If all I can really know are my own
sense impressions, how can I ever come to know you, other than as a fat grey
patch on my eyeballs?
Are we not eternally shut off from one another by the
thick walls of our bodies?
I can know for certain that I am in pain, but I can
only infer or deduce that you are, even when flames are sprouting from your
hair. If this is so, then there would
seem to be a need for some special, intuitive faculty which allows me to range
beyond my own sense-data, transport myself into your emotional innards and
empathise with what you are feeling.
This is known as the imagination, product
of a flawed epistemology. It makes up for our natural state of isolation from
one another. The moral and the aesthetic lie close together, since to be moral
is to be able to feel what others are feeling
. It would be interesting to know
what sadists would make of this assumption.
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