I’ve also empathized with the oppressor (and sucked up my losses) and I’m wondering how much of this “empathizing” was me seeing myself in the other. To attempt to feel how someone else is feeling is perhaps only to try to understand more deeply how we feel, to understand the me in me with the other in me and my desire to have the other feel me in them. If our whole is the sum of the interactions of our parts, then it’s in the human interactions through empathic praxis that our whole evolves. Is the caring to know more and learn more and make a difference, about self creation or the creation of self into a community and/or the creation/evolution/adaption of community?

I agree with Simon’s post that our lives are intertextual. How much are we reading the narratives in search of selves (I am these characters)? How much are we reading ourselves into the narratives (I am becoming, desiring to be)? How does the act of reading the world and naming it, change it (Paulo Freire)? (Like defining empathy.)

The other in me and me in the other. Empathy creates an “us.” (I know this requires a preposition–rather than “we,” and I’ll leave that to Keith Hamon to show how prepositions work here.)