One of the things I've often found quite frustrating is the seeming lack of empathy or understanding between various political parties. I grew up in a very conservative part of New York, and have since lived in a liberal part of Massachusetts, and I'm always struck by how both right and left normally talk past each other. Of course, in some ways, everyone already knows this: conservatives think liberals don't even attempt to understand them, and liberals normally make the same argument. Thus, even the notion that collective decision making happens by two different parties is a fault, if anything, of our system. Thus Democrats and Republicans (and their supporters) both want to dominate government, because only then will anything good happen.
I think this desire to dominate the government comes precisely because each party sees the other party as unable/unwilling to understand 'where they're coming from.' It's lack of empathy, as I said.
However, I don't think anybody should try to understand where the other party is coming from. Instead of trying to get into another's shoes by empathizing with where they are coming from, we should try to understand someone by imagining where they can come from.
What's the distinction? When you imagine where someone is coming from, you immediate come up with the problem: do I have to have their interests in mind? If I don't, have I really even sympathized with them? If I do have to have their interests in mind, what about my own interests? What would my party think if I sympathized too much with them? Try this as an experiment: if you are conservative, tell a conservative friend you sympathize with Hillary Clinton's health care plan; if you are liberal, tell a liberal friend you sympathize with Bush's leadership qualities - see how far you get.
This problem can be circumvented if we take up Kant's argument on judgment. He argues that in any judging includes first an imaginative leap beyond our particular viewpoint, in order to see if our view could be consonant with everyone else's. The fact that we can do this is because there is basic machinery that is the same between everyone. In our discussion, we might say that republican democracy is the basic "same" between everyone.
Once we do this operation of imagination, we can then "enlarge" our imagination, or rather start to "vary" the procedure, imagining what different positions might say about the thing we are focused on. E.g., abortion: for conservatives, this is about the life of a child; for liberals, about the right to a woman's body. Conservatives might imagine that this right to the body is within an entire context of women's history, from not being able to vote until less than a hundred years ago, to problems of domestic violence and coercion, etc. This would require - since many conservative don't like feminism, as it were - a disinterested standpoint, or rather a holding off of one's own interests. However, in this imaginative variation, one doesn't to take over the interests of the other person, but just to put these interests in the context of possible positions (of course, another possible position could be that some people who want to get abortions want to unhindered by the "inconvenience" of a baby - which is the only position many conservatives can imagine). On the other side, liberals might imagine that for conservatives, there is a whole history vis-a-vis Christianity that sees human dignity in the fact that God has created them, and that no matter where it starts, or who happens to be in the womb, this person is a creation of God, not of humans.
This is not too far off from what Ryan Mays thinks Wittgenstein does, in a blog response to someone arguing against the "new Wittgenstein". The argument was that Wittgenstein actually liked nonsense, and that the New Wittgenstein readers are too austere in their arguments against nonsense. Mays' point was that for Wittgenstein, one could understanding seeming nonsensical language (like Heidegger's "being") if one imagines what this language could mean. As for Kant, Wittgenstein seemed to hold that imaginative leaps are required when judging.
The next step, beyond this imaginative variation, is reflective judgment. More on that next time.
I think this desire to dominate the government comes precisely because each party sees the other party as unable/unwilling to understand 'where they're coming from.' It's lack of empathy, as I said.
However, I don't think anybody should try to understand where the other party is coming from. Instead of trying to get into another's shoes by empathizing with where they are coming from, we should try to understand someone by imagining where they can come from.
What's the distinction? When you imagine where someone is coming from, you immediate come up with the problem: do I have to have their interests in mind? If I don't, have I really even sympathized with them? If I do have to have their interests in mind, what about my own interests? What would my party think if I sympathized too much with them? Try this as an experiment: if you are conservative, tell a conservative friend you sympathize with Hillary Clinton's health care plan; if you are liberal, tell a liberal friend you sympathize with Bush's leadership qualities - see how far you get.
This problem can be circumvented if we take up Kant's argument on judgment. He argues that in any judging includes first an imaginative leap beyond our particular viewpoint, in order to see if our view could be consonant with everyone else's. The fact that we can do this is because there is basic machinery that is the same between everyone. In our discussion, we might say that republican democracy is the basic "same" between everyone.
Once we do this operation of imagination, we can then "enlarge" our imagination, or rather start to "vary" the procedure, imagining what different positions might say about the thing we are focused on. E.g., abortion: for conservatives, this is about the life of a child; for liberals, about the right to a woman's body. Conservatives might imagine that this right to the body is within an entire context of women's history, from not being able to vote until less than a hundred years ago, to problems of domestic violence and coercion, etc. This would require - since many conservative don't like feminism, as it were - a disinterested standpoint, or rather a holding off of one's own interests. However, in this imaginative variation, one doesn't to take over the interests of the other person, but just to put these interests in the context of possible positions (of course, another possible position could be that some people who want to get abortions want to unhindered by the "inconvenience" of a baby - which is the only position many conservatives can imagine). On the other side, liberals might imagine that for conservatives, there is a whole history vis-a-vis Christianity that sees human dignity in the fact that God has created them, and that no matter where it starts, or who happens to be in the womb, this person is a creation of God, not of humans.
This is not too far off from what Ryan Mays thinks Wittgenstein does, in a blog response to someone arguing against the "new Wittgenstein". The argument was that Wittgenstein actually liked nonsense, and that the New Wittgenstein readers are too austere in their arguments against nonsense. Mays' point was that for Wittgenstein, one could understanding seeming nonsensical language (like Heidegger's "being") if one imagines what this language could mean. As for Kant, Wittgenstein seemed to hold that imaginative leaps are required when judging.
The next step, beyond this imaginative variation, is reflective judgment. More on that next time.
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