Empathy, and the Human Condition, the Will to Power, Care, and Education as the Practice of Freedom

My education in Compassionate Communication has inspired me to consider the parallel virtues it possesses with what existentialist thinkers and contemporary, pedagogically critical teachers call “the freeing of the individual”. The position that a subjective self by necessity has choice and responsibility has interested me immensely, specifically, because I hypothesize that only through the acceptance of everyone’s subjective “self” truth can we all live in harmony. Thus, I consider “the free individual” as an essential foundation for pragmatic also spiritual world change. The central pillar of these parallelisms is the notion of ‘know thyself’. The purpose of my paper is to outline the parallel notions and virtues which NVC shares with Hannah Arendt’s thinking on the human condition, Bell Hooks’s notion of “education as the practice of freedom”, Friedrich Nietzsche’s will-to-power, subjective health, and the transvaluation of morals, and lastly, Martin Heidegger’s notion of Care. In doing so, my objective is to better understand the legitimacy of NVC with its juxtaposition to these thinkers and positions, despite my deep understanding that NVC is best understood in practice. My motivations are focused on what I understand to be the most meaningful pillar for NVC, the notion of the existence of universal human needs, and so too the largest problem with NVC, the implementation process into the world. If NVC is the concept which does in fact “free the individual”, then I find it entirely important to understand these two points.
How does NVC parallel all the mentioned positions of Arendt, Hooks, Nietzsche, and Heidegger on “the freeing of the individual”? The first presupposition in NVC is that human beings all share “basic human needs” (54) . This foundational assumption is encompassing for all humanity, much like Kant’s notion of The Categorical Imperative, which is by no means a theoretical conception which implies freedom. With “the “categorical imperative” steal upon him, and with it in his heart, strayed back to “God”, “soul”, “freedom”, and “immortality”, like a fox that strays back into his cage- and it was his strength and cleverness that had broken open this cage!” (146). Kant came to the reasoning that human beings are by necessity free, but he feared certain implications with that reality and created the categorical imperative in response. Thus, we can come closer in understanding the true legitimacy of NVC’s notion of universal human needs by differentiating it from something we already understand as freedom-limiting. Kant’s Categorical Imperative follows that humans ought to act as such that their choices could be willed as natural or universal law for all other choosing beings and their respective situations. A contemporary paraphrase is ‘treat others like you would like to be treated’. The categorical imperative is the last word on morality for modern philosophy. It is the last attempt, before existentialist morality, to encapsulate all human behavior into law. Under the domination of the categorical imperative, in the moment of choosing or perhaps even that moment of choice anticipation, the self is forced to consider their choice as a matter of determined morals, set before them with ultimate legitimacy. The problem with universal law is that there is no law for behavior in this universe that is ever absolutely obeyed, let alone by ourselves. The paradox is that the rational-human mind understands and applauds the objective of the categorical imperative, while with the same potential for understanding, knows the categorical imperative unearthly, therefore unreasonable nature. In realizing universal laws’ caveat, we also realize our need for autonomy; most existentially speaking, we understand that that need does exist. “We … want to become who we are- the new, the unique, the incomparable, those who give themselves the law, those who create themselves!” (147). The universal human needs list is something empowering, not imprisoning. We have now realized that our need for autonomy is not being met by the categorical imperative, for it negates our internal power within and instead replaces it with a pseudo-utopian ‘hack’ on human politics: universal morals. And if we listen hard enough to ourselves we would come to accept that not even one human being subscribes to the same morals throughout their life, let alone a full day on this earth. The contemporary human hypocrisy is that we delude ourselves into thinking that we remain the same autonomous individual throughout time but instead play different roles throughout our moments in time. Our society is a master play with roles for everyone with domination as the goal for every character. Every action by an individual is done for the particular reason that self holds true, and no unearthly notion of a theoretical universal morality can take away that self’s responsibility for living and choosing with that reason. Our needs oppress us at different layers of our being, creating a web of various abstractions of needs. Moreover, no need will last forever, for even the needs of basic biological life (ie. air, water, food, etc.) will pass when the self passes.
