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.