According to the OED, “empathy” entered the English language in 1895 to mean “a physiological brain-function”–specifically, “a form of psychophysical energy” in the nervous system–that correlated with a feeling.

This meaning is now obsolete, because the underlying theory is. A somewhat more familiar meaning appeared in 1909: “Not only do I see gravity and modesty and pride … but I feel or act them in the mind’s muscles. This is, I suppose, a simple case of empathy, if we may coin that term as a rendering of Einfühlung.” E. B. Titchener Lect. Exper. Psychol. Thought-processes i. 21  (1909).

But this meaning is now also “rare,” says the OED. The word “empathy” gained its mainstream current meaning only in 1946 (in a professional psychology journal):

[Meaning 2b] orig. Psychology. The ability to understand and appreciate another person’s feelings, experience, etc.

1946 Jrnl. Clin. Psychol.2 61/1   A ‘man-to-man’ regard for the client, characterized (ideally) by the understanding of empathy without the erratic quality of identification or the supportiveness of sympathy.

You might think it’s a Greek word, and it parses in Greek: en- (“of the state or condition of”) plus pathos (“an incident, accident; suffering”) = “the state of someone’s [else’s] suffering.” But no such word is listed in my Liddell & Scott Greek-English Lexicon. It is a modern English word built of ancient Greek components. If anything, the origin is the German word Einfühlung (coined in 1873), which needed an English equivalent.

While noting the recent origins of the English word, Emily McRae also argues that it has no direct translation in Sanskrit or other languages that have been used to express the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Key words from that tradition are better translated as “compassion” and “sympathetic joy.” McRae derives a theory of empathy from Buddhist texts, but she interprets phrases like “exchanging self and other” rather than any single word that corresponds to “empathy.”*

Since the word “empathy” is recent, and many wise thinkers have done without it, we might ask whether adding it to our vocabulary has done us good. It would be possible to carve up the conceptual space so that “empathy” vanished and we used only “compassion,” “beneficence,” “good will,” “forgiveness,” “responsiveness,” “mirroring,” and other related words.

I am a little worried that “empathy” confuses matters by combining an empirical concept–empathy exists when person A feels an emotion, which causes person B to feel some of that same emotion–with a positive moral valence (it is good to be empathetic). Yet it is not always good to feel the same emotion as someone else in response to that person.

*“Empathy, Compassion, and ‘Exchanging Self and Other’ in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Ethics” for Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (Routledge), edited by Heidi Maibom, 2017. See also: empathy, sympathy, compassion, justice; empathy: good or bad?; and my self, your self, ourselves

We discussed the following questions in my first-year philosophy seminar last week, after having read selections from Plato, Nietzsche, Epicurus, Buddha, and Emerson, and before turning to J.S. Mill. They seem valuable prompts for personal reflection, too.

1. Do we have a right to pay much attention to our own happiness? (Twenty-one children under the age of five die every minute because of preventable causes. Why are we spending 75 minutes talking about happiness in class while 1,575 kids die?) Do we have a duty to pay attention to our own happiness?
2. To what extent can we affect others’ happiness? Which others? How?
3. Does happiness require autonomy, or community, or both? (Can you be happy alone?)
4. Is it best to aim for a high state of well-being (bliss, satisfaction, etc.) or rather strive to avoid bad mental states (suffering, despair)?
5. Are there other outcomes for ourselves that we should seek instead of, or as well as, happiness? E.g., excellence, authenticity, dignity? (I leave aside justice to others as a whole topic unto itself.)
6. Do we know whether we are happy? What kind of knowledge is that? Can we be wrong about it?
7. Can you tell whether someone else is happy? What evidence is relevant? Could you be right and they be wrong?
8. Is it possible to compare two people’s happiness on one scale?
9. Should someone else’s happiness affect my happiness? Under what circumstances?
10. For an individual, is there one scale from suffering to bliss, or are there many different continua?
11. What are the behavioral consequences of happiness? Does happiness necessarily produce observable outcomes at all? Is happiness that does not produce any good outcomes nevertheless desirable?
12. Are there beliefs about the world that promote happiness? (E.g., only the present is real; or everything happens for a reason.) Are these beliefs true? Does that matter?
13. To answer, “What is happiness?” must we answer metaphysical and epistemological questions? (E.g., your view of happiness might be very different if a benign creator has created your immortal soul, as opposed to living in a universe in which life is suffering.) The answer might also be different if I can–or cannot–know whether I am happy.
14. What is the relationship between truth and happiness? Let’s disaggregate the virtue of truth into sincerity, integrity (truth to who one is), and responsible inquiry. Let’s break down happiness into pleasure, peace, satisfaction, etc. What are the relationships among these things?
15. Could being good (or just) to others be a path to happiness for ourselves? Is that a reason to be good? Is that the only reason to be good?