What is empathy?

April 27 marked two years since the death of Igor Kon. I have been fortunate to associate with him since my youth. Warmth and attention will always be remembered. He, a multilingual and a person who shuns the manifestation of emotions, would most likely call it empathy. That is, sensual attention. I think he didn’t have a very loving relationship with the word “love”. Unless it was about my mother. But using the example of communicating with him, I just want to describe what this English word means in a real relationship.

Read more:

• Hate grows out of disgust

In school still youth: a person looks at everything differently than we look at. But he hears. After a moment it becomes ashamed that he hears our stupidity. He does not humiliate with his knowledge, he tries to find arguments. Respects. This is hardly the first example of honest, unfeigned, non-pedagogical respect.

Next: lectures at the Leningrad University “Sociology of Personality”. Personality was a new word, and they were drawn to it. He dragged sociology exclusively out of fashion. Later he confessed. There is no such science: the sociology of personality. But this sociological feature allowed a truly revolutionary event to take place. Cohn always got out of a situation rather than complaining about it. The hall was bursting with youth. The commandant, as Igor Semenovich later told me, applied to the rector that he was not responsible in the event of a collapse of structures. The structures did not collapse, but much has changed in consciousness.

For several years, Kon and I did not communicate, after he moved to Moscow, and it turns out that he quoted from article to article my response to these lectures, which, however, shocked us. Such kindness in absentia. Empathy.

Why did you move to Moscow? Explained. Very simple. In Leningrad there is one door to the government, but in Moscow there are several. One door of the Central Committee of the CPSU leads to the study of science, the other to the study of culture, and the third to the study of education. The people sitting there, fortunately, do not know each other or are intriguing against each other. And in Smolny everyone is familiar and friendly. Went to cheat.

In Moscow, too, however, it did not work out very well. Changed topics all the time. Friendship, childhood ecology, sex, the nature of homosexuality. Kon brought up in people scientific, and, therefore, human tolerance. In recent years, he developed the theme of the relationship between father and son. He himself did not have a son, but the mind of a scientist is wider than experience.

His scientific clarity and rationality are remarkable. This, in fact, is the lesson. For example, he once said that a boy comes to him, the son of his friends, who helps to set up a computer. Strange, however, he has a quirk. He started his own website, exposes his photographs, poems, aphorisms there. Hey listen man, why? After all, you are still an insignificant quantity. Is it necessary to show up like this?

And suddenly I realized, says Igor Semenovich, that he is doing the right thing. At sixteen, the only problem is to declare yourself. And when else? After all, a baby, when it comes out of the womb, yells that it is. Wonderful boy. In addition, he understands the computer more than I do.

So it goes. Igor Semenovich and I talked often. More through the computer, or I came to him in his small apartment on Vavilova. He sent me his texts. In particular, I remember the simple consideration that the destruction of the empire is most likely a historical blessing, but for a private person it is a disaster. Imagine, he said, I come to Siberia, they know and love me there, but it turns out that they only read my books twenty years ago. Books have not been sent to the regions for a long time. They thought I was dead. How do you like this condition?

However, there are no happy birthday greetings. I received a literary award – yes! He published a book, of course. Specifically: tell me, in which novels are the relationship between father and son significantly traced?

I repeat: no emotions. Actions, actions. “Glad to see you!” Yes, that seems to have been said. But also, rather, from the ritual. Never complained. I cooked for myself. And he gave me something to eat. Basically, from ready-made boxes. But that was not the point. Maybe the bottom line is that this was not the case. He was all about meaning. To prove something, to explain something, to understand something. The purest work of man. He said: “For the first time in the history of mankind, the rate of change of new generations of technology began to rapidly outpace the rate of change of generations of workers.” All this contributes to the growth of sentiments of traditionalism. People yearn for the past, and not the real one, moreover, but the idealized one.

That’s what was not in Igor Semenovich himself – false sentimentality. He always lived in the present and the future. Unless he recalled with tenderness the years when he rented a house in Pavlovsk near Leningrad. To the city – twenty minutes, and at the same time a complete recluse.