Sept 4 – Empathy (re-edited)

I.

The fundamental prejudice that lords always above and precedes ever before seemingly every valuation that originates from the mouth of modern man – that prejudice which not only enframes but also structures, conditionalizes, and thereby limits and renders his habits of potential thought upon a certain inevitable path whose misunderstood, misappropriated, and misinformed end is all but teleologically unavoidable – is the hopelessly erroneous notion that the people who inhabited the past in every way, no matter their time and place, were somehow “just like us” in mind, body, spirit, values, sensibility, and mentality, only less evolved, less enlightened, and a poorer moral version of we who reign in the present, of course.

To even begin to consider that men of the past – even of, say, the past hundred years or so – were of a radically different psycho-moral constitution than we, such that – if we were to travel backward in time – it would be virtually impossible to find a common point of teleological reference by which to effectively empathize and thus understand one another not necessarily “better” but at all, is all but inconceivably anathema to the minds of today: man who – in whatever age, generation, or form he has taken – as an inescapably “self-centered” subjective individual, can do nothing but objectify everything he believes he has perceived according to the prejudices embedded in the truth or falsity of his own image; the world and all that is in it as things he could in no way apprehend, connect to, or integrate with unless he is first and foremost able to empathicate the Object into a Subjective form which might allow for the investment of that which he is most of all concerned, himself.

Without such empathication reduces the “big wide world” into something he can metaphysically “grasp” (reduction which cannot rightly apprehend “what is” of course, but only what he hopes, wishes, longs, and lusts it to be) life would be inescapably foreign, chaotic, disintegrated, and incoherent such that man would never be able to find any sort of psycho-emotional stability by which he might do and move, think and feel anything at all.

II.

In this light then might we partly divine “the reason and purpose” for the ceaseless narrating force always at work in the machinations of our self-consciousness: for no other phenomenon has the power to empathize objects to enable the subject to emotionally, and thereafter consciously and conscientiously apprehend anything outside the self at all.