I always enjoy your slow and deliberate takes. It seems to me that the injunction to not be partial in judgment either to rich or poor is itself a command to the discipline of empathy, because in the very act of considering someone's social state, we have to exercise our imaginations in a discplined way to ferret out the biases we might be prone to in our judgment.
I've also always been fascinated with the wisdom Nathan employed to convict David. The little tale was basically an atom bomb wrapped up in an innocuous-seeming package of--empathy. David's sense of righteous indignation wasn't in itself hypocrisy, it was a just judgment, and it depended for its power upon David's having been a shepherd boy. Quite a weaponization of empathy on Nathan's part, but in an incredibly helpful direction!
I always enjoy your slow and deliberate takes. It seems to me that the injunction to not be partial in judgment either to rich or poor is itself a command to the discipline of empathy, because in the very act of considering someone's social state, we have to exercise our imaginations in a discplined way to ferret out the biases we might be prone to in our judgment.
I've also always been fascinated with the wisdom Nathan employed to convict David. The little tale was basically an atom bomb wrapped up in an innocuous-seeming package of--empathy. David's sense of righteous indignation wasn't in itself hypocrisy, it was a just judgment, and it depended for its power upon David's having been a shepherd boy. Quite a weaponization of empathy on Nathan's part, but in an incredibly helpful direction!