An example of compassion from life. Do you need sympathy and compassion in your life?

It is generally accepted that man is a social being, capable of sympathizing with his neighbor. The very notion of compassion involves experiencing, together with someone, his pain - suffering together. As to whether this feeling is appropriate and whether it is necessary in human society, opinions, oddly enough, diverge.

Compassion as a hindrance

Someone dares to directly say that this is completely useless, and gives another example of compassion from life (good, you can find an illustration in any way of thinking): a woman was walking, saw a homeless puppy, regretted, fed, and then an ungrateful dog Grew up and bitten the child of her savior.

Then follow the Nietzschean reflections that the weak must perish, and the strong, respectively, survive. If you think in this way, the question of whether sympathy and compassion are necessary in life is excluded in principle. For the sake of justice it should be noted that all these arguments are peculiar to people either mentally ill (to which the founder of the theory belonged) or emotionally immature - due to age or lack of imagination.

Quality of a developed person

Ability to abstract thinking in the process of compassion is necessary: we often sympathize with people who have never been in their place (and thank God). Physical or mental injuries and losses cause a feeling of compassion - perhaps only because a person is capable of his own, a similar (even the most insignificant) experience to use to imagine how one should feel who has been even less fortunate.

Experience, the son of difficult mistakes

This leads us to the widespread opinion that claims that to feel someone else's pain, one must at least once test your own. On the one hand, this is true - each of us can confirm that other people's feelings become much more understandable when you experience them yourself. Daughters begin to understand their mothers much better by giving birth to their own child. Deported to humiliation in school, it is easier to imagine yourself in the place of an outcast.

On the other hand, the notorious personal experience is not necessarily the key to success: every example of compassion from life is counterbalanced by its opposite. Indicative in this respect is the army hazing: yesterday they humiliated me, today I humiliate myself. Such revenge, aimed at the whole world around, is the reverse side of sympathy. The way in which each of us uses his life experience depends on the person's personality, his upbringing, the environment in which he lives, and many other factors.

Feeling and business

If you strictly adhere to the actual side, compassion is just a feeling. In itself, it is barren and designed only to motivate to action - to come to the rescue. Conversely, in order to get help, you should first initiate compassion. Examples of people's lives are concentrated, in principle, on this. Here is a person who came from another city, received a salary and agreed to drink in a warm company of unfamiliar people (the act itself is far from optimal, but as a rule, any trouble is preceded by stupidity). The newly-found comrades beat him to death, than, they took the money and threw the poor man out on the roadside.

A guy walks by, stops, finds out what's wrong, and gives money to travel to the house. Someone will say that this is a real example of compassion from life, but it may well be that it is so revealing only because in this case the feeling gave rise to action.

Long-standing problem

In the course of thinking about the nature of empathy, it is customary to delve into the shades of concepts and talk about how compassion raises, pities humble, various interpretations and subtle nuances are given. The well-known Austrian writer S. Zweig introduced another notion related to the subject, "impatience of the heart". He wrote the eponymous story, the central theme of which was compassion. Composition, examples from life in which bright, interesting and very illustrative, can be considered a deep and highly ambiguous philosophical development of the concept of empathy and responsibility for it.

So, the young man gets acquainted with the girl-cripple, who falls in love with him. In a fit of compassion (whether it?) The hero decides to marry her. Further details of his internal torment, resulting in a tragedy: abandoned heroine ends his life by suicide.

This situation is literary, but a similar example of compassion from life, albeit not so dramatic, is not so difficult to find as it seems: in the next entrance there lives an unwanted child, almost a homeless child. Mother bitterly drinks, his stepfather scoffs at him. In one "fine" night the boy is on the street, and he is picked up by compassionate neighbors. He spends the night there a day, another, and then nobody wants to take responsibility for himself, nor to mess with another's child, and as a result he again finds himself in the circle of his so-called family.

For a while the boy comes to people who helped him: he brings flowers, tries to communicate, but does not find understanding: they are busy with their problems, they do not care for him. He becomes embittered and starts to wander.

Impatience of the heart

It is logical to assume that in the matter of compassion, as in any other, it is necessary either to finish what has been started, or not to start at all.

In the book, the topic gets its own peculiar development: a young man, tormented by the throes of repentance, comes to the doctor of the deceased bride, and it turns out that he in the analogous situation acted directly opposite: he married his blind patient, devoting her all his life.

In the mouth of this character, the author puts the following thought: it happens, they say, true compassion, and sometimes just impatience of the heart - the feeling that arises in each of us when we see someone's pain or trouble. This causes discomfort in the soul of others, a desire to correct as quickly as possible - not to help the sufferer, but in order to regain his own peace of mind. And our fussy, inconsistent actions can lead to truly dramatic consequences.

Another example of compassion from life, which can rightly be considered a classic "impatience of the heart" according to Zweig, is alms given in the underground passage to a dirty woman with a sleeping child in her arms. Thousands of words have already been said and printed about the unhappy children who have been drugged with drugs, thanks to which enraged people are enriched - a place for them in hard labor, with a cast-iron core on their legs. But no: citizens with enviable persistence continue to throw a trifle into the cardboard box of the beggar, thereby investing in infanticide. Is this not a mockery of such categories as sympathy, compassion, support?

First - think

Apparently, everything should be approached, listening to the voice of not only the heart, but also the mind. Even the Christian religion, calling for mercy, says at the same time: "Let your alms sweat in your hands before you know who you are giving" (The Doctrine of the 12 apostles, chapter 1, article 6). This advice is interpreted in different ways, but in the sense that it is not necessary to support the "covetous person". It is unlikely that the money given to alcoholics for vodka or a drug addict for his hellish potion is a manifestation of compassion - rather, this desire to get away as soon as possible.

Another important question is very important: "Do we need sympathy and compassion in life, requiring a victim from a human being and thereby giving rise to a kind of chain reaction?" The same doctor from the already mentioned book, married to an unloved woman, inevitably causes sympathy, like herself. Is it right for a person to sacrifice himself for the sake of empathy or such actions destroy both the recipient and the giver?

Examples of mercy and compassion from their lives can lead everyone who has at least a drop of gratitude. It is unlikely that there is a person in the world who has never been helped in his life. As well as a villain who has not committed a single good deed ... We all give and receive - and the question of the proportionality of the given and received each solves for himself.