Empathy Is Not a Feeling
The word “empathy” has been so thoroughly degraded by popular usage that I must begin by reclaiming it from the territory of sentiment and returning it to the territory of philosophy, where it originated and where it does its most important work.
Empathy, in common usage, means “feeling what another person feels.” This definition is not merely imprecise. It is wrong in a way that obscures the most valuable thing about empathy and replaces it with something that is, at best, sympathetic projection and, at worst, a form of emotional colonialism in which I replace your experience with my imagined version of it and call the result “understanding.”