On the plural level of humanity, there are certain truths which we cannot deny. In The Vita Activa, by Hannah Arendt, we are posed with the three primary conditions of humans. First there is labor, defined by her as “the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, which spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor” (7). The human condition of labor refers to the endless, eternal toil to stay alive, which ends when the self’s time comes and goes. Marshal Rosenberg parallels Arendt’s notion of the human condition of labor, as she defines, with the notion of the human need for physical nurturance. The specific items in this category are some of the most basic needs we can conceive a human being as having by necessity of our Being: “air, food, physical movement, protection from life-threatening forms of life, rest, sexual expression, shelter, touch, and lastly water” (55). We can analyze this list and consider each specific need of physical nurturance as behaving as Arendt describes. Each of these basic needs are eternally crucial to the self-being-alive, and thus each need revolves around a epicenter (the self), or possesses a frequency of time and magnitude of life-importance in tune with the moment to life-moment Being-in. These basic needs revolve the most necessarily because they are the binding glue between humans and the eternal which is the universe.
The second human condition Arendt outlines is that of work, “which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. [Instead] work provides an “artificial world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is “worldliness” (7). By worldliness, Arendt alludes to their ex-lover’s notion of world, which is that landscape and entity which contains multitudes of other entities. Moreover by using the term work , Arendt refers to the creation of the human made world, which we make with the objective of immortality. Being unnatural, human work is most always a product of first theorizing some form (in platonic terms), and is always manifested in physical reality with unintended consequences. Buildings last generations, cities through epochs, and even a sword lasts longer than the humans who used the blade to bring others to a quicker death. Work also comes with a paradox of utility, for humans work to transcend their earthly condition, while ironically the human artiface conditions humans to live with those constructions. How could their be threat of global warfare if no contemporary objects of war existed? Rosenberg’s universal human needs that are in conjunction with Arendt’s notion of work are very specific. While a building may be built in the name for the need for shelter (a basic human need), we ought to consider the necessary component of humans which considers what that shelter ought to be. How it ought to be, is of course a reflection upon the self (or society). The basic human needs which NVC refers to generally speaking as integrity are “authenticity, creativity, meaning, and self-worth” (54). So too is the general need for autonomy “to choose one’s dreams, goals, values [and] to choose one’s plan for fulfilling one’s dreams, goals, values” entirely existent in Arendt’s notion of the human condition of work. The individual who by necessity will always work in solitude with their hands, and add to the human record of creation a thing in their own image. The initial and forever integrated reason for the human condition of work is the arete towards immortality. The constructed world humans have built is a reflection of this arete. “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?” Our collective, historical self-worth is centered around our detached feeling towards our earthly condition, hence faith in heaven, something unearthly.
The last and most human condition of Arendt’s notion of the human condition is action. By action Arendt refers to “the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, [which also] corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world. [Moreover] while all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, the plurality is specifically the condition… the conditio per quam - of all political life” (7). Arendt elaborates later on action with, “Action would be an unnecessary luxury, capricious interference with general laws of behavior, if men were endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model, whose nature or essence was the same for all as predictable as the nature or essence of any other thing. Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live” (8). Does Arendt crash any hope we have to distinguish the universal human needs Rosenberg conceives of by saying humans are not “reproducible repetitions of the same model”? Can humans exist with the same needs and still not be the same model as Arendt contends with? Or does she legitimize the notion of universal human need further, by saying “because we are all the same, that is, human in such a way”? Are we all the same because “nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live”, or are we all the same because despite each of our absolute uniqueness we operate with the same foundations of moment to moment operations? Arendt’s term action coincides with NVC’s universal human needs regarding the need realms of interdependence and spiritual communion. Both of these realms, conceived for NVC’s own purpose run parallel to Arendt’s notion of human as a political animal and by necessity existing in plurality. By the term interdependence NVC refers to the need for “acceptance, appreciation, closeness, community, consideration, contribution to the enrichment of life [using one’s own self-empathy-power-supply to give outwardly], emotional safety, empathy, honesty, love, reassurance, respect, support, trust, understanding, warmth” (54). And by spiritual communion, NVC refers to the need for “beauty, harmony, inspiration, order, and peace” (55). It would be misleading to suggest that the need for spiritual communion and interdependence don’t apply with the self alone too, however living in plurality makes it necessary to interact and grow with other people. The needs which NVC provides for the specific condition of humanity as a plurality outline the goal-living-state which most if not all humans truly want to experience in their world, life. Do they not?
