Zhu Xi on Self-Focused vs. Other-Focused Empathy

Abstract

This chapter is about issues in ethics and moral psychology that have been little explored by contemporary philosophers, ones that concern the advantages and disadvantages of two different kinds of empathy. Roughly, first type is what is sometimes called “other-focused” empathy, in which one reconstructs the thoughts and feelings that someone else has or would have. The second type, “self-focused” empathy, is the sort of emotional attitude someone adopts when she imagines how she would think or feel were she in the other person’s place. Both are variants of empathy, for both have to do with having thoughts and feelings that are more apt, in the relevant senses, for someone else’s circumstances than one’s own. But they differ with respect to how much one makes substantial reference to oneself in order to elicit those thoughts and feelings. In cases of self-focused empathy, we imagine ourselves facing predicaments relevantly similar to those of the person with whom we sympathize, and we achieve our empathetic response by doing things like recalling equivalent experiences or noting similar interests and desires that may bear on the situation. A little reflection on this distinction shows that it can in fact have profound implications for care, compassion, love, human motivation, and the sense of oneness or unity with others that matters so much for ethics and the well-rounded human life, but there is not yet a body of literature in contemporary moral psychology or western philosophy that really wrestles with these implications. Some influential philosophers and psychologists have taken note of the distinction, but none have engaged the issues as thoroughly as did Zhu Xi and his students in twelfth century, largely in a series of commentaries and conversations that have yet to be translated into Western languages.