Oltre l’empatia: sperimentare nuove forme di coinvolgimento con il mondo

Abstract

Talking about empathy today is not easy. the word seems to get lost in a sky fool of good intentions, the utopia of a better world, and all-purpose sayings. Empathy has become a key word of our time and resonates more and more often in the crisis situations that relentlessly plague our societies. My work on empathy has been nurtured by the conviction that the importance of this human capacity in the contemporary world stems from the fact that it is not the solution, as many think, but the problem. I therefore proposed a new paradigm, that of empathies, which considers the multiplicity of concrete experiences, lived in changing contexts, of contact with people, objects, non-human beings. There are many forms of individual and collective experience that have an empathic quality. At the same time, they go beyond, as they intersect with other levels and planes of experience which produce ever tighter links between justice, equality, vulnerability of human bodies and of the natural environment. This means being open to the richness of reality. Empathy is a capacity with which we are all endowed, but it is developed and practiced in very different ways, depending on the individual and, in particular, on the social, cultural situation in which each of us lives. Not only that: in the empathic experience, time, the duration of an encounter count, and similarly the space, the architecture of a place.