Rae Greiner has the kind of deep dive into word history that I love, in this case “1909: The Introduction of the Word ‘Empathy’ into English.” She begins thus:
Empathy is a hot topic these days, on the lips of cognitive scientists, philosophers, literary critics, and U.S. Presidents alike. But what is it? Consider the opening paragraph of the opening essay of a 2011 collection entitled The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. In “These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena,” C. Daniel Batson writes:
Students of empathy can seem a cantankerous lot. Although they typically agree that empathy is important, they often disagree about why it is important, about what effects it has, about where it comes from, and even about what it is. The term empathy is currently applied to more than a half-dozen phenomena. These phenomena are related to one another, but they are not elements, aspects, facets, or components of a single thing that is empathy, as one might say that an attitude has cognitive, affective, and behavioral components. Rather, each is a conceptually distinct, stand-alone psychological state. Further, each of those states has been called by names other than empathy. Opportunities for disagreement abound. (3, original emphasis)
As Batson goes on to suggest, empathy can be difficult to define because it is often invoked “to provide an answer to two quite different questions” (3). The first is this one: how do we know what others think and feel? And the second: how can we explain the impulse to respond to the feelings of others? The first is principally a question of knowledge. It asks how we are able to infer the contents of other minds, or how and to what extent we project those contents from our own. The second, centered on motivation and behavior, is primarily ethical. It seeks to understand as well as “promote prosocial action” (4). […]
Empathy is the decidedly younger term, at least in English. Moreover, though “empathy” is favored over “sympathy” in modern discourse (for reasons we will explore), it rose to prominence and accrued new meaning in a field—psychological aesthetics—which for many of us no doubt remains unfamiliar.
Her conclusion:
Certainly, one must be wary of overstating the similarities between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of sympathy and a fin de siècle empathy bearing the undeniable stamp of its post-Darwinian making. At present, though, the pendulum often swings too far in the opposite direction, making empathy seem inarguably superior to its old-fashioned cousin. In Upheavals of Thought: the Intelligence of Emotions (2003), Martha Nussbaum offers a corrective, asserting the continuing relevance of a sympathy that, unlike empathy, always entails an ethical stance: “a malevolent person who imagines the situation of the other and takes pleasure in her distress may be empathetic,” she writes, “but will surely not be judged sympathetic. Sympathy, by comparison, includes a judgment that the other person’s distress is bad” (302). There are no doubt plenty of good reasons why a recent study citing evidence for the altruistic behavior of rats toward their distressed fellows should refer to such behavior as empathetic rather than sympathetic (the moral question, surely, is number one).[8] But Nussbaum’s distinction may nevertheless give us reason to pause before jettisoning sympathy altogether in explaining more human endeavors. We will do well, as historians and scholars of a long and lengthening nineteenth century, to continue scrutinizing the empathy/sympathy relation as well as its ostensible divide.
If any of this interests you, I recommend the whole essay; it goes into all sorts of relevant byways.
Addendum. See also this 2012 post (on usage rather than history).
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