The Divergent Outcomes of Empathy: Intercultural Sympathy and Essentialization

Across the disciplines of humanities, there has always been a tension between relativism and universalism. This parallel has been embodied as sympathy-empathy tension in the field of intercultural conflicts and sociology of communication. This paper posits a case where rationalization serves to elicit intercultural sympathy provided there is a commitment to understand “otherness”. Two findings resulted from several interviews regarding this hypothesis. First, the polysemic nature of “sympathy”. Second, utilization of rationalization which is activated by commitment could facilitate to perceive commensurability among social universes at variance. These two findings combined urge the redefinition of the notion of “empathy” (Bennett, 1979). For this paper, several interviews were conducted on close intercultural dyads where value differences seem to be obstacles, in an attempt to find a case where rationalization is observed and facilitates intercultural sympathy. An Australian-Chinese intercultural marriage presented such a case. In the face of a value conflict, the Australian wife’s epoche attitude coupled with her commitment to the relationship eventuated in rationalizing her Chinese husband’s world perspective attributing to the educational influence he received. Consequently, commensurability was widened in her perception. This research also briefly explored the stream in academia around the notion of relativism-universalism and charges against so-called western rationality. It provided one possible account for why Bennett’s empathy did not mention the term “rationality” and thus failed to capture the polysemic nature of sympathy.