What is Intellectual Empathy?

What is intellectual empathy?

Having a consciousness of the need to imaginatively put oneself in the place of others in order to genuinely understand them, which requires the consciousness of our egocentric tendency to identify truth with our immediate perceptions of long-standing thought or belief. This trait correlates with the ability to reconstruct accurately the viewpoints and reasoning of others and to reason from premises, assumptions, and ideas other than our own. This trait also correlates with the willingness to remember occasions when we were wrong in the past despite an intense conviction that we were right, and with the ability to imagine our being similarly deceived in a case-at-hand. Valuable Intellectual Virtues .

From this quote it seems that intellectual empathy has an interest in human communication.  This was one of the first pages I came to when I googled the phrase.  What lead me to look it up was the search for words that could describe to me the HOW – I knew a little bit about the topics that interested me, but how did they fit together and how could I communicate them?

If we begin from a chaotic starting point where communication is all a flurry of wings and then we might only pay attention to the person that squawks the loudest.  Remembering the Keltner study we can reason that those with a high cookie power may follow a pattern where they take what they want and are not concerned with what anyone else may be saying.  So intellectual empathy steps in as a device that describes a mode of communication – one where a listener can connect to the viewpoints of others.

I’m no stranger to people who only listen for the break in speech that will allow them to interject. What is the urgency that drives their speech? I am going to say that this is an effect of Identity. There is some value, or conflict, or information that is pushing for expression – or perhaps it is simply the act of speaking or being heard that validates the speaker.  Identity is the ‘who’ that is speaking, or spoken to – as we don’t talk to bodies, but to people.

Sometimes we can get a better picture of something by considering its opposite:

The opposite of intellectual empathy is intellectual self-centeredness. It is thinking centered on self. When we think from a self-centered perspective, we are unable to understand others’ thoughts, feelings, and emotions. By lendy826 on Hubpages..

My use of intellectual empathy is going to go beyond simply being a process of quieting the self long enough to fully consider the thoughts and reasoning of another. I think that identity and power are going to be our keys to considering the deeper things at work in empathetic and rational communication.