What can Raja Ravi Varma and MF Hussain teach us about empathy

Summary: The counter-point of empathy is not apathy, it is abstract thinking. Like abstract painting, the thinking involves looking at patterns, identifying contours and capturing the essence. Whereas empathy is like the realism style of painting, capturing all the details, literally putting oneself in the shoes of the other and walking a mile and more. Hence most people good at abstract thinking struggle with empathy as detail orientation doesn't come to them naturally. One useful way of getting around this, I have found, is to pay special attention to detail when dealing with people. Especially along the dimensions of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and the context they are operating from. The choice of switching between empathy and abstraction is truly empowering.

Empathy & abstraction

I have struggled with empathy for a large part of my corporate career. Ideas, frameworks, models, logic, rationality, reasoning, these came to me much more naturally than empathy. Then as I got into leadership positions, some kind souls would come up to me and give feedback - "That was a tough meeting"; "Could you be more easy on the team?", "I feel you are not acknowledging the work done before criticising that which wasn't". After a year or two of ignoring it and some soul-searching I finally took the feedback to heart and started to learn about empathy. I also began to observe how more empathic colleagues behaved and those with little empathy conducted themselves. I read up books on Resonant Leadership (Richard Boyatzis et al) , and Servant Leadership, on tactical empathy (Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss) etc. All that reading did not do much to change who I am, though I did start to avoid the pitfalls of not being empathetic. So I moved from negative to zero which was progress. Becoming a coach and training for the ICF certification put me in touch with and in presence of many empathic souls. I stood out like a sore thumb. I was checking off the empathy markers but deep within I struggled. Being a coach helped me tremendously in moving towards being empathetic and non-judgmental. Then I came across this idea of the counterpoint of empathy. I always thought the opposite of empathy was apathy. But turned out it is actually abstraction.

"The opposite of empathy is not apathy, it is abstraction". Robert Vischer (1847-1933) a German psychologist used the German word Einfühlung, literally “feeling-in.” When psychological works influenced by Vischer began to be translated into English in the early twentieth century, the language needed a new term for this new idea, and translators invented the word empathy. In contrast the word abstract meant pulling away.

When I look at an abstract painting (above MFH's "Krishna") I am able to fill in the missing details from my own inner world and relate to a figure without face as Lord Krishna and the animal shape as a cow. This is the process of empathy, feeling into the world and connecting and filling it with what we perceive with what we already know and have experienced. The creation of that abstract painting though, or an abstract idea, requires the opposite ability. An ability of inductive thinking, of looking at the chaos of the world and extracting the essence of it and leaving the rest. Some of us seem to be good at doing the latter than the former. Empathy needs paying attention to details, to even extrapolate them and connect those threads to our own experiences, feelings thoughts etc.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country green,

Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! - John Keats

Keats' immortal words describing a glass of wine show how empathy need not be just about people. It is actually a way of looking at the world. Vischer wrote - “When I observe a stationary object,” , “I can without difficulty place myself within its inner structure, at its center of gravity." Classic realism in Raja Ravi Varma's paintings ("Yashoda" above) depicts that in all it's glory. Every detail and nuance filled into a scene, born in the depths of the being of the painter. Empathy is about observing, absorbing and projecting back into the world a part of ourselves that reflects what is outside, while not getting overwhelmed or lost in the chaos and complexity. Abstraction, in my view, could be an early-stage coping mechanism, a skill, as a way of handling this potential overwhelm.

The Telescope is turned around

Switching between empathy and abstraction is like turning the telescope around. One side brings the scene closer so we can be part of it and immerse ourselves in its glory and chaos. While the other side pushes it away to examine at a distance and just touch its essence. Both have their function and utility. But the question is if we have the choice to switch our view of looking through the telescope or is it super-glued to our eyes, only in one direction. While the choice making is surely more empowering it does call for recognising what has become an unconscious competence for us and what we need to work at.

As for me, I had the larger lens of the telescope glued to my face for a long time. It made me really good at distilling the essence but kept me away from tasting the flora and the country green. It was hard-work to peel it off and give myself a choice. Time and again I still fall back into old ways of seeing things. But now I know how the scene looks like up-close and the memory helps making that choice. At times it works, and some times it doesn't.....but at least the glue is gone