When you sought the self-same size
Was it really me you thought
Or yourself in soles disguised?
As you pulled the laces through
Did you see how things might be
different for me, not-you?
If you’re moved to test the track
Sporting shoes I daily wear
Circle ’til you can give back –
Or if you care to stop and sit
With me retracing painful steps
Stay ’til sure the shoes do fit.
| Copyright © 2019 by Geoffrey Dean |
I realized today (or connected it to this poem) that I think of empathy in a much wider context than the human. Is that a fair – or even allowed – extension, to imagine that a human being can have empathy for...say, a squirrel, or a bird? What would it be, if not empathy, to imaginatively enter into the "mind" of that squirrel out there that seems to be jubilating its good luck to discover a cache of sunflower seed hearts on the ground below the bird feeder, to enter the squirrel's consciousness far enough to "feel bad" about going out and chasing it off, away from something I did not intend for its kind, to imagine (as the squirrel I have "empathized" myself into) being confused about being chased off by the very human I (as the squirrel) saw putting the food out yesterday?
ReplyDeleteMight I be confusing sympathy for the squirrel with empathy for it? But can I even feel sympathy for the squirrel if I haven't first felt the connection with it through empathy – a connection that is a sort of identity with it, in fact?
And can one meet the requirements of Geoffrey's poem in the case of a squirrel? Surely I can't "enter the mind of a squirrel" at all. I can't imagine what that would be like...can I? Well, maybe so. I can't really enter the mind of another human being. My wife of 53+ years is, in many ways, still a mystery to me, at times reassurring, at others baffling, confusing. But she does wear shoes, and squirrels don't. There is that. And I do imagine that I can put myself in her shoes, frequently doing so as I continue to try to understand her, understand what it is like to be her in a wide range of acts that involve me.
But "shoes" is just a metaphor. And it might even be easier to put on a squirrel's metaphorical shoes than a human being's. The fact that I had to put "mind" in quotes for the squirrel is a clue – we think we know a squirrel's mind is much simpler than a human's, and easier to understand because of it.
Geoffrey replied via email and asked me to post this because he doesn’t have good internet access now:
ReplyDeleteA New Yorker piece a few years back (“THE METAMORPHOSIS: What is it like to be an animal?,” by Joshua Rothman) discussed several books by authors who had taken the idea of putting oneself in an animal’s “shoes” to the extreme of actually trying to live like a certain animal. I remember thinking at the time that these were significant examples of empathy.
Some writers argue that one can only really empathize with those are most like us - we can identify with their way of thinking because it is already close to identical to our own. That’s what I would call “easy” empathy, where you project your own thought/feelings/behaviors onto others and it seems successful because they’re so like you to begin with that everything matches. But when you try to identify with someone more unlike yourself, empathizing takes more work and imagination - “effortful” empathy, where the breakthroughs in understanding probably have more value, but are harder to achieve.