Final Essay Rough Draft

In a world that emphasizes rationality, often emotions fall by the wayside. Afterall its easy to attempt to think about emotions in a rational way, but when we are experiencing those emotions all rational thoughts about what we should be feeling and how we should act disappear. As a result, it’s hard to write about emotions from a logical perspective which leads to many concluding that it’s a fruitless endeavor to attempt to develop them. However, I disagree.

I think emotions are a great source of frustrations for some people. They feel something real to them, but others shrug them off because they think emotions are no big deal. This mismatch between what we feel and what others feel when we feel has caused many misunderstandings in the past, all because people lack a tool called empathy. Empathy isn’t an emotion, it’s the ability to realize other peoples’ emotions, and it’s everyone’s responsibility to understand the potential that empathy can have in not only improving other people’s lives, but their own.

            To understand the potential of empathy it’s first important to define it and realize it’s limits. Having done much thinking and reading on the subject I believe I have created a satisfactory definition of what ideal empathy should be, one that correlates to many of the ideas that have been put forth by essayists on the subject. Ideally, empathy is the ability to realize and understand other people’s feelings and emotions constructively. I say constructively because often I found that empathy could lead to situations that promoted irrational behavior. That’s why ideally empathy is only used to help promote solutions if the emotion being felt is the result of a problem. The limits to this ideal version of empathy that I have constructed are that while its useful for being able to find solutions to problems caused by emotions, the actual solutions themselves have to come from rational thoughts, making emotions still dependent on rationality. Ideally this version of empathy would be developed early in the education system alongside other skills taught that became ones of habit like reading and logical deduction. This version of empathy would hopefully allow for people who are anywhere from completely unfamiliar with someone to very familiar someone to correctly assess how the person is feeling as if it’s second nature to them like riding a bike. This would allow for a greater understanding of what people from all around the world are going through not just in the mind, but also the heart. This fosters a greater sense of the world as a community and allows for solutions that are not only rational, but also appeal to our neglected emotional side to be reached.

            There are three essayists about empathy whose ideas on the subject differ wildly but allowed me to gain some perspective on what empathy is capable of when I developed my idealized version of the subject. The cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s essay Necessary Edges: Arts, Empathy, and Education is perhaps the one whose ideas on empathy closely match my own version. Yo-Yo Ma’s ideas on the role of empathy in society are even more idealized than my own. Yo-Yo Ma believes that on the spectrum of human civilization there are two edges. Rationality which is furthered by our understanding of science, and empathy which is furthered by the arts, (Yo-Yo Ma, 280). Yo-Yo Ma says that it is our responsibility to keep these two edges in equilibrium with one another yet currently the arts are not nearly as thought of as necessary like science, (Yo-Yo Ma, 279). Yo-Yo Ma therefor theorizes that if the arts where focused on more in school, allowing people to express their feelings through multiple mediums, then the untapped potential of empathy as a tool for greater world understanding and connectedness would develop alongside it, (Yo-Yo Ma, 279).

When I first read Yo-Yo Ma’s essay, I thought his ideas where too pie in the sky to even think about becoming a reality, that the notion that empathy could be as vital as rationality is ludicrous because I had this pre-conceived notion that empathy and emotion where inherently irrational and therefore not worth considering. However, I started to ponder his ideas about how art furthers emotion and I started to realize how much art I enjoyed and connected with. I thought about all the times in the past I looked at an art piece or listened to a song and I felt emotions. Emotions that were there because the artist wanted me to feel them and connect themselves. Slowly I started to understand what Yo-Yo Ma was talking about and realized that emotions and empathy do have a place in furthering societal interconnectedness. However, while Yo-Yo Ma believes rationality and emotion are equals, I believe that rationality will always trump emotion and that empathy has no place in the world without rational thought guiding it.

On the other side of the spectrum from Yo-Yo Ma’s essay is a treatise by psychologist Paul Bloom. While Yo-Yo Ma made a case for the potential of empathy, Bloom believes that empathy has already done too much damage to be considered a viable form of understanding. Bloom asserts that empathy is biased towards those who we share common characteristics with and that it’s rather unlikely to ever further world interconnectedness because we will always have that bias, (Bloom, “The Case Against Empathy”). Bloom instead believes that instead of being empathetic we should place much focus on reason in our decisions and if there is ever a time to consider emotions to instead be compassionate rather than empathetic, (Bloom, “The Case Against Empathy”). Bloom defines compassion as “giving your concerns weight” rather than what he says empathy doing which is picking up all the other persons feelings indiscriminately, (Bloom, “The Case Against Empathy”).