Arendt’s notion of the human condition is distinctively parallel to NVC’s notion of universal human needs. However neither notions of humanity and its necessities may be perfect and accurate, and thus it is important to keep wide eyes for augmentation. But even without full assurance that Arendt’s notion of the human condition of labor, work, and action or Rosenberg’s notion of universal human needs is in tune with humanity itself, we can consider the legitimacy of each thinker by assessing their respective positions’ tendency to draw their own conclusions based on the power of past human experience. For Arendt, and this can be seen quite clearly in her footnotes, her theories are backed by her interpretation of a vast collection of past history and theory from human history. For Rosenberg NVC and all that it entails came mostly from his life long journey of hands on work with other people in his private life, patients, workshop students, and most astonishingly both domestic and foreign, hostile disputes. As a teacher Rosenberg grew NVC with other people and in turn became a teacher who spread emotional awareness to future teachers.
With my knowledge of NVC, I understand that there is only one hangup; the system’s integration into the world. As a plurality of what Rosenberg would call jackals (linguistically violent beings), NVC is prone to being taught in violent manners. The most obvious example is our tendency to categorize things and not do anything else instead. Pragmatically, NVC can be initially frameworked and understood in terms of its primary virtues and practical structure of thoughts and use of particular words. Quickly, new learners feel confident to assume NVC as the best or better way to speak. But to think this way is inherently violent, therefore not in parallel with NVC. Even the name NVC, distinguishes Rosenberg’s system like it has the mark of cain. Thus some hear the letters NVC and run from fear from when some wannabe giraffe in the past imposed their new way of speaking onto them. Instead of falling for the temptation of conceiving NVC as the right way, we ought to choose to consider it a means to a goal: human connection and presentness of Being. Differentiating understanding of something as a category floating in objective nothingness and something as a goal (made in the present for the future presents), is inherently attached to the means of self and plural progress itself.
We have established that education in the name of growth is inherently connected to dynamic processes and goals and not static categories. So too does Bell Hooks conceive “education as the practice of freedom” as a dynamic process, hence the word practice. “Progressive, holistic education, “engaged pedagogy” is more demanding than conventional critical… pedagogy” (15) because it requires everyone. Bell Hooks goes on to say that “it was Freire’s insistence that education could be the practice of freedom that encouraged me to create strategies for what he called “conscientization” in the classroom. Translating that term to critical awareness and engagement, I entered the classrooms with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer” (14). Moreover, “education can only be liberatory when everyone claims knowledge as a field in which we all labor [specifically with] emphasis on “praxis” - action and reflection upon the world in order to change it” (14). Only when present and engaged can a person begin to truly understand NVC, because the primary virtue of NVC is to be engaged. In truth, and as mentioned before, we can conceive of a person or people thinking that they are learning NVC but are in all actuality not because they are acting as “passive consumers” of the NVC book or human instructor on the stage up front. Not “active participants” learning NVC.
