a broader sense, “feels with” another person. This means that one does not
look at the other person from the outside – the person being the “object” of my
interest or concern – but that one puts himself into the other person. This
means that I experience within myself what he experiences. Compassion or
empathy implies that I experience within myself that which is experienced by
the other person and hence that in this experience he and I are one. All
knowledge of another person is real knowledge only if it is based on my
experiencing in myself that which he experiences. If this is not the case and
the person remains an object, I may know a lot about him but I do not know
him. Goethe has expressed this kind of knowledge very succinctly:” Man knows
himself only within himself, and he is aware of himself within the world. Each
new object truly recognized opens up a new organ within ourselves.”
The possibility of this kind of knowledge based on
overcoming the split between the observing the subject and the observed object
requires, of course, the humanistic promise that every person carries within
himself all of humanity; that within ourselves we are the saints and the
criminal, although in varying degrees, and hence that there is nothing in
another person which I cannot feel as part of ourselves. This experience
requires that we free ourselves from the narrowness of being related only to
those familiar to us, either by the fact that they are blood relations or, in a
larger sense, that we eat the same food, speak the same language, and have the
same “common sense”. Knowing men in the sense of compassionate and empathic
knowledge requires that we get rid of the narrowing ties of a given society,
race, or culture and penetrate to the depth of that human reality in which we
are all nothing but human.
(Erich Fromm: The revolution of
hope, pg 82-83)
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