Where — Sympathetic response

How do we respond sympathetically?

In our context, responding sympathetically doesn't mean saying how sorry you are and asking how you can help. Sympathy derives from ancient Greek, sym, "with," and pathos, "feeling," or especially, "suffering." We are using the term to indicate responding with fellow feeling. We might say, with a congenial response, meaning "of the same genius, disposition, or temperament; kindred, sympathetic." It's a response that we try to make perceptive, discerning, insightful, observant, savvy — in a word, helpful.

We respond in this way by sensing the intents of the other person as she expresses them explicitly and as we perceive those nuanced by intuitions about the other person and our awareness of the field of action relative to those intents. We do not project our intents onto the other person, bending her purpose to conform with our own. Rather we seek to facilitate her fulfilling her intent, including aspects of it that may be inherent in it but not yet fully perceived by her.

In receiving sympathetic responses, a recipient should not take them as authoritative, but simply as informative. The recipient's concern is with her intents, not conformity to the responders' opinions. The recipient must judge how well the respondent has perceived her purposes, her fields of awareness and action, her capabilities, both actual and potential. The recipient must judge whether and how the response facilitates her fulfilling her intents. The responder gives a sympathetic response freely; the recipient receives it autonomously.

Sympathetic, congenial interaction arises as we recognize that we are all peers, active agents conducting, as best we can, unique, intertwined lives in unique, coexisting lifeworlds. We need to work at interacting sympathetically, for although we continually put ourselves in the shoes of others to some degree, even in situations of long-lived intimacy, the transposition remains partial, at once fruitful when appropriate and constraining when misconceived. In situations of formal instruction, people have difficulty giving a congenial reaction, for assessment processes subvert the peer to peer character of a sympathetic response. On A Place to Study, we avoid incentives, positive and negative, to keep differences of power, status, and authority from complicating the congenial relations in our interactions with one another.