#Empathy Through Reading

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of Reading

Reading is more than just decoding symbols on a page; it is an immersive, transformative experience that shapes our understanding of the world and ourselves. The philosophy of reading delves into the multifaceted nature of this activity, exploring its cognitive, emotional, and ethical dimensions. Here’s an exploration of key aspects of the philosophy of reading:

1. Cognitive Engagement

Reading engages the mind in complex ways, involving both comprehension and critical thinking. The act of reading stimulates mental faculties, enhancing vocabulary, analytical skills, and the ability to synthesize information. Philosophers of reading study how texts influence our cognitive processes and contribute to our intellectual growth.

2. Empathy and Emotional Connection

Reading, especially narrative fiction, fosters empathy by allowing readers to experience the lives and emotions of characters. This emotional engagement can lead to a deeper understanding of others’ experiences and perspectives. The philosophy of reading examines how literature can cultivate emotional intelligence and moral sensitivity.

3. Interpretation and Meaning

One of the central concerns in the philosophy of reading is the interpretation of texts. This includes the debate between authorial intent and reader response, as well as the role of context in shaping meaning. Hermeneutics, the theory and methodology of interpretation, plays a crucial role in understanding how readers derive meaning from texts.

4. Ethical Implications

Reading is not a morally neutral activity. The content we choose to read and the way we engage with it can have ethical implications. Philosophers of reading explore how texts can challenge or reinforce ethical norms and how readers have a responsibility to approach texts critically and thoughtfully.

5. Transformative Power

Reading has the power to transform individuals and societies. It can inspire change, challenge the status quo, and promote social justice. The philosophy of reading investigates how texts influence our beliefs, values, and actions, and how they can be used as tools for personal and collective transformation.

6. Aesthetic Appreciation

The aesthetic dimension of reading involves the appreciation of literary beauty, style, and artistry. This aspect of reading goes beyond the utilitarian function of texts, focusing on the enjoyment and enrichment that come from engaging with well-crafted literature. Philosophers of reading study how aesthetic appreciation contributes to the overall reading experience.

7. The Role of Silence and Solitude

Reading often requires solitude and silence, creating a space for introspection and contemplation. The philosophy of reading considers the importance of these quiet moments in fostering deep, reflective engagement with texts. This solitude can be a counterbalance to the noise and distractions of modern life.

The philosophy of reading encompasses a rich tapestry of ideas that highlight the profound impact of reading on the human experience. From cognitive development and emotional engagement to ethical considerations and transformative potential, reading is a multifaceted activity that shapes who we are and how we understand the world. By exploring these dimensions, the philosophy of reading deepens our appreciation of this timeless and essential practice.

[garvalhaminho]

why does every tsc male main character act like a divorced father of three w bills to pay at 17. who gave them the right.

[yudidoodles]

One of the few parts of every adaptation that makes me cry is the Yi City/Coffin City arc- something about finding love when you don't deserve it, fighting with all you have for it, only to ultimately ruin it with your own hands,,, like MAN I know these guys could never have any sort of functional relationship as is but I wish they could! What very little we see of their dynamics are amazing 10/10 would cry at crushed old candy again

[edwardshundredyearoldspunk]

dot and bubble might just be my favorite episode this series. it's safe to say there have been NAUR bad episodes but the futility of dot and bubble, the slow realization that these young adults (who have been chosen as the final vestiges of this civilization) aren't just rich and beautiful, they're also ALL white. the subtle, unexplained hostility lindy pepper-bean has for the doctor. the way she listens to only ruby, addresses only ruby even when it's the doctor who is talking to her. and then. that ending. the doctor's disbelief. he can't believe these people aren't letting him save them just because he's black. and they could have gone the allegorical racism, the whole sci-fi alien bigotry. but I'm glad they didn't. the doctor has never encountered this problem before and what does he do? he screams. he cries. because if there's anything the doctor will always hate, it is the meaningless loss of life. and that's exactly what will happen to lindy and her friends. they will die. and as audience members there is some part of us that enjoys that, because we hate bigots and we love the doctor. but the doctor cares, so part of us cares, even when we don't want to. and that's the beauty of doctor who. I truly don't believe a piece of media has had more of a hand in making me as empathetic as I am and for that I love it. best episode so far this season for me. rtd at his absolute best!

[fromtheseventhhell]

why does this fandom act like dany never suffered again after she gains her dragons? i saw an improperly tagged post on my for you page here and in the tags people are genuinely saying that after dany births her dragons, she never experiences sexual violence or oppression again unlike sansa who has to use her "ladies charms" to survive. i couldn't believe my eyes as i read tag after tag explaining why dany is a girlboss who never experiences anything bad after agot. what is wrong with tha fandom?

