Abstract
Empathy plays an important role in a holistic understanding of the religious other. Though empathy is often seen as a purely affective, biological or pre-linguistic response to the experience of other, this article points out that language contributes to mediating an appropriate empathic resonance. It creates a proper mental frame for opening oneself up to the religious life of another; it helps in preventing a mere projection of one’s own experience onto the other; and it nourishes the imagination with ideas and concepts that may broaden one’s experiential horizon.
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Notes
- 1.
He used the example of watching a person on a tight-rope, and going through the motions oneself.
- 2.
This research was originally conducted by Italian neuroscientists Rizzolatti, Lallese Fogassi, Craighero, and Fadiga. See Rizzolatti et al. (2002).
- 3.
He states that cognitive empathy involves “the capacity or process of knowing what the other wants, believes, or feels as a result of placing oneself in her situation” and affective empathy “feeling the way the other feels, or having a congruent emotion, because the other feels that way.”
- 4.
Basic empathy “allows us to recognize, for example, that another person is angry, or that he intends to grasp a cup” whereas reenactive empathy involves “using our cognitive and deliberative capacities in order to reenact or imitate in our own mind the thought processes of the other person.”
- 5.
In passive empathy taking the perspective of the other may be spontaneous and automatic, whereas in active empathy it may be more “deliberate, reflective, and effortful.”
- 6.
I will not here raise the question of the possibility of multiple religious belonging or religious hybridity which I have discussed at length in other publications. While I question the logical or theological possibility and the religious or spiritual desirability of such phenomenon, the very fact that individuals experience and claim such hybridity illustrates its reality and the possibility of profound interreligious empathy.
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Cornille, C. (2023). Interreligious Empathy and Linguistic Plurality. In: Vestrucci, A. (eds) Beyond Babel: Religion and Linguistic Pluralism. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 43. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42127-3_7
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