Word play: Sympathy vs. empathy

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, September 19th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

You know, words don’t always mean what we think they mean…

INIGO: Inconceivable! / You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

…and sometimes two words we use as synonyms are really worlds apart. Here’s George Grant with Word Play for September.

GEORGE GRANT: What is the difference between sympathy and empathy? Though the words are often used today as synonyms, they originally had two very different meanings. Both involve feelings of concern for others, but in two very different ways.

Sympathy is an expression of compassion, kind-heartedness, and benevolence for someone who has suffered difficulty, adversity, or grief. It means to come alongside, to care for, or to console the hurting.

Empathy on the other hand involves actively sharing in someone’s emotional distress. It is to enter into their sorrows and woes, to take up their burdens and affronts, or to identify with their causes and agendas. It is to actually feel the afflictions of others—to make their anguish our own—vicariously experiencing their feelings, thoughts.

Sympathy is the English translation of a Biblical term. The Greek word is sympathizo. The root sym means “with, alongside, or together with.” The root páthos means “experience, misfortune, or emotion.” In the New Testament book of Hebrews we read, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (4:15).

Empathy is a much more recent term—appearing in English for the first time in the early 20th century. The root em means “feeling-in” or “feeling into.” It is a translation from the German word einfühlung, a neologism created by the Austrian philosopher Robert Vischer. He coined it for his 1873 PhD dissertation on aesthetics to describe how people experience a piece of art, music, or literature so profoundly that they actually feel the emotions the artist intended to represent. The word was later transposed into a kind of interdisciplinary moral value by Theodor Lipps, Sigmund Freud’s philosophical mentor. Thus, in Freudian psychology empathy became an essential ethical virtue.

When Rigney published a book about the necessity of Biblically discerning the strategic differences between empathy and sympathy it led to great social media furor. There was much huffing and puffing, much empathetic kvetching and caviling. Why?

According to author Joe Rigney, “Sympathy willingly joins with sufferers in their pain.” But “Empathy makes their suffering our own in a more universal and totalizing way.” As a result, he says, empathy can all too often become “weaponized pity,” taking up “another’s offense,” and “defaulting to manipulation.” Indeed, it is, he says, the impulse driving much of modern progressivism’s cultural agenda. And that perhaps hit a little too close to home for some.

The whole episode has been a reminder of J. Gresham Machen’s quip that “The things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight.”

I sympathize with that.

I’m George Grant.

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