I recall hearing Surah Al-Kāfirūn (Chapter 109 of the Quran) enunciated with a song-like cadence through the dry air of a childhood afternoon in Saudi Arabia. Rather than condemning or belittling the beliefs of others, it simply recognizes their existence and the legitimacy of difference itself. The closing verse, "To you your religion, and to me mine", exemplifies tolerance and coexistence.

At the most abstract level, empathy means understanding someone's perspective, and not necessarily endorsing it. Empathy doesn't feel like it should mean that I must collapse all distinctions or pretend to feel what you feel. As a child, this Surah felt like a good encapsulation of empathy: it acknowledged others' perspectives in a way that I parsed as compassionate.

Recently, this has started to feel unsatisfactory. I find myself questioning what empathy really is. The word seems to refer to the ability to "imagine and understand the thoughts, perspective, and emotions of another person".

At this junction I can't help but systematize this somewhat. For instance, is empathy merely cognitive? One can intellectually grasp what someone else is thinking or feeling, and the conditions that led them to developing those thoughts or feelings, without actually feeling them directly. Must empathy be affective? Perhaps its not enough to merely understand; one must also feel. I need to actually feel as do you as a pre-condition of becoming an empathetic agent. Must empathy be compassionate? Is it enough to understand and feel, or must I also care in a way that compels me to act?

I'm going to consider empathy as somewhat of a staircase of increasing valence: cognitive, affective, and compassionate. First, I will argue that even the first step, cognitive empathy, is both a necessary and sufficient condition for empathy. Next, I will offer a critique of the other levels, arguing that not only are they unnecessary, but that they may not be possible in any meaningful sense.

I practised clinical medicine in London for a few years. In many instances, I was clerking patients who had complex medical histories. I would read their notes, understand their diagnoses, and learn about their prior management. But I had to do more than that. When I spoke to them, many were afraid. Some were terrified of their conditions, others of the treatments they were about to undergo.

I would sit with these patients, listen to their concerns and deeply understand their fears. If this was ever done in a half-hearted or unserious way, the patient would sense it. You would sense it. The patient would erect guardrails and I would be unable to help them. I had to understand their perspective, their lived experience, and the context of their situation. This cognitive empathy was the foundation of my ability to connect with them. But I never felt their fear. I never felt their pain. I never felt their anxiety. I understood it, but I never felt it.

In fact, I remember thinking that if I were to feel how they did, I would be overwhelmed by their emotions and my ability to provide care would be compromised. This also wasn't mere sympathy, which is a feeling of compassion, pity, or sorrow for someone else's misfortune or suffering that doesn't necessarily require fully understanding them. I had to fully understand them. This was the essence of cognitive empathy: understanding another's perspective without necessarily sharing their emotional state.

The patients recognized this as empathy. They thanked me for my empathy, and I felt that I had done my job well in this dimension. I had connected with them on a human level by understanding their emotional experience without sharing it. Whilst I had to act, and this could be interpreted as compassionate action, merely showing them that I deeply understood their situation made them feel heard, and was sufficient for them to feel that I was empathetic. Sometimes being cognitively empathetic was my only role and all that they needed.

Now, up until this point my words have been suffused with an implicit assumption of a subtle type of emotional neutrality. Something like "I understand your fear but don't need to feel it, and actually I don't feel anything in particular. I myself am neutral." But of course, this was not always the case then, nor is it now.

In John Wentworth's essay My Empathy is Rarely Kind, he describes how putting himself in others' shoes can lead to negative feelings towards them because he is more able to feel both their possible ineptitue and, occasionally, their lack of desire to ever move past it. But it feels like this state should be perfectly compatible with being empathetic.

I can understand your fear and sorrow at being diagnosed with lung cancer. I can go a step further, and earnestly feel a sense of deep sorrow for you and wish that you could overcome this terrible affliction. Furthermore, I can take sincere and determined action to help you in whatever way I can. This must be empathetic if that word is to mean anything at all. Despite all of this, I can also think you're a fucking idiot for continuing to smoke. This fact about you could disgust me even. That shouldn't mean that I can't be empathetic to you all the same.

