this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
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He pretty much gave a common definition of empathy. What do you think it means?
Well to be fair he doesn't really explain what he thinks the word sympathy means, but I can tell you that it doesn't serve as a better term than empathy except in the case where you actually mean sympathy and not empathy. They are different concepts, lol. If you are talking about sympathy, that's the better word to use. 😆 Apples and oranges. Though tangentially related, just like the fruits in their category.
He was also dead wrong that someone cannot feel what another person feels, or understand what they are feeling. That's what empathy is and he's claiming it isn't real, which is false.
My impression is that he was just trying to be edgy and stretch the concept of the Explanatory Gap to its limits. That he was just trying to win philosophical points to seem like he's nothing but factual, and it's bullshit. I'm seeing right through that shit.
They overlap. To quote Merriam-Webster
More generally, sympathy means sensitivity to share feelings or have common feelings with another.
You can guess or imagine without truly knowing that's actually how they feel. In all likelihood, you're probably right: people aren't that radically different & unique.
His mistake is claiming empathy means feeling as if sympathy doesn't when it does, too. Neither of them excludes feeling & means only knowing or understanding how someone would feel or only grasping the weight of their experience.
I honestly don't think it matters whether anyone feels, understands, or tries to imagine how I (or anyone) feels or went through if they won't try to understand the problem & help. The other side is shit, and there are better arguments to throw at them than to chide them for lacking empathy & humanity (which is what they hear).
Sympathy is surely more about showing that you care about someone and their feelings. But empathy is actually feeling what they feel, or understanding how they could feel and being affected by it.
I can have sympathy without empathy. And I can have empathy without showing sympathy. Right? Or am I way off?
Not an element of any definition I've seen. The phrase hidden sympathies exists.
As the rest of the Merriam-Webster entry states, it's a more general word:
Empathy implies the general sense of sympathy defined before: an actively shared/vicarious feeling is a shared feeling.
Every word has some degree of vagueness. Some (like you) claim personally feeling as another feels isn't essential: it's more about understanding or caring. That empathy is about a serious effort to imagine or understand another's experience as if it were one's own, which sympathy doesn't imply.
While that sense is admissible, the word empathy without qualification doesn't communicate that sense exclusively, so I don't fault people interpreting feelings from it. Wouldn't following empathy (either sense) mean picking up the room for interpretation & communicating a distinction more clearly or perhaps jumping straight to the reasons driven at by empathy?
Sure, you could be a "sympathizer", but those meanings I feel are out of scope of what Kirk was talking about.
I don't think empathy implies any serious effort. Empathy is something you just have, or something you experience/feel, rather than make an effort to "do". It's innate (in some).
I'm not sure I understand your last question.