To be empathetic is to have a good and reliable understanding of how others feel and think. To be unempathetic is to either have a poor and unreliable understanding of how others feel and think, or to be oblivious to their feelings and thoughts. These characteristics manifest themselves in what one says and how one acts towards and treats others.
It is often supposed that greater empathy is a good thing. But this is a mistake, unless one assumes that being empathetic will inevitably bring it about that one treats others better. But there is no logical reason to suppose this. Being empathetic may be a good way to know how to do hurt to someone in respect of their feelings and thoughts more acutely and damagingly. Not being empathetic may result in such hurt too, but that will be because of poor understanding, or lack of awareness, of the feelings and thoughts of others, not through calculated use of good understanding enabling one to better get people where it really hurts.
It could be factually that greater empathy tends to make people shy away from hurting others, as the person doing the hurting will know what is being done with acuity, but this need not necessarily so. Being empathetic is a factual not a normative matter, and it may be a better way of being cruel to someone than simply being incomprehendingly insensitive or oblivious to their feelings and thoughts. This aside however is not the central focus this paper, though it is a background which it is beneficial to hold in mind.
It certainly is not the case that in order to be empathetic one has to know that one is empathetic. Many people are regarded, indeed vaunted, as empathetic ‘by nature’ or ‘intuitively’, with little or no reflection involved or cultivation of it. They have an innate talent for it. Some people, on the other hand think they are empathetic, even think it is quality they have to a special degree and more than more than others. This goes back to empathy, other things being equal, being regarded as a good thing, and thus people and motivated to claim they are empathetic. A comparison with others who lack it which may even be self-congratulatory.
The paradox of empathy arises from knowing whether oneself or another is empathetic. Let us say someone is not empathetic. The lack of empathy could well make it appear to oneself that one is empathetic. The evidence of one’s empatheticness would have to derive from one’s being empathetic, that of understanding the feelings and thoughts of others. But in this case of the unempathetic person they are unable to see that they are not empathetic because they do not understand that the reactions of other people to them through their feeling and thoughts that indicate the lack of empathy.
Something that could be repeated and show itself in different ways. Let us say some …
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