Intellectual Empathy

Matthew Lee Anderson has the right idea: "The real problem seems to be that people are uncertain about what to do with our disagreements, how to open and conduct conversations across the aisle without sacrificing our core convictions ... And if the “first things” of our framework are really at stake, then it can be easy to slip into a belligerent defense rather than entering into open inquiry ... "

His solution seems spot on: "One way to cultivate such common ground in our own local communities is through what some of called “intellectual empathy,” or the decision to enter into a person’s way of the seeing the world and look along with them ...  Intellectual empathy is a form of seeing how.  As in, “Oh, I see how you could think that.  It’s wrong, but I can see how it might make sense.”  It is an act that is aimed, first and foremost, toward the good of understanding, a good that persuasion may flow from but can never precede."

Intellectual empathy, then, requires one person to accept that the other has legitimate reasons for her beliefs, regardless of the validity the one gives to them.  Giving reason, as Donald Schon described it, is the act of taking the position of the other, and recognizing that, just as each of us has (mostly) strong reasons for what we think and why we act as we do, so do others.  To deny them that level of reasonableness dehumanizes; a signaling, perhaps, more to our fear of making vulnerable our ideas and beliefs.

Moreover, intellectual empathy means embracing the other's view as one's own.  Until we get inside their thinking (by a process that helps us towards understanding the context and contingency of their view, the identity claims presented in their view, the normative and subjectivities involved in coming to their view), we will continue to treat their views as static and concrete, ignorant or uneducated, rather than stochastic, fluid and dependent on an overall world view and experience of living in the world view.

Problems arise when the one person implicitly devalues the other's opinions, thereby defaming her reasoning.  While one can see the other as mistaken or lacking in understanding, missing some key fact or factor or just poor in analytical ability, that is a second order understanding.  The first takes seriously that the other has reason for their understanding, and attempts to justify those reasons as reasonable.