Читать книгу Homo Empathicus - Alexander Görlach - Страница 6

WRITING A BOOK THAT FOCUSES on the capacity for empathy and a narrative of friendship draws your attention to your own biography and the people who have prepared you to live a good life through their examples. I would therefore like to thank my dear parents, Ilse and Werner. The Mexican author Octavio Paz begins his masterpiece The Labyrinth of Solitude with a sentence that has always captivated me: Our whole life, according to Paz, is an inner dialogue with our parents, whether they are present or not. You never outgrow the influence of your childhood home, and your parents stay with you wherever you are in the world.

As an African proverb says, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Along those lines, I think back with deep attachment on Wiesoppenheim, the Rhine- Hessian winegrowing village where I grew up, and I thank my grandparents Irmgard and Jakob, Melitta and Werner, Aunt Gisela and Uncle Georg, Aunt Lucia and Uncle Heinz for their marvelous example of empathetic humanity. I also thank my friends Gudrun Appolonia and Ilona for their friendship and patience and for contributing to my upbringing through their wholesome and Christian example. Both are no longer living, but while there are still people who remember them, they are not dead.

I would like to thank two of my teachers: Gottfried Bell, the pastor of Wiesoppenheim, and Roland Naumann, my math teacher. The two of them could not be more different, but they each authentically and convincingly embodied for me in their own way what it means to be just and fair.

Ultimately, we all lean on fellow human beings whose examples impress us and whose lives guide us.

Every generation must face the call of humanity, and I hope that my godchildren Lilli Charlotte and Julius Alexander will find a path through time that will lead to the victory of humanity, and that they might one day themselves become witnesses of this humanity.