It's cause! A subsection of Stansas have adopted the show's (misogynistic) logic that suffering = deserves a good ending, so they want to play the suffering Olympics so Sansa ends up looking the most deserving of a happy ending. They're constantly downplaying other female characters and their trauma to fit their logic. Dany has dragons -> which offers her protection -> which means she hasn't suffered as much as Sansa. Arya has a sword -> which means she can fight back -> which means she hasn't suffered the same way Sansa has. Cersei has power -> which means she has control over her circumstances -> which means she hasn't been victimized the same way Sansa has. And so on and so forth. It's nothing but thinly veiled misogyny based on fundamentally misinterpreting the books cause the story being told doesn't make their favorite look special enough for them. Even a cursory glance at the books would prove these takes incorrect but something tells me they haven't taken the time to actually read them.

[lgbtlunaverse]

I think i need to explain why this line makes me go so feral

I think the "fine! I'll kill myself after I kill you" line from nie mingjue in chapter 49 permanently altered my brain chemistry and it has something to do with precisely how i got into the mdzs fandom space in the first place.

I've mentioned it a few times but i started watching the untamed in late 2019 right as it was blowing up everywhere and, likely due to a combination of undiagnosed adhd wrecking my ability to be interested in anything for longer than 4 seconds and me very much not being used to the specific style of acting, especially during fightscenes, i never finished it. The only concrete memory i have of it is seeing wen qing's face and meng ziyi completely short circuiting my little gay brain. I remember more of staring endlessly at pictures of her than I remember of the plot. Press F to pay respects.

Flash forward a few years and a friend recommends me a fic writer for an fma fic (the fic riter in question is metisket) and i like their stlye so much i decide to read other stuf they've written. Here we get to our prime suspect: "the one body problem" a genuinely hilarious fic where jingyi gets posessed by wei wuxian like a year before the plot happens and they become awkward brain buddies. 10/10 i loved it (and still do) even though i remember huasiang showing up in my first reading and I, having fully forgotten his name, had no fucking clue what was going on. (Little did i know...)

Anyway flash forward ANOTHER year and I decide to reread that fic, and then the other untamed fic metisket wrote, a wen qing time travel fix it that's also real fun. And then i'm like. huh. that's fun. wonder if there's anything in their bookmarks.

And then, within 20 days, I had read approximately 350 fics. Many of them 100k+ words. I cannot stress enough how much this CONSUMED my brain's ability to do or think about anything else. I now think back to the early days of getting my adhd diagnosis and insisted that while i had pretty much all other symptoms, I did not get hyperfixations. Lol. Lmao, even.

I am mainly focused on wangxian and the junior quartet becuase they are my baby ducklings and i love them. I do come across some 3zun fics and I think huh... this is interesting. But the 3zun brainrot is LIGHT at this point.

The thing about reading more than 350 fanfics is that at some point you kind of piece the plot of the source material back together backwards. Especially because my favorite genre was time travel fix its, where characters relive the whole plot and like to make allusions to all the ways everything went wrong last time.

Because I'm still squarely in my wangxian + juniors (plus a heavy dosis of yunmeng sibling reconciliation) corner here... the feelings on jin guangyao in my fandom corner are. different from where I'd end up soon after. He is my special little guy though, so I do kind of immediatley develop a fondness for him, and I approach my 3zun and early nieyao thoughts specifcially from the assumption that the widespread opinion is that nie mingjue is a fine good guy and jgy is the evil one (I have not seen the bad nmj takes yet. well... I am seeing DIFFERENT bad nmj takes but they're nice to him. In, like, the wrong way. With no solid undertanding of the inherent tragedy at the heart of him that makes him so blorbo to me. But still.) major reactions to the stairs scene as I see them on twitter are "girlboss! He should've kicked him harder 💅"

And the baby jgy apologist in me goes :/ me no likey. And at this point I am also actively seeking out metas and analysis posts so i'm seeing some better opinions than that and getting a halfway solid graps on the themes. wwx and jgy being foils becomes very obvious to me very quickly. So, with my curent understanding of the plot, I go... you know all you people who are like "god i wish nmj would have killed jgy sooner" it uhh... kinda sounds like he'd have died if he did that. If he'd killed him before meng yao had gone off to spy there is a very big chance they'd have lost the sunshot campaign and most of the main cast would be dead. If he'd killed him at the stairs that's... well that's killing your sworn brother, which by the canon's own admission is a universally reviled crime, and jin guangshan could easily take advantage of this by demanding nmj's head in retribution, since he already wanted to get rid of him anyway. He doesn't give a fuck about a-yao of course but he could pretend well enough that he does. And what leg would nmj have to stand on? The jin clan is canonically both willing and able to slaughter entire clans for the murder or attempted murder of the leader or his family, and nie mingjue is the kinda guy who'd immediately offer himself up if it meant the rest of his clan would be spared.