Because imagine if negative feelings were disallowed in any part of empathy. The implications would be stark. Empathy would become selective, biased, dangerous, and ultimately impossible. If fulminant positive emotional valence were a requirement for empathy, then I would only be able to empathize with those I like or agree with. And this isn't some off-handed general intuition.

We know from decades of psychological and neuroscientific research that empathy is skewed by factors like similarity, familiarity, physical proximity, and how “innocent” or deserving we perceive the other person to be. Feeling "empathetic", where now this word necessitates feeling positively or even emotionally permissively, for those who are in our tribe, but indifferent to distant or dissimilar suffering is a very bad habit to get into.

We can also end up setting the ground-work for an absurd definition of empathy. In both John Wentworth's original essay and in the follow-up note, there were people in the discussion who argued that in empathetic discourse, one must accept that other people might value different things. Whilst this comment is fair, it was often followed by recommendations to the author to do things like take into account a lot of the "real psychology of other people".

But what does that really mean? If empathy requires no negative feeling, then I must accept your values or objective functions (or at least not negatively judge them) even if they harmful or desctructive to you or others. The way I am required to do this is to imagine and understand your thoughts, perspectives, and emotions. The better I do this, the more empathetic I am.

Let's set aside the fact that this could reasonably lead to a form of moral relativism where all actions and beliefs are seen as equally valid, regardless of their consequences. If we took this description of empathy to be true, than in the asymptote I'm actually having to do more than merely simulate your thoughts, because a simulation of a system only replicates its external behaviour without understanding its internal workings. No, I must actually emulate you. That is, be able to somehow generate a world model which reflects, as well as possible, your preceise psychological machinations.

Clearly this is impossible. When Descartes said that the idea of an infinite being could not have originated from his finite self and that therefore the idea must have been placed in him by an actually infinite being, he did not mean that he could fully comperehend or can vividly imagine the infinite. He meant that he intellectually possesses the notion of the infinite, and that this notion could not have been a product of his own finite mind. One can imagine the infinite abstractly and superficially and symbolically, but one cannot actually imagine infinity and stare into its depths per se.

This is the same sense in which people can understand how others feel. I can create a lossy simulation of your thoughts and feelings, but I cannot either: 1) Create an emulation of you in some crevice of my mind, or; 2) Actually become you at will. Because, y'know, of course I can't. This would require a strong downward causation, whereby the higher-level phenomena of my mind would need to have causal influence over lower-level phenomena in ways that can't be reduced to physical laws. In other words, I can understand the pain of losing a child. My chest could hurt, and I could cry with sadness for you. But I cannot become you, and I cannot feel your pain in the same way you do.

What of actions? Well, I can take compassionate action based on my understanding of your situation, but this doesn't require me to feel what you feel. Compassionate action can stem from cognitive empathy alone. I can choose to help you because I understand your plight.

But of course, actions are imperfect. If I take an action I sincerely believe would be helpful, such as offering a detailed plan to resolve a problem, and this makes you feel worse, because what you really needed was a sympathetic ear, then I have not failed to be empathetic. I have failed to be helpful. If you genuinely feel worse, then I can extend my empathy to include this new outcome, and would, if I were decent, adjust my actions accordingly: "Oh, it appears I've actually stressed you out more, and I didn't mean to do that. I apologize.". But again, if my actionss had an unintended negative outcome, this would have no bearing whatever on whether I was sincerely empathetic or not.

Where, then, does this leave us? Perhaps here: empathy is not the sanctified union of souls it is often romanticized to be, nor the guarantee of right action, nor even a reliable moral compass. It is, at its most durable, the effortful work of understanding and not of merging. It is intellectual before it is emotional, descriptive before it is prescriptive. And it is limited, necessarily so, by the irreducibility of experience and the impossibility of full psychological emulation. To empathize is not to collapse into the other, but to trace the outline of their shape with care and accuracy, even while remaining distinct.

True empathy requires only cognitive understanding. A lossy but genuine simulation of another's inner experience. Affective resonance and compassionate action may follow, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient for empathy itself.