As jackals, in Rosenberg’s view, we are conditioned throughout our time to idolize false idols. Specifically we believe in the constant and never forgiving existence of the mark of cain. When NVC is initially taught, learners are prone to place the mark of cain upon NVC or the human instructor (or both). And in doing so, learners operate in their current pseudo-educational state with an underlying notion of domination (where the jackal learners ought to submit to the righteousness of NVC). Concurrently, we can consider a statement regarding Paulo Freire's notion of “authentic help”, “Authentic help means that all who are involved help each other mutually, growing together in the common effort to understand the reality which they seek to transform. Only through such praxis- in which those who help and those who are being helped help each other simultaneously- can the act of helping become free from the distortion in which the helper dominates the helped” (54). In order to dissolve domination in the pragmatic real life sense, learners must operate in ways which inherently are modes of mutual giving and receiving with no domination at all. Rosenberg too relates NVC with the inherent power of mutual giving and receiving by integrating this poem in his teachings: “I never feel more given to than when you take from me –when you understand the joy I feel giving to you. And you know my giving isn’t done to put you in my debt, but because I want to live the love I feel for you. To receive with grace may be the greatest giving. There’s no way I can separate the two. When you give to me, I give you my receiving. When you take from me, I feel so given to.” As jackals, we deceive ourselves through the compounding effect of moment to moment thoughts and actions (delusional praxis). We know we want to give and receive non-obligatory to ourselves and to others, but we somehow convince ourselves otherwise. Bebermeyer’s, “Given to”, is a window into what harmony tastes like, yet to us jackals the window Bebermeyer gives us closes or is closed for us. A jackal reads the poem and wonders how it all makes sense.
Most importantly, the poem speaks on the level of subjective truth. “It makes the most substantial difference whether a thinker has a personal relation to his problems, so that he finds in them his destiny, his need, and also his best happiness” (151). Never will a self become more fulfilled than while approaching the understanding of their own needs. If we consider it vain to spend the rest of our time being in tune with our world and our needs, then I can’t help but wonder what further truth we seek instead. I can say for certain though, that if we consider it vain and naive to consciously consider our needs as truth and instead think there is something else out there of purer quality and meaning, then we may very well be searching for nothing. Then the day will come that our lights turn off, and our lives will have consisted in choosing the will to truth over the will to power. That “”Will to truth”- that could be concealed will to death”, for in searching for anything higher than our needs we blindly gaze into nothing, like a person with a gambling problem, and one day, death comes over us with that same numbness the will to truth had given us up to this moment of death. The will to truth is not only Nietzsche’s delusion, even Rosenberg notes human’s tendency to play “the who’s right game”. Two people may bicker over who washed the dishes, fighting over who is right, while the fact that they are both needing understanding from each other and themselves goes absolutely negated. And most ironically it is each other’s unmet needs which are the root of all the anxiety. These anxious instances of all forms are so constant in our lives, it would be better to use the word tragic over the word ironic to describe our delusion into the who’s right game, the will to truth. Why are these two hypothetical ‘dish’ people both determined to focus on who’s right rather than the human needs involved in the situation?
What commands us to seek something more than our needs? Nietzsche would consider the culprit to be the will to truth itself. The will to truth is tantalizing and the will to power is the its antagonist. However, better to think of the will to power as the protagonist. Nietzsche speaks on the will to power with, “When people reach the basic conviction that they must be commanded, they become believers. In contrast, one could conceive of a pleasure and strength in self-determination, a freedom of the will in which a spirit takes its leave of every faith, every wish for certainty, practiced as it is in supporting itself on slender cords and possibilities, and dancing even by abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence” (155). This free spirit living with the will to power knows one thing for certain and with the most care: their subjective health. Subjective health is that which changes with the self through time, and always corresponds to the needs of that self. Similarly, Rosenberg recalls that “another aspect of self-compassion… is in the energy that’s behind whatever action we take… an important form of self-compassion is to make choices motivated purely by our desire to contribute to life rather than out of fear, guilt, shame, duty, or obligation… when the sole energy that motivates us is simply to make life wonderful for others and ourselves, then even hard work has an element of play in it” (136).“With every choice you make, be conscious of what need it serves” so you can acknowledge the existence of that need and realize that the choice to try to meet that need is self-decidedly in tune with one’s needs (therefore being one’s own commander)(136). The self also comes to realize their need’s contingency on the situation of the world. But the self doesn’t understand this and see a determined life before them, but rather an existence which ties themselves and their world into one: the self’s needs ties the self into the world. “We have been endowed by nature with these feelings for a purpose: they mobilize us to pursue and fulfill what we need or value. The impact of these feelings on our spirit and bodies is substantially different from the disconnection that is brought on by guilt, shame, and depression” (133). When we are in tune with our own feelings and needs, we follow our own destiny. We are always in some sense attached to our destiny, as I think of it here. Even in the moments where we think and act in tune to guilt, shame, or depression we have a sense of what we really needed and why. That sense is usually manifested by blaming ourselves for being so unauthentic in the past; Rosenberg would say the act of blaming oneself is a tragic manifestation of that person’s need for authenticity never being understood properly by that same self. It is a tragic misconception to assume just by blaming or judging ourselves in the present for being inauthentic in the past will assure our being-authentic-ness in the future. Rosenberg would conclude that under no circumstances will violent thinking ever guide oneself toward the intended future state. Instead violent thinking will bring stagnation or lack of growth, the unintended consequence. We cede our responsibility for our own destiny when we we blame, compare, or judge ourselves as objects and not dynamic beings. Moreover, in objectifying ourselves on a massive scale (in terms of population) we create the perfect tinder for a world of other-objectification. This is a lofty proposition, but I will restate it once more. The existence of all the othering domination objectification in this world is entirely contingent on a massive level of self-objectification. All around the world selfs search around and bicker about all the different ways we can classify ourselves. We are all running around searching for guidance which can only truly come from ourselves. That guidance is the will to power and its presence harmonizes people to their world and the others within. The will to truth divides people.