What I found most interesting about Bloom’s argument is the emphasis on compassion and empathy being two different concepts while to me they are two sides of the same coin. Compassion in my eyes is empathy-lite. I came to this conclusion when I thought about how Bloom said that compassion means you understand what someone is going through. I realized that to fully understand what someone is going through, you need some level of understanding the emotions they have which is form of empathy. Another idea from Bloom that resonated with me is his idea that empathy is inherently biased towards people that share things we have in common and that it’s rather unlikely to ever further world interconnectedness. Personally, I find that mindset to be defeatist. While bias and empathy may be entwined right now, I do believe its possible for people to learn how to apply empathy universally especially if they are taught from an early age when they are most impressionable.

The last essay I engaged with is by Professor Leslie Jamison called Devil’s Bait. I found Jamison’s essay to both be the best at understanding what empathy is capable of and how terrifying it can be if let spun out of control. In Jamison’s essay she never puts forth any actual ideas about how empathy can or should operate, rather the essay is about her experience at a Morgellons conference. Morgellons is a disease laughed at by the medical community since it has no real symptoms, yet the people who claim to be infected with it swear they have it and often become obsessive over it. Jamison empathizes with the people supposedly infected with it because she sees that they are really suffering not because they actually have a disease, but through the obsession over it, (Jamison, 226-227). Through Jamison’s experience empathizing with the Morgellons patients she understands that the only thing they really wanted was to be taken seriously, (Jamison, 230). However, she eventually becomes somewhat obsessed with trying to see symptoms of Morgellons after her encounter with the patients, leading her to further understand how easily this obsession can take route into someone’s mind, (Jamison, 234).

What interests me the most about Jamison’s pieces is the slight terror I had while reading it. Jamison is especially good at relating the plights of Morgellons patients to those a normal person might have and feel. She made me feel empathetic towards the Morgellons patients because I too can relate and understand the experience of not being taken seriously. Like Jamison, I did take their plights seriously and found myself saddened that their lives were destroyed by this disease. However, while reading the essay I felt a few brief moments were all logic went out the window for me. That maybe Morgellons was a real disease and that maybe I would believe myself infected if I looked for symptoms just like Jamison did. And it was in these brief moments that I felt terror and awe at the power of what empathy could accomplish. This led me to conclude that the ideal version of empathy is one that lends itself to constructive solutions so that something like the terrible brain worm of Morgellons or any other misguided conclusions as a result of empathy never occur.

Since I put forth an idealistic idea of how empathy can be used to promote community interconnectedness, I believe it is my prerogative to explain how I think it would help clear up misunderstandings of what others are going through. One of my favorite essays that I have read recently is Kenji Yoshino’s The New Civil Rights. In the essay Yoshino talks about what he calls covering, which is to say the act of concealing one’s true self by hiding characteristics deemed unsavory to society with a false self, (Yoshino, 453). People cover sometimes without even knowing it because it is instinctual. They know that people will jeer certain characteristics and that it is better to hid then to be mocked. Now lets apply my ideal version of empathy, the ability to realize and understand other people’s feelings and emotions constructively. If everyone was empathetic to everyone else, then we would realize that being mocked for characteristics we can’t help feels awful. If people were empathetic to each other more often, then people would be able to shed these covers they feel they need and integrate their true selves into society with open arms.

I realize that my thoughts on the potential of empathy are rather idealistic. That its unrealistic to expect people to be able to use empathy often and constructively, especially since its been neglected for so long due to its irrationality. But I think I have given those ideals merit, that a society with even just slightly more understanding of each other is worth striving towards. Empathy isn’t some irrational, vestigial appendage from a begone era of emotion. It’s a powerful tool that allows us to understand one another as human beings. And it’s because of this power that it needs to be harnessed and its potential taught to future generations to come. Yes its idealistic, but who ever said ideals aren’t worth pursuing?

Work Cited

Bloom, Paul. “The Case Against Empathy”. Vox.com, January 16, 2019.

Jamison, Leslie. “Devil’s Bait”. Emerging: Contemporary Reading for Writers, edited by Barclay Barrios, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019, pages 222-240

Ma, Yo-Yo. “Necessary Edges: Arts, Empathy, and Education”. Emerging: Contemporary           Reading for Writers, edited by Barclay Barrios, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019, pages 278- 282.

Yoshino, Kenji. “The New Civil Rights”. Emerging: Contemporary Reading for Writers, edited  by Barclay Barrios, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019, pages 452-460.