The reason this question has arisen is simply the fact that I feel a growing conviction that I’m becoming more empathic as I grow older. But am I, or am I simply exhibiting a greater awareness of human feelings because I’m a highly feeling individual myself, and the older I get the more personal experience of feeling I have. Am I simply learning to recognise strong feelings in others through a growing capacity to read body language and other signs, and then relate the results to my own nature? And that raises the further question of whether I’m really only becoming more sympathetic, not empathetic, and whether it’s all really grounded in nothing more than sentimentality. (So then I ask a related question: where does sentiment end and compassion begin? Is there a difference?)
I’ve read that expert opinion is divided on the issue. Some say that empathy resides purely in the imagination, while others say that it exists across the higher animal kingdom – including humans – and is part of our survival mechanism. Well, if the experts disagree, how can I be qualified to offer an answer? And so I don’t, at least not yet.
Maybe I’ll find out one day, probably after I’ve left this mortal realm and moved onto a different state of existence. But there might not be any other state of existence. Maybe death really is the end of cognisance, in which case there was never any point in my addressing this question or most of the others I ask about the deeper aspects of life. Not that it matters, I suppose. The need to understand the human condition has been one of my principal drives for most of my life, and I might as well be doing that as doing something else.
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