Nancy Huntting, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:
Why can the same person go from caring about people to feeling cold toward them? Why is there so much unfeelingness in the world still, after centuries—and what can change it? These questions are answered, mightily, in “Fellow-Feeling, & What’s Against It,” the new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known!
The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:
Dear Unknown Friends:
We’re honored to publish here portions of a lecture Eli Siegel gave in 1948: the magnificent Mind and People. As with two other 1948 lectures by him that we printed recently, no audio recording or transcript of Mind and People exists, and I am again using notes to reconstruct some of what Mr. Siegel said so many decades ago. The notes are those of Martha Baird and my mother, Irene Reiss. Mind and People will appear in two parts—with the final section in our next issue, TRO 1909.
This lecture is a classic: it is true for all times and places. And it has what we need to know right now.
The biggest matter in the life of everyone is how we see other people. And how people see people is the biggest, most urgent matter affecting the world itself: it determines the decisions of nations, including whether there will be war or peace; it determines how wealth is distributed; what laws are made; how persons of different ethnicities and religions treat each other. In Mind and People Mr. Siegel explains what it is that has human beings see each other hurtfully. He also explains what can enable us to see other persons in a way that’s resplendently just—both to them and to our own ever so particular treasured self.
Coldness—& What Can Change It
To introduce this lecture, I’ll comment a little on an article of our own time. It’s about a question asked in various ways for thousands of years: Why is a certain unfeelingness so extensive in humanity? Why are persons so cold to what others feel and endure?
On July 12 the New York Times printed an opinion piece titled “Empathy Is Actually a Choice.” Empathy can be described as feeling for the feelings of another. The writers are three professors of psychology: Daryl Cameron, Michael Inzlicht, and William A. Cunningham. They note that “empathy seem[s] to fail when it is needed most.” And they say there’s a current view, put forth by “a growing chorus of critics,” that empathy is not so valuable and may even be hurtful. It’s a view with which these authors rightly disagree. Meanwhile, what empathy (or, to use an old-fashioned term, fellow-feeling) truly is, and what in oneself stops one from having it, is not to be found in this article. It is to be found in Aesthetic Realism. So I’ll mention four things that need to be known and studied for empathy, fellow-feeling, to exist with real power among people. >> Read more