8 - Ideal understanding
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
Summary
When lovers commune, they learn what cannot be expressed or known in other ways. Or so it is plausibly said. Donne's poem ‘The Extasie’ tells how
Our soules, (which to advance their state,
Were gone out,) hung 'twixt her, and mee.
And whilst our soules negotiate there,
We like sepulchrall statues lay;
All day, the same our postures were,
And wee said nothing all the day.
A behaviourist would have had a thin time of it. Yet negotiate they did, by a process needing a special sort of Verstehen. The sharpest observer cannot understand, unless he were
so by love refin'd,
That he soules language understood
And by good love were grown all minde.
I do not doubt that there is a process by which not only lovers empathise. Indeed I would gladly present an epistemology for it, if I could see my way to a pure science of ecstasy. But for present purposes nothing less would do. If the insights can be expressed and known in other ways, then empathy becomes, in principle, merely a short cut. To put it more sonorously, where the usual canons of validation apply, Verstehen is only a heuristic device. The skills of anthropologists in the field, art critics, personnel managers and participant observers in general are not our concern and this chapter is not about empathy.
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- Models of ManPhilosophical Thoughts on Social Action, pp. 164 - 184Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1977