This combined with jin guangyao specifcally dying for his murder of nie mingjue, with huaisang basically not caring much about everything else he does and wanting to get revenge only for his brother, it gives nieyao a sort of mutual doomed soulmates feel. For either of them, killing the other would spell death for themselves. They either both die or they both live, one cannot live on without the order. That's crunchy. I like it.

The fire palace though? well, on meng yao's part there is a real argument that if he'd let nmj get killed immediatly instead of dragging it out he wouldn't have been able to get wrh alone and distracted enough to assasinate him, so that's one half of the mutual doom coin, and if nmj had killed him during their fight there he's also done for. But after? Right before Xichen intervenes? I had no answer for that yet.

(You know what's coming. I did not)

It is at this point that i realize that if this is gonna keep being A Thing then i need to read the source material before I catch fatal fanon poisoning. Yes, I can piece together the plot and themes from seeing what stays consistent across fics and what are the author's own opinons. But I know just as well that sometimes fanon just agrees on shit that didn't happen and treats it like canon, and I have no way of knowing which is which. So I start reading the novel.

And of course, eventually I get to the empathy sequence. And remember, my "nieyao both live or both die" theory is heavy on my mind at this point, and the only stickler is that nmj could sort of have killed meng yao after the confrontation with wrh, still believing meng yao was actually working for him, and not a spy, and get off... not scott-free, Xichen won't be happy, but it's not gonna cost him his life.

And then I read THIS.

Please Imagine dropping a whole block of pure elemental sodium into water. Except the sodium is this quote and the water is my poor little delicate brain. Not only is my theory right, it is ten times more unhinged than i thought it was.

And considering that Nie Mingjue does not seem like the kind of guy who'd consider something like a life debt to have an expiration date, and because after this he will link himself legally and socially to jin guangyao as family and declare that one among their brotherhood turning against the others is to be met with a painful death, I can no longer read the scene at the stairscase in jinlintai without the impression that he is still planning to die afterwards. Which, if you wanted to make that scene even more painful, this is a very efficient way of losing all your remaining hinges.

I think I'd have gone crazy about this line no matter what context I heard it in, but this one specifically? where I'm already obsessed with idea of nieyao's deaths being connected by the narrative and missing just this one piece and having it confirmed? out loud? from one of the characters himself? It's like giving cocaine to a baby.

[susandsnell]

Good Luck, Babe! is in fact about Sue Snell

[goldkirk]

as I'm going back over my past history and items and journals and years, I come across all sorts of things, like the pencil I saved from that so-precious memory from second grade, and a pair of flip flops I've been missing for two years, and [checks notes] the modern-high-school-AU-kidnapped-by-a-serial-killer story I wrote in late high school jdfsjdfsjkjlksfd

[bancaishi]

didn't want to put this rant in the tags of that last post but honestly i feel like a lot of people hate toshiro disproportionately compared to what he actually did in-story. and if we're being real it's most likely because of racism

[fatherramiro]

ive got so many thoughts about origin character playthroughs in bg3 as i go into act 3 of my wyll origin run, and while a majority of them are "wyll and lae'zel co protagonists of the game by a large margin" there's also some moments where im like "ooh id have done that differently if i were writing the game"

[hermitw]

There is nothing gege can do that will not get hate posts written about it,

And I'm so sick of them taking up my fyp when I never interact except to hide those posts?

Is there a way to manipulate the tumblr fyp

Ik that following or liking a single blog/post of a certain ship or fandom can make my fyp like 90% that thing

So it's easy to add things but hard to remove them?

Is there a cheat code please

Also I keep telling tumblr that I'm not interested in the same post. 2 hours, days, weeks or months later, it just. Vomits the same posts back up into my fyp. If I wanted it to have another chance I would have just scrolled past!!

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[mistninja]

Maybe a hot take but i don't get the Pilkrop hate tbh 🤨

[sakuraspoke]

a gentle reminder that you are good and bright and worthy of respect and care ♡

[volivolition]

[guy with chronic pain voice] i should draw pain threshold

[llycaons]

to prev post you know im going to have to say something about the novel and im sorry bc the post is about real people and not fictionalized depictions of the subject matter but my god it really does drive me up a wall that these characters canonically sexually assaulted each other and then go on to re-enact rape and pedophilia fantasies without like discussing what happened at all besides 'oh hehe it was you back then!' and they, the author, and the readers act like that's fine and normal when realistically there has to be so many issues around that for them emotionally! this cannot be healthy! I enjoyed some of the extras and even some of the sex scenes but ppl who uncritically support all of them are living on a different plane of existence