Reviewing Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams for The New York Times, critic Dwight Garner calls it a collection of "cerebral, witty, multichambered essays [that] tend to swing around to one topic in particular: what we mean when we say that we feel someone else’s pain."
The word for this phenomenon, of course, is empathy. It's not to be confused with sympathy, a fact Jamison is clearly well aware of as she explores the complicated layers of philosophy and meaning behind this word.
Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves....It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we’ve committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations.
According to our Dictionary's blurb for empathy, it originated as a way to describe our identification with art. And that's appropriate here, where Jamison's explication of empathy shows us how great words, like great paintings, continue to provoke deeper understanding the more we look into them.
What other words are like empathy, in that they teach us what it means to be human? Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.
