Self, will and Empathy

WHEN I RECENTLY MENTIONED THE title "Self, Will and Empathy" to a friend as a subject I would be writing about he remarked: "Does anyone combine such formidable subjects into one paper?" My answer was that while they are indeed formidable, they are interconnected and it is to their relationship that I wish to address myself. In fact it was a sudden understanding of the interdependence of self and empathy, a kind of "aha" experience, that alerted me to the importance of exploring the interpersonal, as well as the cultural dimension in each of these concepts.

I was viewing a documentary film about recent archeological finds of the Maya civilization in Tikal in Guatemala. I had been there a few years ago when much less was known about Mayan culture, largely because the fuller deciphering of their hieroglyphics had not yet been accomplished. Now we know much more about the structure of their society, their economy and their religion. It has been clearly documented that in their religious rites they practiced human sacrifice. The altars and artifacts as well as the writings concerning this practice have been preserved. To us, whatever our present barbarisms, this is savagery indeed. We cannot identify with it; in fact, we are repelled by it. Whether it was because of the scientific detachment of the young curators reporting the findings, or the facts themselves and the projection of my imagination into that time and place, I was suddenly struck by the extent to which the ritual of human sacrifice at least from our vantage point seems to connote a complete lack of empathy with the victim. Perhaps this seems fairly obvious; yet it raises questions about the nature of the self, its relationship to empathy and the relationship of both to culture.

First, what do we mean by empathy? It is the capacity, through sensitive perception and understanding, to feel what another individual is experiencing emotionally. Weigert (1962) cites Max Scheler's definition of "empathy