In Being and Time by Martin Heidegger, we come to the conclusion that Being (existing as opposed to being-nothing) is time itself; a thesis which shakes metaphysics to its core. In the process of coming to this metaphysical conclusion, Heidegger differentiates between two opposing states of Being for that entity he calls Dasein (which is his notion of the human entity in the world): authentic and unauthentic. Unauthentic Being, not only implies that this self aware entity does not know that Being is time, but even what Being means itself. Most importantly, Dasein is unauthentic not just by what they understand or not to be so, but how they move through life. Thus, Heidegger takes it upon himself to figure out the meaning of Being. To do so he focuses on the self aware entity Dasein which resembles the human being, because it is us as human beings who are asking about the meaning of Being and to use our own existence as an investigation path should keep us focused on existence itself. As a being, an earthly entity which participates in existence (constituting its Being-in), Heidegger considers there to be two conditions of human beings which are contingent in our existence. “State-of-mind is one of the existential structures in which the Being of the “there” maintains itself. Equiprimordial with it in constituting this Being is understanding. A state of mind always has its understanding, even if it merely keeps it suppressed. Understanding always has its mood…” (239). The first condition is what Heidegger calls “state-of-mind”. “What we indicate ontologically [existentially] be the term “state-of-mind” is ontically the most familiar and everyday sort of thing; our mood, our Being-attuned” (237). He elaborates further on the notion of mood with, “A mood assails us. It comes neither from “outside” nor “inside”, but arises out of Being-in-the-world, as a way of such Being” (238). Human mood, manifested in what I recall to be feelings, is a necessary experience in human existence. This notion is the central thesis of this paper, the central pillars in Rosenberg’s notion of NVC, and at least an important byproduct of Heidegger’s work on the question of Being. The second equiprimordial condition of our Being-in is what Heidegger calls understanding, “the kind of Being which Dasein has, as potentiality-for-being, lies existentially in understanding… it pertains to Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being towards itself, for the sake of itself” (239). With understanding, Heidegger thinks human beings possess the capability to “project” themselves onto the world, and change both themselves and the world in doing so. Heidegger's “state-of-mind” “understanding” dichotomy for the pillars of human existence runs parallel with NVC: State-of-mind clearly translates to mean the moment to moment existence of the mood of the self (NVC’s notion of feelings). The potential to do something in reaction to those feelings is Heidegger's notion of understanding.
