Compassion and empathy are two other feelings clearly related to tenderness but not entirely identical with it. The essence of compassion is that one “suffer with” or, in a broader sense, “feels with” another person. This means that one does not look at the person from the outside – the person being the “object” of my interest or concern – but that one puts himself into the other person. This means I experience within myself what he experiences. This is a relatedness which is not from the “I” to the “thou” but one which is characterized by the phrase: I am thou. Compassion or empathy implies that I experience in myself that which is experienced by the other person and hence that in this experience he and I are one. All knowledge of another person is real knowledge only if it is based on my experiencing in myself that which he experiences. If this is not the case and the person remains an object, I may know a lot about him but I do not know him. Goethe has expressed this kind of knowledge very succinctly: “Man knows himself only within himself, and he is aware of himself within the world. Each new object truly recognized opens up a new organ within ourselves.”
The possibility of this kind of knowledge based on overcoming the split between the observing subject and the observed object requires, of course, the humanistic promise which I mentioned above, namely, that every person carries within himself all of humanity; that within ourselves we are saints and criminals, although in varying degrees, and hence that there is nothing in another person we cannot feel as part of ourselves. This experience requires that we free ourselves from the narrowness of being related only to those familiar to us, either by the fact that they are blood relations or, in a larger sense, that we eat the same food, speak the same language, and have the same “common sense.”
excerpt from: Erich Fromm (1968) The Revolution of Hope.
pdf: Compassion and Empathy
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