Reflection
Compassion is something you hear a lot about - compassion for others and, more recently, self-compassion. I am treating it here as an emotion - as something we feel about other people.
There is an awful lot of moralising about compassion. It has become one of the touchstones of customary morality. Its twin is love. It goes like this: when faced with someone who is in difficulty or experiencing suffering, or when faced with someone who has hurt or harmed you, or, or when facing these things yourself, the best ethical response is to show love and compassion.
Today we’re thinking about compassion, love will come around in about two weeks.
Here are two problems with this approach. The first is that when I talk to people about this topic it becomes clear that almost no-one agrees on a definition of what compassion is. The word denotes ‘feeling with’ - con + passion. But is this enough? Is it empathy? Is it taking someone else’s perspective? Is it validating …
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Provocations to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.