Lastly, we come to Heidegger's notion of care. To understand the notion of care as Heidegger uses the word, it is essential to know of care’s opposition, concern. Unauthentic Being is living in a world of concern, which corresponds to the state of Being which makes the self turn away from the situation, the world, and themselves: anxiety. “Nothing which is ready-to-hand or present-at-hand within the world functions as that in the face of which anxiety is anxious. Here the totality of involvements of the ready-to-hand and the present-to-hand discovered with-the-world, is, as much, of no consequence; it collapses into itself; the world has the character of completely lacking significance” (244). By ready-to-hand and present-to-hand, Heidegger refers to the two ways he understands humans to experience their existence as that experience which corresponds the “averageness of day to day” that keeps the self fascinated (occupied) on the phenomenon of the world and that experience which comes from the self understanding (interpreting) the world and its phenomenon, respectively. “What oppresses us is not this or that, nor is it the summation of everything present-at-hand; it is rather the possibility of the ready-to-hand in general; that is to say, it is the world itself”. NVC would not disagree that it is the interactions with the world and all of its situations and other people which resonates in a way where the jackal-self comes into anxiety. “Anxiety thus takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself, as it falls, in terms of the “world” and the way things have been publicly interpreted. Anxiety throws Dasein back upon that which it is anxious about- its authentic potentiality-for-Being-in-the-world. Anxiety individualizes Dasein for its ownmost Being-in-the-world, which as something that understands, projects itself essentially upon possibilities” (245). Heidegger reasons that the state of anxiety turns the self away from the world of concern (ready-to-hand and present-at-hand experience) and forces the self to gaze at themselves as pure possibility.
However it is easy to experience such anxiety as both Rosenberg and Heidegger describe and still come back to the world of concern. “When anxiety has subsided, then in our everyday way of talking we are accustomed to say that “it was really nothing” (245). We can delude ourselves that nothing really bothered us with the help of what Heidegger calls discourse (or human language). In using the public interpretation, the status quo for language use, we make it easier to numb ourselves of the truth about our experience. NVC’s other central pillar is the notion of violence. By violence Rosenberg doesn’t only consider physical violence, but also certain ways we use language (and by abstract thought) which disconnect ourselves from others, the world in general, and ourselves with the use of comparison, judgement, blame, and domination. We live in a jackal world; Rosenberg articulates a foundational quality of the ‘public interpretation’ which Heidegger connects to the self’s own falling back into the world of concern.
At any moment moving forward we will all meet those moments of anxiety, those potential moments to connect with ourselves and others around us, to lean toward our potentiality-for-Being. We even may fall back into the world of concern again from time to time. “The formally existential totality of Dasein’s ontological structural whole must therefore be grasped in the following structure: the Being of Dasein means, ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the world) as Being-alongside (entities encouraged within-the-world). This Being fills in the signification of the term ‘care’” (246). In those moments of anxiety NVC says to assess (and always be reassessing when necessary) one’s own and other’s feelings and needs in the moment. The power of empathy grounds the self into the present and attempts to anchor everything around it in the present. So too does Heidegger understand humans with care to be “alongside” or present with the situation by feeling it. For no human-Dasein can exist without feeling and understanding together in unison.
Existentialist thinkers articulate what it means to exist into complementary layers of meaning. They do this because all past philosophic traditions have objectified the human existence and they seek to turn our power of rationality towards subjective truth instead. So to does NVC articulate the self’s feelings and needs (which pragmatically creates layers of feelings and needs within the self) because all past human experience has negated or at least twisted the meaning of human needs and feelings into things ungodly.
Rosenberg thinks that a person cannot properly give empathy when they haven’t given proper empathy to themselves first. If we consider the thoughts of these existentialist thinkers on the notion of “freeing the individual” and realize them through ourselves, will we be able to harmonize with others, and others with others, and on and on? When will everybody understand our universal needs we all share and depend on one another for? For the basic need for water and air may seem like the responsibility lies on the self, but where does the responsibility lie if we consider that self to live in a shared world with shared water and air? The responsibility one feels for everyone and everything, including themselves, is the state where one realizes intersubjective truth.

Citations
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1958. Print.
Hooks, Bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.
Rosenberg, Marshall B. Non-violent Communication: A Language of Life: Create Your Life, Your Relationships & Your World in Harmony with Your Values. Encinitas, CA: Puddledancer, 2003. Print.
Guignon, Charles B., and Derk Pereboom. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995. Print.
Rosenberg, Marshall B. "Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Compassion |." The Center for Nonviolent Communication. CNVC, n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2016.