What Is This Thing Called Empathy?

While psychologists have been talking about it for decades, empathy as a topic of popular interest has emerged relatively recently. This chapter examines the emergence of empathy as a social ‘good’ in the past decade, particularly in North America. Drawing on phenomenological and sociological theory, empathy is approached not as a singular, knowable phenomenon, but as a multi-dimensional, ethical and social construct that means different things to different people across time and place. By critically exploring common conceptions about empathy, this chapter examines what the growing interest in empathy at this moment in time might tell us about North American worldviews, beliefs and values. The chapter then considers how these worldviews and beliefs act as ‘canopies of meaning’ that may frame how people both experience and understand empathy. It is argued that the popular conception of empathy as ‘the capacity to stand in another’s shoes’ – whether conceived of in affective or cognitive terms – constitutes a ‘passive’ and individualist orientation towards the Other that divests empathy of its transformative potential. Conceived of and experienced within a worldview of interdependence and relationality, other possible orientations towards the Other appear, which open up the potential for empathy to not only transform the Self, but also to be a driver of social change. Building on Larocco’s conception of empathy as an orientation, the author proposes a diagram, which maps out how distinctive orientations towards the ‘Other’ relate to and diverge from one another.