
Everyday Philosophy: How much empathy is too much empathy?

Wondering if this trend of empathy had gone too far? To erase the possibility of empathy is to erase the possibility of understanding. To erase the possibility of empathy is also to erase the possibility of art. Theater, fiction, horror stories, love stories. This is what art does. Good or bad, it imagines the insides, the heart of the other, wheth
... See moreAmanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
Edith Stein, shortly after she finished her PhD thesis on the phenomenology of empathy
Sarah Bakewell • At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others
While empathy is essential, if we over-identify with the person or people hurting, the empathy turns into empathic distress, where our own discomfort ironically takes center stage. We collapse or run away.
Sharon Salzberg • Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World
Sometimes it is appropriate to feel what others are feeling, especially if you are in communion or relationship with them; it can help you to understand them on a kinesthetic level. But you start to realize it’s not necessary to go around feeling what everybody else is feeling when you’re not in relationship with them. You realize their business is
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