At its core, empathy is wrapped up in a very human need — the need to be understood. The ancient Greeks understood πάθος (“pathos”) to mean “suffering” or “feeling”. To have empathy is to be ἐν (“in”) πάθος with someone else. That is, to share in another’s suffering. It is a recognition that something exists beyond the self. To empathize with another is to acknowledge their humanity, knowing full well that their version of right and wrong might refute your own. To do this, one is required to shed the self and become one with the other. So long as you approach another’s humanity through the prism of your own, true empathy will remain out of reach. If empathizing with others is to recognize their humanity, then to be empathized with is to have your own humanity recognized. And in this we can see the fundamental challenge in empathy — we crave recognition from others but we are reluctant to give it to others for fear of losing ourselves in the process.

Taken more broadly, the idea of empathy can be broken into two categories: cognitive empathy; and, emotional empathy. The latter of the two is the type we most often conjure when discussing empathy. It gets to the core of the ancient Greek idea of feeling what another feels — suffering as another suffers. Emotion though is hard to unwrap and almost impossible to precisely replicate. To have emotional empathy is to see that another person is upset and to feel upset as well. But it’s not enough to simply feel the same emotions. You have to feel them for the other person’s reasons, not for your own. Particularly in political discourse, this is an immensely complex task. Ideological emotion is driven by an incalculably large number of factors, both seen and unseen. We may have mastered a sort of community-wide political anger but we all feel it for our own reasons. That is the opposite of empathy.

Although emotion and empathy are necessarily intertwined, we do ourselves a disservice by understanding the idea solely through this lens. In the public and cultural spheres, most of us are uncomfortable with emotion. When we encounter emotion in strangers we tend either to respond with our own emotion or turn the other way (call it an “emotional fight or flight” response.) As the intensity of the emotion increases, which it often does in matters political, our discomfort in facing it intensifies as well. It’s no wonder that we find it so difficult to empathize with one another.

Emotional empathy is important, but perhaps it is too much for us to ask of ourselves, and of others — at least in the beginning. In order to reach emotional empathy, we must first aim for cognitive empathy — that is, taking on the perspective of others without necessarily assuming their emotions as well. Surely this is the easier task for it requires only a logical leap rather than an emotional one. Cognitive empathy merely asks that you acknowledge the possibility that another person acts and feels the way they do for reasons that are rational to them (this is an important distinction — whether or not the reasons are rational to you is immaterial at this stage.) In doing so, you give yourself a bit of mental breathing room. No longer are you required to reconcile some action with your individual values and beliefs — you need only reconcile it with someone’s values and beliefs. In effect, you have taken yourself out of the picture entirely. Empathy lets you consider perspectives that are unconstrained by your sense of self, and in doing so, perhaps find some common thread from which to move the discourse forward.