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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (15951)	1/20/1998 3:32:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Empathy in a hunter is a Good Thing. Wanna catch a mastodon? Learn to think like a mastodon! What the effective hunter needs, though, is the ability to compartmentalize that empathy when it's spear time. (Read the literature of the big game hunter. Recurring motif: Hunter spies a big elk or something. He writes that "it was the most beautiful creature I've ever seen. So I put a round into it.") Empathy with your fellow hunters (if it's a team deal) is positively selected for. Maybe that's why guys are all fuzzyhearted around smallish male task groups: the football team, the platoon, the power tool counter...

To: epicure who wrote (15951)	1/20/1998 4:22:00 PM
From: j g cordes	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

OK.. lets nail this down a little. Words do have common and historical use definitions. Among women vulnerability may have an insiders' use for identifying some guys that pull your heart strings, but in common use and (dare I say) among men, vulnerability is most frequently used in its agressive/defensive context. Indeed, even the DOD, Dept of Defence has a formal meaning.. "(DOD) 1. The susceptibility of a nation or military force to any action by any means through which its war potential or combat effectiveness may be reduced or its will to fight diminished. 2. The characteristics of a system which cause it to suffer a definite degradation (incapability to perform the designated mission) as a result of having been subjected to a certain level of effects in an unnatural (manmade) hostile environment." Now, tell a guy he's vulnerable and he's more likely to salute than to kiss you. The Webster definition is interesting also: "Main Entry: vulúnerúaúble Pronunciation: 'v&l-n(&-)r&-b&l, 'v&l-n&r-b&l Function: adjective Etymology: Late Latin vulnerabilis, from Latin vulnerare to wound, from vulner-, vulnus wound; probably akin to Latin vellere to pluck, Greek oulE wound Date: 1605 1 : capable of being physically wounded 2 : open to attack or damage : ASSAILABLE" Being observant I could, but won't, draw attention to the Latin root "vulnus" as having something to say in this conversation. Last, lets look at empathy... from Webster first: "The feeling or capacity for awareness, understanding and sensitivity one experiences when hearing or reading of some event or activity of another, thus imagining the same sensation as that of those actually experiencing it." AS telling is the historical use of a word through time and its literal inferences: Empathy - Sympathy for another's situation, feelings, and motives. Quotations about empathy: "He who wishes to paint Christ's story must live with Christ." Fra Angelico (-1455), Florentine painter of the early Renaissance. Argan, Fra Angelico and His Times, 1955. "As an artist I am . . . attracted by decadence, by those who exhaust their lives in the shallow pursuits of pleasure . . . . Occasionally, I feel that spiritually I participate in all these kinds of lives." Emil Nolde (1867-1956), German Expressionist painter. Years of Struggle, 1934. "Daumier paints with an enormous capacity for absolute empathy; a complete identification of himself with the figures he paints. He sets forth what it feels like to do something; not what somebody looks like doing it." David Sylvester, The New Statesman, 1963. "We've reached a point where we are not a very empathetic people, and art without empathy is art without an audience. My basic viewpoint is that without art we're alone." Jamake Highwater, interviewed in Art News Magazine, August 1984.